Atlas Obscura - Latest • Jan. 21, 2026, 3:22 a.m.

The Bauvais-Amoureux House is the kind of architectural oddball Atlas Obscura readers secretly (loudly) root for: a 1792 French colonial home built poteaux-en-terre —“posts in the earth”—meaning its vertical log walls are literally structural and planted like stubborn teeth in the soil. It’s a survivor from a town that had to move and rebuild after the Flood of 1785, and it sits near le Grand Champ—among the nation’s oldest continuously worked farmland—like it’s keeping watch over the old field still.

Even in a country stuffed with “historic homes,” this one hits different: only five poteaux-en-terre houses are known to remain in the United States, and three of them are right here in Sainte Geneviève.

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