Badin-Roque House
also known as the Sylvie-Badin House
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Mama had a buggy and a big sorrel mare and...if the weather was bad,... we'd come and stay all night to cousin Zeline's...so we was close to church, because the road would be so bad. I know that old house like my finger, so they can't tell me nothing about it...In the big front room by the fireplace, they had two hand hewn beds...She had an old armoire right against that door where you go into the back room, and they had two cats that must have been ceramic, that was the prettiest cats...I was always wishing I could get one...And in her room, over there where she had that little table in that corner, they had a nice, big wooden bed, an antique bed, where she slept....She had that little table in the corner where she prepared her dinner. She had her fireplace on the other side where she cooked her dinner. They had a window there where Shuke, her old brother, used to sit and tend everybody's business!
Community members who grew up around that house remember it as a home full of old people - Zeline, her brothers, and later, her husband, Joe Roque, whom she married "in her old days."
They were the oldest people on the river when I was growing up. We'd be in Catechism and the nun would say, "Who made the world?" and some guy would say, "Zeline and Joe Roque." They were the oldest ones that everybody on the river ever knew. They was there forever.
The outdoor kitchen of Badin-Roque.
In 1979 the St. Augustine Historical Society purchased the house from Zeline Badin Roque's heirs. The Badin-Roque house is the only surviving example of poteaux-en-terre and bousillage architecture in Louisiana, and one of only five in the entire country. Because of its national and regional significance, it has been placed on the National Register of Historic Places.