ucked deep within the cypress shadows where Livingston Parish meets the winding edges of St. James and St. John the Baptist, there’s a steeple that doesn’t belong to any road map. You won’t stumble upon it by accident in a car. You have to want to find it. You have to follow the water.
Long before it became a quiet pilgrimage site for kayakers, fishermen, and the curious alike, Our Lady of Blind River began with something far simpler. A promise. And a love story that felt almost too fast to be real. In Gramercy, two sixteen-year-olds met in a roadside inn. She was engaged. He said he’d be back anyway. Three days later, Bobby Deroche married Martha Waguespack, and the two would go on to build not just a life together, but something far more lasting, hidden miles into the Louisiana swamp.
Years later, settled along Blind River with no roads in or out, Martha found herself longing for a place to pray. Sunday Mass wasn’t simple when it required a five-mile boat ride just to reach the nearest road. But what began as a practical need quickly became something deeper. Martha began to speak of visions, of Christ kneeling in prayer along the riverbank. The feeling stayed with her. Eventually, she turned to her husband and told him plainly that she believed she was meant to build something there.
And so they did.
On Easter Sunday in 1982, with the help of neighbors and friends who floated supplies downriver, the couple began construction. Three months later, a chapel stood where there had once only been water, moss, and trees. More than two thousand cypress shingles were cut by hand and layered one by one. A massive cypress trunk, hollowed and polished, became the heart of the sanctuary, cradling a statue of the Virgin Mary. Even now, visitors tuck handwritten prayers into the natural knot at its base, leaving behind pieces of their own stories in the wood.
When the chapel was dedicated in August of 1983, hundreds came. Boats lined the riverbanks, some never even docking, just drifting close enough to be part of it. What was built in isolation quickly became something shared.
That spirit never left.
Martha welcomed every visitor personally for years, offering small rosaries and stories from a worn photo album that documented every step of the chapel’s creation. To her, no one arrived by accident. And over time, people began to return with stories of their own. Stories of healing. Of prayers answered. Of something they couldn’t quite explain, but felt all the same.
Today, the chapel remains open, just as she insisted it always would be.
Her daughter, Patricia Hymel, carries that responsibility now. Though she no longer lives along the river, she makes the trip regularly, keeping the doors unlocked, the candles lit, and the legacy alive. The structure has weathered floods, storms, and decades of Louisiana heat, but it still stands. Not perfectly, but faithfully.
Visitors still come from across the country and beyond, their names filling the pages of a simple notebook just inside the door. Some arrive knowing exactly what they’re looking for. Others find it without realizing they needed it at all.
There are no gates. No fees. No expectations.
Just a small chapel, raised on cypress knees, waiting quietly in the bend of a river.
Elizabeth Baudoin
