Arcadia, Louisiana: Beautiful Hills and a Famous Death

Arcadia's name comes from an early postmaster named Shadrick Sutton, who looked at the rolling pine hills of Bienville Parish and chose the word Arcadia, meaning a place of pastoral beauty. The town incorporated in eighteen fifty-five and later became the parish seat. But most travelers today know Arcadia for a single grim day in May of nineteen thirty-four.

South of here near Gibsland, on a quiet stretch of Louisiana Highway One Fifty-Four, a six-man posse of Texas and Louisiana lawmen ambushed the car carrying Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. After the shooting, the bodies were brought here, to Conger's Funeral Home on Main Street, where thousands of people lined up to view them. It was the end of a two-year crime spree that had gripped the country, and Arcadia was where the story finally came to rest.