Sunset

Sunset, Louisiana is a lovely rural community located 12 miles north of Lafayette just off Interstate 49. It has 2,500 friendly residents who invite you to visit here. The town has the South St.Landry Community Library, dubbed the “Miracle Library”, which is a lovely Art Deco facility with 13,000 recent volumes; it is fully automated and has Internet access.

The Celebration of Herbs and Gardens is an annual festival sponsored by the Sunset Garden Club and held on the first Saturday in May. At Christmas time, the town is called Village d’ange because so many angels decorate our streets, thanks to the efforts of the ladies in the Sunset Garden Club. Mardi Gras becomes festive with the annual Sertoma Mardi Gras parade.   LaCaboose,
a local jelly-making facility, has beautiful gardens and a unique Bed and Breakfast.

The town was built at the site of a railroad construction camp and incorporated in 1904. Victor Hugo Sibille, the first mayor, was an innovative man who organized cotton gins, saw mills, lumber yards, syrup mills, and the first telephone company in the area. The Bank of Sunset, founded in 1906, is the oldest surviving business in the town. During the “Great Depression”, the Bank of Sunset was one of few in the U.S. that did not close, and it earned the title “Biggest Little Bank in the World”. After boll weevils destroyed the cotton crops, production of sweet potatoes made Sunset the “Sweet Potato Capitol of the World.” Sunset has all the advantages of small town life and is less that twenty minutes from the large city of Lafayette. It is twinned with St. Paul en Cornillon in France and there are regular exchanges of visits between members of the two communities.