Natchitoches was not the first European "settlement" in present-day Louisiana. That was Fort de la Boulaye, also called Fort Mississippi or Fort Iberville, on the eastern bank of the lower Mississippi River near today's Phoenix in Plaquemines Parish, which Iberville built in 1700 and Bienville abandoned in 1707. However, Natchitoches is the oldest continuously-occupied European community in the State of Louisiana. It was founded in 1714, during the governorship of Le Mothe de Cadillac, by the young Canadian-born adventurer and kinsman of Iberville's wife, Louis JUCHEREAU de St.-Denis, former commander at Fort de la Boulaye, four years before Bienville founded New Orleans in 1718. St.-Denis sited Fort St.-Jean-Baptiste des Natchitoches, named after friendly local Indians, on an island in a branch of the Red River just below a huge log jam that impeded further navigation upstream. St.-Denis used the new post as a jumping off point for establishing a trade route with New Spain. The trade was not sanctioned by Spanish authorities, who, in 1721, established a mission post nearby that they called Presidio de Nuestra Senora del Pilar de Los Adaes, or Los Adaes, also named after local Indians, near present-day Robiline in Natchitoches Parish. Nonetheless, Fort St.-Jean-Baptiste des Natchitoches served as a strategic point from which to observe the Spanish at Los Adaes and as a trading post from which to win the favor of local Indians. St.-Denis established deeper ties with the Spanish in Texas when he married Manuela SÁNCHEZ y NAVARRO, the step-granddaughter of a Spanish commandant on the lower Rio Grande. St.-Denis served as commandant at Natchitoches for 30 years, until his death in 1744.
When the Spanish took over Louisiana in early 1766, they were very much aware that Natchitoches had become one of the most important Indian trading centers in the region. Only St. Louis and Arkansas Post, up the Mississippi River, rivaled it in importance. Despite this distinction, few Acadians settled at Natchitoches because of its great distance from the major Acadian settlements to the southeast. A wayward group of Acadian exiles from Maryland came through Natchitoches in October 1769, but they did not remain there. Today, Natchitoches Parish is not a part of the 22-parish region known as Acadiana.
Sources: Crouse, Lemoyne d'Iberville, 208-09; Winston Deville, "JUCHEREAU, de Saint-Denis, Louis," DCB, 3:317-18; Galán, "Los Adaes," 192-93; Higginbotham, Old Mobile, 17n; Kinnaird, "The Revolutionary Period, 1765-81," xiii, 35; Taylor, J. G., Louisiana, 8; "Timothy Flint's Louisiana [1831]," in Conrad, ed., The Cajuns, 119; Appendix.
On their exploration of the lower Mississippi in March 1699, Iberville and Bienville passed a site on the left, or east bank, of the river, at a prominent bend, where local Indians demonstrated that a short portage existed between the natural levee of the river and what the French later called Bayou St.-Jean, which flowed into Lake Pontchartrain. Nearby stood the villages of the Biloxi and Acolapissa, who became allies of the French. However, the portage site did not become the first French "settlement" on the lower Mississippi. Erected by Iberville in 1700, Fort de la Boulaye lay a few dozen miles downriver from the portage site, on the same side of the river, near present-day Phoenix, Plaquemines Parish. Consisting mainly of a log blockhouse with cannon of various caliber and a 12-foot-wide moat, the fort served the essential purpose of maintaining a French presence on the lower river, which the British also claimed and had threatened to settle. After Bienville abandoned Fort de la Boulaye in 1707, the only French military presence on the lower Mississippi was an observation post at the portage site near the head of Bayou St.-Jean manned by Louis JUCHEREAU de St.-Denis, who had commanded at Fort de la Boulaye, and a few of his sturdy Canadians, who had garrisoned the fort. "It was Saint-Denis who first reported to Bienville ... on the richness of these lands [along Bayou St.-Jean] and who was largely responsible for its subsequent development."
In the spring of 1708, in hopes of creating a breadbasket for the colony, still headquartered at Mobile in present-day Alabama, Bienville sent five Canadians to the area where Bayou Tchoupitoulas joins Bayou St.-Jean and granted them 4-arpent-by-36-arpent holdings along the St.-Jean. These Canadians included Antoine RIVARD de La Vigne, Francois DUGUE, Jean-Baptiste POITIE, and Nicolas DELON. None of them brought along wives or children. They planted two wheat crops, but both failed because of the intense heat and humidity. The Canadians abandoned the site in 1710. In 1714, St.-Denis moved his observation point to a site farther inland and established a post at Natchitoches on the Red River. Once again, only Indians occupied the narrow piece of land between the Mississippi and Lake Pontchartrain. But Bienville did not give up on the idea of establishing a French post there.
Even in 1718, after Bienville became governor of Louisiana, the founding of New Orleans was a close thing. In April 1718, the Company of the West, which had taken control of the colony the year before, ordered that a new post be constructed along the lower Mississippi "on the Manchac brook," today's Bayou Manchac, a location that company officials believed would provide the most direct route for trade between Canada and the French holdings on the Gulf of Mexico. The engineer who had been assigned to the job died en route to the Mississippi, however. This gave Bienville his chance. Later in the year, he ordered that the company's new post be constructed not at Bayou Manchac but farther down at the portage site on the east bank of the river near the head waters of Bayou St.-Jean, on "one of the most beautiful crescents of the river," he assured the Company. Named for Philippe II, duc d'Orleans, nephew of King Louis XIV and regent of the boy king Louis XV, Nouvelle-Orleans became the capital of the colony in 1723. Five years later, despite a devastating hurricane in September 1722, ever-present disease, and frequent desertion, New Orleans could boast a population of a thousand colonists. By the time Louisiana reverted to a royal colony and Bienville became governor again in 1733, his little city on the beautiful crescent had become the head, heart, and soul of French Louisiana.
When the Acadians reached Louisiana in the 1760s, it was to New Orleans that they came to recuperate from their long, trying exile. And it was from New Orleans that the French and Spanish officials sent them to posts on the river or into the prairie region west of the Atchafalaya Basin. Owing to their proclivity to reunite with members of their extended families, few Acadians remained in the city, away from other Acadians. The one exception were two dozen Acadian families who reached the colony from France in the autumn of 1785 aboard L'Amitié and La Caroline. They chose to settle at Nueva Gálvez in present-day St. Bernard Parish, on the river below New Orleans. Only in the twentieth century, when superhighways, industries, and a material economy opened up the modern world to them, did Acadians leave their traditional homes and "return" to New Orleans. This is why, Hollywood perceptions notwithstanding, Orleans Parish is not a part of the 22-parish region known as Acadiana.
Sources: Cowan & McGuire, LA Governors, 14-15; Crouse, Lemoyne d'Iberville, chaps. 8, 9; Higginbotham, Old Mobile, 293, 345-46, 373, 387, 423, quote from p. 345; Jobb, The Cajuns, 228; Sternberg, Bayou Manchac, 35-36; Taylor, J. G., Louisiana, 9.
Pointe Coupée, which is French for "cut-off point," called this by the brothers Iberville and Bienville in their March1699 exploration of the lower Mississippi, is one of the oldest French communities in Louisiana. Its first settlers arrived in the early 1720s. By 1722, a Capuchin priest included Pointe Coupée in his religious rounds up and down the Mississippi. The first Roman Catholic church at Pointe Coupée, St.-Francois, dates from 1728. Some of the first families at Pointe Coupée were DECOUX, DECUIR, and POURCIAU, who had come to the colony in 1720 from the Hainaut region of Belgium and France aboard the ship La Loire, "the Mayflower of Louisiana."
When the Acadians began to arrive in Louisiana in large numbers in 1765, the French and later the Spanish authorities in New Orleans forbade them to settle in Pointe Coupée, which was already well established. They sent the Acadians, instead, to newer communities along the Mississippi such as Cabanocé, now St. James, St.-Gabriel, Ascension, San Luìs de Natchez, and Bayou des Écores. The latter community lay directly across the river from Pointe Coupée in what was later called the Feliciana country. Bayou des Écores had no church, so priests from Pointe Coupée would cross the river and administer the sacraments to the Acadian families along the bayou, hence the presence of Acadian names in the church records of St.-Francois Parish in Pointe Coupée. The same held true for the Acadian community at Baton Rouge, on both sides of the river south of Pointe Coupée, which did not have a church of its own until 1793. Pointe Coupée priests also administered the sacraments there.
Despite its history as a French Creole and not an Acadian community, Pointe Coupee is considered one of the 22 parishes in the region called Acadiana. So is Avoyelles Parish, northwest of Pointe Coupee, where many French Creoles, but few Acadians, settled in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Sources: BRDR, 1b:xi-xii; Crouse, Lemoyne d'Iberville, 184-85; Taylor, J. G., Louisiana, 3; <geocities.com/BourbonStreet/8230>; map.
Pointe Coupee and Avoyelles parishes
The area that is now St. James Parish was the abode of various Indian tribes during the early 1700s, some of them hostile to the French. The first attempt by the French to settle the area, in the early 1720s during the John Law period, failed miserably. In the 1740s, a trading venture existed among the Houma Indians, who resided in the area at the time. In the 1750s, Mathias FREDERICK moved upriver from the German Coast into the St. James area. There were other scattered inhabitants along the river there when Jacques CANTRELLE and his sons-in-law, Nicolas VERRET and Louis JUDICE, secured land grants from the French authorities still running the colony in the early 1760s.
CANTRELLE was in his 60s by then and had a long history in the colony. The son of Claude CANTRELLE and Marguerite EURGUIN of St.-Léger, Picardy, France, Jacques and his wife, Théressé MARQUANT, had come to Louisiana aboard Le Profond out of La Rochelle in 1720, having agreed to live on one of the concessions the French had granted to the Scottish entrepreneur, John Law. In 1723, Jacques, his wife, and their son Jean were counted at Sotehouy (Arkansas), a John Law concession. In January 1726, Jacques and his family had returned to New Orleans, where they lived on Orleans Street. In the late 1720s, they moved to another John Law concession, Fort Rosalie, Natchez, at the site of the city in Mississippi that still bears the name. In November 1729, the Natchez Indians turned on the settlement and massacred all but 20 Frenchmen. CANTRELLE was one of the lucky survivors; his wife Théressé, who was the local mid-wife, and their two children were not so lucky. Jacques hurried back to New Orleans, secured a loan, and resettled at Cannes Brulées, now Kenner, just upriver from New Orleans. Meanwhile, in April 1730, he remarried to Marie-Marguerite LARMUSIAU, whose husband had fallen at Natchez. He also maintained a residence in New Orleans. The story goes that in July 1763, with old age catching up to him, the violence in the city compelled him to find a quiet place farther upriver in the forest primeval. He and his sons-in-law secured large land grants on the Second German Coast along the west bank of the river. CANTRELLE named his plantation Cabahannocer, Choctaw for "mallard's roost" and the name of a small bayou nearby. The name has various appellations, including Cabanocé (favored here for its brevity), Cabannocé (favored by Brasseaux), Cabahannocer (favored by Bourgeois and White), Cabahan-noces (from the St.-Jacques census of 1777), Cabanocey (favored by Bourgeois and De Ville), Cabonnous, Kaba-anoce, and Kabahannosse.
In February 1764, soon after CANTRELLE and his sons-in-law settled on their upper German Coast land grants, the first Acadian families to reach Louisiana, the CORMIER-LANDRY-POIRIER-RICHARD party of 20 men, women, and children, stepped off a ship from Mobile, Alabama, and the French authorities scrambled to accommodate them. The family heads in this party were Jean-Baptiste CORMIER, père, from Chignecto, who was 54 when he reached Louisiana, Olivier LANDRY, age unknown, Jean-Baptiste, called Jean, POIRIER of Menoudie, Chignecto, who was 26, and Jean-Baptiste, called Jean, RICHARD, of Nappan, Chignecto, who was 44. Each of their nuclear families was related by blood or marriage, so they were essentially a single, extended family, which would be typical of Acadian migration to Louisiana in the years to come. The arrival of this party at New Orleans is marked by records in the St.-Louis church noting the baptism of three of their children--Jean-Antoine LANDRY, Joseph POIRIER, and Joseph RICHARD--on 26 February 1764, and another baptism, that of Jean-Baptiste POIRIER, fils, on 1 March 1764. It is interesting to note that the New Orleans priest who penned the baptismal records did not include the children's ethnicity. A few weeks later, on 6 April 1764, Jean-Jacques-Blaise D'ABBADIE, France's chief administrator in Louisiana, wrote to his superior, the duc de Choiseul-Stainville, French Secretary of the Navy: "My Lord, I have the honor to inform you of the arrival of four Acadian families, including twenty persons, who came here from New York[sic] last February." D'ABBADIE goes on: "The English who held them as prisoners till the signing of the peace [which occurred in February 1763] permitted them to leave, provided they would defray their own traveling expenses. Their passage from New York[sic] to Mobile cost 550 livres per family, consuming all of the hard-earned savings accumulated during their captivity." The administrator implored the secretary to include a reimbursement of the Acadians' expenses in the colonial budget and informed him that he had "ordered ... a ration of corn and rice be given to them until they can be settled." In truth, the Acadians had come from Georgia, where the British had deported them in 1755, not from New York. Not long after their arrival, d'ABBADIE sent them upriver to CANTRELLE's concession. There they put down roots in "the area of the vacant lands between [Nicolas] VERRET's plantation and JACQUELIN's cow ranch," at the present site of Lagan, St. James Parish, on the west bank of the river. Here they created a Nouvelle-Acadie of their own.
Thus, Cabanocé was the first Acadian community in Louisiana, predating the Acadian settlement on Bayou Teche by a year. A flood of more Acadians came to Cabanocé from Halifax via St.-Domingue in 1765 and from Maryland in 1766, so many of them, in fact, that Louisianians began to call the area the Acadian Coast. The settlement that grew up there lay at first only on the west bank of the Mississippi, but eventually it straddled the deep, wide river above and below CANTRELLE's concession.
With the arrival of so many new settlers in 1765 and 1766, the French authorities in New Orleans, still in control of the colony, created two sub-districts at Cabanocé. A captain and co-commandant would command each sub-district and its company of militia. Interestingly, acting governor AUBRY appointed Jacques CANTRELLE's sons-in-law as commandants. Nicolas VERRET commanded the lower sub-district, and Louis JUDICE the upper one. When Spanish Governor Antonio de ULLOA finally "took over" the colony in March 1766, he approved the arrangement at Cabanocé. VERRET and JUDICE remained in command and soon were being compensated by the Spanish government. In 1767, another wave of Acadians arrived from Maryland, many of them kinsmen of the Acadian Coast settlers. ULLOA did not sent them to Cabanocé, however, to the consternation of both group of Acadians. He sent them, instead, farther upriver to a new settlement the Acadians called St.-Gabriel.
The sudden increase in population on the Acadian Coast created a burden for the nearest parish priest. Father BARNABE of St.-Charles des Allemands, downriver from Cabanocé, ministered not only to his German Coast congregation but also to the families on the Acadian Coast. In November 1767, Father BARNABE spent six days at Commandant JUDICE's house and performed a number of Acadian weddings there. The commandant complained to the governor that his house was not large enough to accommodate the hundreds of worshipers who flocked there to attend Holy Mass. JUDICE informed ULLOA that the harried priest had proposed the construction of a shed, 49 feet by 20 feet, to serve as a temporary chapel for the Acadian Coast congregation. JUDICE assured the governor that his brother-in-law and co-commandant, VERRET, would cooperate in the venture. In July 1768, JUDICE informed the governor that the church shed had been built, that Father BARNABE had blessed it and consecrated it to the honor of St.-Jacques and St.-Philippe. However, church authorities did not formally establish a separate Catholic parish at Cabanocé until 1770, five years after they had created one for the Acadians on Bayou Teche. The new church, on the river's right bank, above the original settlement, was called St.-Jacques, perhaps in honor of the patron saint of one of the settlement's most prominent residents, who, despite his advanced age, was still very much alive. Jacques CANTRELLE in fact donated the site for the permanent church, where he was buried in October 1777.
In September 1779, after the Spanish entered the American Revolution on the side of the French, the Acadian Coast militia joined Spanish Governor Bernardo de GÁLVEZ's expedition against the British at Manchac and Baton Rouge. According to all accounts, the Acadians fought gallantly. Six years later, in 1785, hundreds of Acadian exiles reached New Orleans from France. The Spanish authorities in Louisiana allowed only a few of these families to settle at Cabanocé/St.-Jacques, an indication of how thoroughly the old Acadian Coast had been settled in the previous two decades. Most of the 1785 arrivals chose to settle at Ascension, on the river between St.-Jacques and St.-Gabriel, on what Louisianians called the Second Acadian Coast.
Eventually, the name Cabanocé was forgotten, and the settlement around Jacque CANTRELLE's old concession became known simply as St.-Jacques and then St. James. (In this study, I use the name Cabanocé before 1770 and St.-Jacques from 1770 to the early 1800s, when the settlement's name is anglicized to St. James because of the Louisiana Purchase.) When the Americans created the Territory of Orleans and divided it into 12 counties in 1805, St. James became a part of the County of Acadia, a named derived from the old Acadian Coast. When the territory was reorganized into civil parishes in 1807, the territorial legislature carved St. James Parish out of the lower half of Acadia County.
According to Lillian Bourgeois in her book Cabanocey, St. James was at one time or another known as Poste de Cabahannocer, La Côte des Acadiens, Le Comte d'Acadie, Poste de Cabahannocer Paroisse St.-Jacques aux Acadiens, Paroisse St.-Jacques Côte de Cabahannocer aux Acadiens, and Acadia.
Sources: Bourgeois, Cabanocey, passim; Brasseaux, ed., Quest for the Promised Land, 16; BRDR, 2:ii, 173; <thecajuns.com/acad1764.htm>, "The First Acadians to Arrive in Louisiana"; De Ville, Acadian Coast, 1779, 8, Introduction by Kathleen M. Stagg; De Ville, St. James Census, 1777, Introduction by Eileen L. Behrman; <geocities.com/BourbonStreet/8230>; NOAR, 2:xx, 167, 229, 238; Oubre, Vacherie, passim, the most detailed & thoroughly documented of the histories of St. James; Robichaux, German Coast Families, 128-29; Appendix for a list of individuals & family connections in the CORMIER-LANDRY-POIRIER-RICHARD party; map.
St. James Parish
This community originally was named Poste des Atakapas, after the wandering Indian tribe that occupied the vast marsh and prairie region from the Gulf of Mexico to the Red River valley and from east Texas to the Atchafalaya Basin. The dictionary and therefore the standard spelling of the Indian name is Atakapas, but it is more commonly spelled Attakapas. Other spellings are Atacapas and Attacapas. The name is pronounced ah-TACK-ah-paw. The word comes from the Mobilian Jargon used by the many Indian tribes of the region and means "man-eater," for the Atakapas were one of those rare tribes of North American Indians who ate human flesh.
The Atakapas Post was founded by the French in the mid 1750s to provide a strategic point from which to control the vast prairie region of Louisiana west of the Atchafalaya Basin, where cattle could be raised to provide meat for the growing population of New Orleans. Thus, the first "settlers" in the area were concessionaires who raised huge herds of livestock for the New Orleans market. But most of these prominent landholders did not live in the area. They sent itinerant drovers to watch the herds and to drive the cattle to market. Jean-Antoine-Bernard DAUTERIVE, "a retired French military officer and a large Attakapas landholder," was one of the major cattle producers in the district. Typically, he lived on the river at Iberville though his major holdings were in the Atakapas.
The first permanent settlers in the Atakapas District were French Creoles called Alibamont who migrated from Mobile and the Alabama River valley after that region had been ceded by France to Britain in the Treaty of Paris of 1763. Some of these Alibamont families were BEGNAUD, BERARD, BONIN, FONTENOT, and GUILLORY.
It was to DAUTERIVE's huge vacherie near the Poste des Atakapas that the first major group of Acadians to reach Louisiana came in the spring of 1765. Led by Joseph BROUSSARD dit Beausoleil and his older brother Alexandre, 200 individuals established La Nouvelle-Acadie on the banks of Bayou Teche. These Acadians were expected to sustain and improve the cattle industry in the area, which, as later censuses reveal, they did beyond all expectations. Their first settlement was not at the post but on the east bank of the Teche downstream from the post, near present-day Loreauville, at what was called le dernier camp d'en bas, or the camp lower down, today's Fausse Pointe. They also settled above the post at a place they called La Pointe de Répos, near present-day Parks, but this settlement was temporarily abandoned in the early autumn of 1765 when 82 of the settlers fled an epidemic that killed many Teche valley Acadians. [see below for details]
By 1766, radiating out from Fausse Pointe and La Pointe de Répos, other Acadian communities in the district had sprung up along Bayou Tortue (not to be confused with Bayou Queue de Tortue to the west), between present-day St. Martinville and BROUSSARD; at La Manque, between Lafayette and BREAUX Bridge; and at Côte Gelée, near BROUSSARD. Later Acadian communities appeared at Grand Prairie, near downtown Lafayette; along Bayou Carencro, at the northern edge of the district; at Beaubassin, along the upper Vermilion east of Carencro; at Grand Pointe, on the upper Teche near Cecilia and BREAUX Bridge; along the middle and lower Vermilion valley from Lafayette down to Abbeville and beyond; along Bayou Petite Anse near Avery Island; and farther down the Teche at Chicot Noir, near Jeanerette. [map]
The arrival of the BROUSSARD Acadians substantially increased the district's population, so in 1765 the Spanish established a Catholic parish centered at the post that they first called L'Eglise des Attakapas, then L'Eglise de St.-Joseph, and finally L'Eglise St.-Martin de Tours--known today as the Mother Church of the Acadians in Louisiana. The church council of St. Martin de Tours owned the land around the church, which included most of the town of St. Martinville, so in the late 1790s a unique lease-purchase arrangement was made between the church council and the local merchants that existed for nearly a century.
In 1779, the Spanish authorities established a Màlaguenos settlement at Nueva Iberia on the Teche, not far from the Acadian community at Fausse Pointe. A few Islenos families from the Canary Islands moved into the Teche region in the decades that followed, adding their bloodlines to that of the French Creoles, the Alibamont, Atakapas Acadians, and the Spaniards from Màlaga. When hundreds of Acadians reached Louisiana from France in 1785, a few of these families chose to move to the Atakapas to join their kin already there.
Two years after the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, the old Atakapas District became Atakapas County in the Territory of Orleans. When the Americans created the first civil parishes for Louisiana in 1807, the old Atakapas area became St. Martin Parish. In 1817, the site of the old Atakapas Post became the incorporated "city" of St. Martinville, which styled itself La Petite Paris. In the years that followed, the old Atakapas District became the civil parishes of St. Martin, St. Mary (1811), Lafayette (1823), Vermilion (1844), and, after the War Between the States, Iberia (1868).
Sources: Brasseaux, Founding of New Acadia, 74-77, 91-97, 206-07, quote from p.75; Dr. Brasseaux's essay at <www.acadianmemorial.org/english/ensembleencoreset.html>; <cityofsaintmartinville.com/english/history/history.htm>; De Ville, Opelousas History, 4-5; De Ville, Southwest LA Families, 1777, passim, which reveals the amazing number of cattle owned by many Acadians a dozen years after their arrival; Hebert, D., Southwest LA Records, 1-A:119, 137; Kniffen et al., Indian Tribes of LA, 75, 109, 114-15, 123-25, 257; Voorhies, J., Some Late Eighteenth Century Louisianians, 124-25.
The BROUSSARD dit Beausoleil Party and Nouvelle-Acadie
The story of Joseph BROUSSARD dit Beausoleil and the Acadian resistance in what is now western New Brunswick and their eventual settlement in the Atakapas region of South Louisiana is one of the most dramatic episodes in Acadian history.
In the summer and fall of 1755, at the beginning of Le Grand Dérangement, BROUSSARD and hundreds of other Acadians from the Chignecto area were rounded up and held by the British in Forts Cumberland and Lawrence before some of them managed to escape. Joseph dit Beausoleil was one of the escapees. He rejoined his family, and they literally took to the woods of present-day eastern New Brunswick, not only hiding from the British forces sent out to capture them but also engaging in what today is called guerrilla warfare, including privateering in the Bay of Fundy to harass British shipping. There was a terrible price to pay for their resistance, however. Obtaining food, clothing, and shelter for their families, especially in the winter, continually burdened the resistance fighters and limited their effectiveness against a well-fed, well-supplied, and comfortably-sheltered foe. By the autumn of 1759, after four years of unimaginable hardship and the recent fall of Louisbourg on nearby Île Royale, BROUSSARD and his compatriots responded to a British offer of amnesty and agreed to surrender to the British at Fort Cumberland, formerly French Fort Beauséjour, to spare their families the horror of another Maritimes winter. Joseph dit Beausoleil's older brother Alexandre, who had been shipped in irons to South Carolina four years before but had managed to escape and make his way back to Acadia to reunite with his brother, was held as hostage at Fort Cumberland until Joseph and other resistance leaders surrendered the following spring. However, the British reneged on their amnesty offer, and Joseph and his fellow Acadians continued their struggle against the strengthening foe. Joseph dit Beausoleil held out until November 1761, when impending starvation forced him to surrender to British authorities at Fort Cumberland. He was held at Georges Island, Halifax, for a time, then transferred to Fort Edward at Windsor, formerly Pigiguit, as a prisoner of war before being sent back to Halifax, where he and his extended family spent the next few years in close confinement.
In the prison camps of Nova Scotia, the BROUSSARDs were joined by Acadians whom the British forces had rounded up at Restigouche, Miramichi, Île St.-Pierre, Île Miquelon, and other places of refuge in the Maritimes region. Ironically, many of the Acadians being held at Fort Cumberland, Fort Edward, and Halifax were enticed to return to their former lands and rebuild and maintain the dykes that had transformed their Acadia into an agricultural paradise. The New England "planters" who began to occupy the Acadian lands along the Fundy shore in 1760 had no idea how to maintain the dykes and the aboiteaux that made them work. The Acadians worked diligently for their New England "masters" and were paid in Canadian card money. Despite their plunge from proud landowners to mere laborers on their former lands, many Acadians harbored the forlorn hope of owning their old farms again.
This was not to be. The French and Indian War finally ended with the Treaty of Paris of February 1763. An article in the treaty gave all persons dispersed by the war 18 months to return to their respective territories. In the case of the Acadians, however, this meant that they could return only to French soil. Nova Scotia had not been French for half a century. The British authorities refused to allow any of the Acadians at Halifax or the other prison compounds in the region to return to their farmsteads as proprietors. If Acadians chose to remain in Nova Scotia, they could live only in the interior of the peninsula in small family groups, away from their lands along the Bay of Fundy, or they could continue to work for low wages as laborers on their former lands. They must also take the hated oath of allegiance to the British crown without reservation. No self-respecting Acadian would consent to this, so the Acadians at Halifax decided to leave Nova Scotia.
The British officials in Halifax, still threatened by their presence, encouraged the Acadians to leave the province, despite entreaties from the New England "planters" to keep them around as cheap but highly skilled labor. Too proud to work for wages and unable to return to their homes, the BROUSSARD party had to find a suitable place to put down new roots. They considered migrating to St.-Domingue, today's Haiti, where 2,000 Acadian exiles from the English colonies had gone in late 1763 and early 1764 to start a new life in the French West Indies. However, letters from Acadians in St.-Domingue detailed the horrors of the climate and maltreatment at the hands of French officials there. The Halifax Acadians considered going to Canada, but they heard stories of how the Canadians treated with contempt Acadian refugees who had settled there. Besides, Canada was as much a British possession now as Nova Scotia, which would mean that they would have to take the hated oath if they settled there. Nor would the British authorities in Nova Scotia allow the troublesome BROUSSARDs and their partisan compatriots to settle as close as Québec to their former lands along the Bay of Fundy. The Illinois country was another option, but the British would not allow them to go there via Canada, and France had ceded the eastern part of that area to Britain. However, France still controlled the western bank of the Mississippi and the important trading post at St.-Louis. Then there was Louisiana in the lower Mississippi valley, which the French also retained. And so BROUSSARD and his compatriots chose to go to New Orleans, the gateway to the Mississippi valley. There they could decide if they would remain on the lower Mississippi or continue on to the Illinois country.
No higher authority planned their move from Halifax to New Orleans. Pooling the money they had saved from their months of labor on land they once had owned, the BROUSSARD party left Halifax in late November 1764 aboard a chartered English schooner. They changed ships at St.-Domingue, which they reached in January. They had hoped to pick up fellow Acadians there and take them on to the Mississippi valley, but most of their fellow Acadians in St.-Domingue were either dead or too destitute to book passage to Louisiana. So the BROUSSARD party sailed on to New Orleans, arriving there in late February 1765. They were not the first Acadians to reach Louisiana (they had missed that distinction by a year), but they were the first large party of Acadian exiles to seek refuge in the colony. The surprised French officials counted 193 of them. Although Louisiana at the time was officially a Spanish province, having been ceded by France to its ally in the secret Treaty of Fontainebleau in late 1762, French officials were still in charge of the colony. They were determined to keep this group of hard-working Acadians in the New Orleans area. They first planned to settle the BROUSSARD party on the west bank of the Mississippi across from New Orleans, the site of present-day Algiers. The place was low and subject to flooding, however, thus requiring the building of high, expensive levees. It was also "blanketed by dense, hardwood forests" and was thus unsuitable for the weary Acadian exiles, most of whom were Chignecto cattlemen who had lived in the wide, treeless marshland along the upper Bay of Fundy.
In April, while still recuperating from their voyage and weighing their options, BROUSSARD and seven other leaders of his Acadian community (brother Alexandre BROUSSARD, son Victor BROUSSARD, nephew Jean-Baptiste BROUSSARD, cousin-in-law Olivier THIBODEAUX, Joseph GUILBEAU dit L'Officier, Jean DUGAS, and Pierre ARCENEAUX) once again took charge of their destiny. They signed a contract with Jean-Antoine-Bernard DAUTERIVE, a major cattle producer in the Atakapas District, west of the Atchafalaya Basin. The "Acadians agreed to tend DAUTERIVE's livestock for six years; in consideration for their labor, they would receive not only half of the herd's increase but also the land grant DAUTERIVE and his partner, Edouard MASSE, had acquired in 1760." Acting French governor Charles-Philippe AUBRY agreed to the arrangement; the Acadians would be going to a fertile area where their labor would provide much-needed provender for the hard-pressed residents of New Orleans. AUBRY directed retired French engineer officer Louis-Antoine ANDRY to lead the BROUSSARD party to the Atakapas District "via Bayou Plaquemine and the network of waterways lacing the Atchafalaya Basin." ANDRY was also tasked with surveying Bayou Teche from the new Acadian settlement down to the Gulf of Mexico to establish a quicker line of communication between the Atakapas District and New Orleans. Also accompanying the BROUSSARD party was Father Jean-Francois de CIVREY, a Capuchin priest who had been tapped by the church authorities in New Orleans to minister to the Atakapas Acadians.
And so the Acadian refugees from Halifax established their Nouvelle-Acadie along the banks of Bayou Teche. The rigors of exile and adjustment to a new climate, however, as well as the hard work required to prepare their new homesteads, wore down the tough old fighters. Joseph dit Beausoleil and his older brother Alexandre died that autumn with dozens of other Acadians and were buried beside the Teche probably near present-day Loreauville at a place the Acadians called au camp d'en bas, or the burial place lower down, now Fausse Pointe. The place was also called Beausoleil in honor of the BROUSSARD brothers.
In mid-September 1765, only months after they had reached their Nouvelle-Acadie, 82 of the Atakapas Acadians from La Pointe de Répos fled with Father Jean-Francois to Cabanocé on the Mississippi River to escape the epidemic that had claimed the lives of dozens of their fellow exiles. But most of the Halifax Acadians survived the sickness and remained on the Atakapas prairies. And there they fulfilled the dream of the heroic old fighters by starting a new life for themselves.
Sources: Brasseaux, Founding of New Acadia, 30-34, 74-77, 102, quotes from p. 75; Dr. Brasseaux's essay in <www.acadianmemorial.org/english/ensembleencoreset.html>; <cityofsaintmartinville.com/english/history/history.htm>; <thecajuns.com/acadians.htm>, "Arrival of the Acadians in Louisiana", citing Brasseaux, Founding of New Acadia, 101; Brasseaux, Scattered to the Wind, 55; C. J. d'Entremont, "BROSSARD (Broussard), dit Beausoleil, Joseph," DCB, 3:87-88 & online; Faragher, A Great & Noble Scheme, chaps. 14 & 15; Perrin, W. A., Acadian Redemption, chaps. 4-6; Appendix for a list of individuals & families as well as burials au dernier camp d'en bas. Interestingly, Gov. AUBRY, in a letter to his superior, the duc de Choiseul-Stainville, dated 14 May 1765, writes: "This uninterrupted influx of new [Acadian] families will soon turn Louisiana into a New Acadia." Some authorities, however, claim that it was Father Jean-Francois who first used the term Nouvelle-Acadie. See Hébert, D., Southwest LA Records, 1-A:[32], citing the brochure that accompanies the Dafford Mural at the Acadian Memorial in St. Martinville.
Dr. Brasseaux, Founding of New Acadia, 34, suggests that, after letters from fellow Acadians in St.-Domingue eliminated that place for resettlement, the Halifax Acadians decided to go to the Illinois country via the lower Mississippi, which, despite being roundabout, was the only practical way to get there. When they got to New Orleans they learned from French officials that the Treaty of Paris had given the British control of the Illinois country as well. So they settled on lower LA as the location of their Nouvelle-Acadie.
Faragher, p. 431, makes the interesting speculation that the Halifax Acadians could have been alerted to the fine qualities of the LA colony by the father of one of Joseph dit Beausoleil's young partisans, Jean-Baptiste CORMIER, fils of Chignecto. CORMIER's parents & sisters & three kindred families had been exiled to GA in 1755 & had reached LA in Feb 1764 via SC, NY, & Mobile. After settling in LA, the elder CORMIER may have communicated with his son in Halifax via the amazing grapevine of Acadian seamen who worked on ships that sailed the Atlantic, the Caribbean, & the Gulf. For the elder CORMIER party's arrival in LA, see Appendix.
Stephen White suggests that the BROUSSARDs also could have been sold on LA by a cousin, Joseph DE GOUTIN, whose father, Mathieu DE GOUTIN, had been a high official in Acadia, & whose mother, Jeanne THIBODEAUX, was a kinswoman of the wives of the BROUSSARD brothers. Joseph DE GOUTIN, known as the first Acadian in LA, came to the colony c1746 from Île Royale, where his family had taken refuge after the fall of peninsula Acadia to Britain. Joseph married a young LA woman in 1747 & settled in New Orleans. It is entirely possible, according to Stephen White, that DE GOUTIN communicated with the BROUSSARDs in Halifax via the Acadian grapevine. DE GOUTIN also was kin to Olivier LANDRY, one of the first Acadians to reach LA in 1764. See <www.acadian-cajun.com/degoutin.htm>.
BREAUX Bridge
A prominent Acadian community of the Atakapas region, present-day BREAUX Bridge has its own interesting story:
Firmin BREAUX of Rivière-aux-Canards in the Minas Basin, son of Alexis BREAUX and Marguerite BARRILLEAUX, came to Louisiana in February 1765 with the Joseph BROUSSARD dit Beausoleil party. He was only 16. After moving to the Mississippi then back to the Atakapas, Firmin became a major land owner of the area known as La Pointe de Répos on Bayou Teche above the Atakapas Post. He purchased his property in 1771 from Jean-Francois LEDÉE, "a wealthy New Orleans merchant who had acquired the land as a French land grant." Firmin increased his holdings so that by 1786 "he was one of the largest property owners in Teche country." In 1799, he built a footbridge at La Pointe across Bayou Teche "to help ease the passage for his family and neighbors. This first bridge was a suspension footbridge, likely made of rope and small planks. It was stabilized by being tied to small pilings located at each end of the bridge, as well as to a pair of huge live oak tress on both sides of the bayou. When traveling directions were given, folks would say 'go to BREAUX's bridge.'" Firmin died in 1808, and the land around the footbridge was inherited by his younger son Agricole. In 1817, "Agricole built the first vehicular bridge, allowing for the passage of wagons and increased commerce in the area."
The distinction of founding the city of BREAUX Bridge, however, goes to Agricole's wife, Scholastique Melanie PICOU, whom Firmin BREAUX most likely never knew. In 1829, recently widowed, Scholastique submitted plans for a village at La Pointe in the area around her dead husband's vehicular bridge. Scholastique's father was French Creole, but she had Acadian blood on her mother's side. Her father was Nicolas PICOU, fils, born in New Orleans in 1754 to Nicolas PICOU, père and Marguerite LAVIGNE. The PICOUs were an old New Orleans family. Nicolas, fils's grandfather, Urbain, was a native of Brest, France, who had married Marie-Josèphe LARMUSIEAU in New Orleans in 1733. Nicolas, fils moved upriver to the Acadian community of St.-Jacques probably in the 1780s, where he married Scholastique BOURGEOIS, born at St.-Jacques c1770, daughter of Joseph BOURGEOIS and Marie GIROIR of Chignecto in Acadia. Scholastique Melanie was born in November 1796. Her father died at St.-Jacques in 1800 when she was only three years old. Her mother remarried to Charles MELANÇON at St.-Jacques in 1803. Scholastique, her brother Jean-Baptiste dit Fletcher, and sister Melanie Félicité moved to the La Pointe community on Bayou Teche when Scholastique was still a girl. In June 1813, at age 16, she married Agricole BREAUX, son of Firmin BREAUX, who had been dead for five years, and Marguerite BREAUX. Agricole and Scholastique had eight children.
In May 1828, Agricole died suddenly at age 40, leaving his wife with seven children, including an infant. The financial difficulties that followed her husband's death seem to have compelled the determined young widow to lay out a village on the site of her husband's property along Bayou Teche. The village was called Pont-BREAUX and eventually ... BREAUX Bridge.
In 1836, at age 40, Scholastique remarried to Jean Francois DOMENGEAUX of St.-Domingue, present-day Haiti, son of Jean Pierre DOMENGEAUX and Marie Marguertie Victoire LEFEBRE. Jean Francois's wife, Claire Marie ROY, had recently died. Scholastique had one child by Jean Francois, a son. Jean Francois died in March 1846, age 50, leaving Scholastique a widow for the second time. She died around 1851, in her mid-50s, no doubt surrounded by many grandchildren. Founding new communities must have been in her blood; her maternal Acadian ancestor, Jacques dit Jacob BOURGEOIS, had pioneered the Acadian settlement at Chignecto in the early 1670s.
Sources: BRDR, 2:138, 589-91; <breauxbridgelive.com>, source of quotes, which says that she & Agricole had 5 children & that she & her second husband had 2; Hebert, D., Southwest LA Records, 2-A:135-36, 140, 141, 142, 750; 2-B:133, 135, 138-39, 140; 2-C:104, 110, 3:203, 517, 4:147; 5:447; NOAR, 1:207-08, 2:228.
St. Martin, St. Mary, Lafayette, Vermilion, and Iberia parishes
This community, originally called Poste des Opelousas, was named after a band of Atakapan-speaking Indians whose village lay a few miles east of the present city of Opelousas. The word Opelousas in the Atakapan language means "black hair" or "black head." These Indians were not a direct part of the Atakapas tribal group but were related linguistically.
In the early 1730s French adventurers explored the region that became the huge Opelousas District to study the possibility of establishing a strategic point in the area to counter the Spanish presence to the west. By 1740, two French entrepreneurs, Jean-Joseph Le KINTREK dit Dupont and his partner Joseph BLANPAIN, had established an Indian trading venture in the area. When the Indian trade proved to be profitable, other traders followed, including André MASSE and Jacques COURTABLEAU.
Not until 1763 did the French establish the Opelousas Post at the site of present-day Washington on Bayou COURTABLEAU (pronounced by the locals car-TOB-lah)--on the eve of their surrendering the colony to the Spanish. (Professor Carl Brasseaux says that the original post was "located along Bayou Teche below present-day Port Barre," but Winston De Ville, followed here, says it was at Washington.) The French appointed Louis PELLERIN, a Creole, not an Acadian, as the first commandant of the post. The first permanent settlers in the district were Creoles from Mobile and the Alabama River valley, the Alibamont, who came to western Louisiana after France ceded the eastern part of the colony to Britain in the Treaty of Paris of 1763.
When the Spanish took over Louisiana in March 1766, they maintained the post on Bayou COURTABLEAU. Official Spanish policy discouraged the settlement of Acadians in the Opelousas country, which explains why relatively few Acadian families settled there compared to the French Creoles and even the Anglo-Americans who found their way to the district. The Spanish authorities wanted the Acadians who crossed the Atchafalaya Basin to settle in the Atakapas region south of Opelousas, but a hand full of Acadian families had already moved into the district in 1765 to take advantage of the wide, rolling prairies in the area, perfect for cattle raising. The first Acadian families in the Opelousas District were COMEAUX, CORMIER, GUÉNARD, HÉBERT, LÉGER, PITRE, RICHARD, SAVOIE, SONNIER, and THIBODEAUX. They settled at first on the Prairie des Coteaux, "along the Teche Ridge in an arc contiguous to the eastern and southeastern corporate limits of modern-day Opelousas." As these families grew or moved and as more Acadians trickled into the area, other Acadian communities sprang up south of Opelousas at Prairie Belleveu, along Bayou Bourbeaux, and at Grand Coteau. Acadian families also moved west into the prairie region and settled along Bayou Plaquemine Brulée from present-day Church Point down to Estherwood, on the Faquetaique Prairie near Eunice and Ville Platte, along bayous Des Cannes, Mallet, and Nezpique, and along the Mermentau River. New Acadian families who came to the Opelousas District after 1765 were BELLARD, BENOIT, BOUDREAUX, BOURG, BOUTIN, BRASSEAUX, BROUSSARD, CHIASSON, FORET, GRANGER, GUIDRY, JEANSONNE, LANDRY, LEJEUNE, and TRAHAN. Some of these families--BELLARD, BENOIT, LEJEUNE, and TRAHAN--were among the Acadians who came to Louisiana from Maryland in 1769 aboard the ill-fated English ship Britannia. Other families had drifted up from the Atakapas District or abandoned the crowded river districts and slipped through the bayous of the Atchafalaya Basin to start a new life on the wide prairies. In 1776, there were enough settlers in the district to create a church parish at the Poste des Opelousas. It came to be called St. Landry, after St. Leandre or Landry, the seventh-century bishop of Paris. When hundreds more Acadians reached Louisiana, from France, in 1785, only a few of these families moved to the Opelousas country, mainly to join their kin already there.
By 1788, nearly a quarter century after the first Acadians reached the Opelousas district, some of the largest cattle ranchers in the area were Acadians. Joseph CORMIER of Bellevue owned 697 head of cattle and 60 horses. CORMIER's neighbor, Charles COMEAUX, held 643 head. Charles's cousin, Michel COMEAUX of Plaquemine Brulée, ran 500 head. Sylvain SONNIER of Bellevue owned 300 head of cattle. His neighbor, the widow of L'Ange BOURG, owned 166 head. Pierre RICHARD of the same area owned 140 head of cattle; his brother Victor owned 150 head. Michel CORMIER of the Prairie des Femmes, Joseph's younger brother, owned 130 head of cattle. Francois PITRE of the Plaisance area also owned 130 head of cattle. Joseph BOURG, the dead L'Ange's brother, owned 120 head.
In 1796, the Acadian families in the Opelousas region numbered 49, only 17 percent of the total number of families in the district. Most of the Acadians lived in the Bellevue area and at Grand Coteau, with a hand full of others residing in the North Plaquemine, Grand Prairie, Grand Louis, and Faquetaique areas west of the present city. Half of the district's 12 sub districts contained not a single Acadian family. But, as this and earlier censuses revealed, many of these Acadian cattlemen were among the shakers and movers of the Opelousas District.
In 1798, two years after Michel PRUDHOMME donated land for a new church, a priest's house, and a jail on property he owned south of the old post, the Spanish authorities moved the Opelousas Post from Bayou COURTABLEAU to the site of today's Opelousas. After the Louisiana Purchase, the old Opelousas District became the civil parishes of St. Landry, Calcasieu (1840), and, after the War Between the States, Cameron (1870), Acadia (1887), Evangeline (1910), Allen (1912), Beauregard (1912), and Jefferson Davis (1912).
Sources: Brasseaux, Founding of New Acadia, 93-95, 97-100, 205-06, quotes from p. 94; De Ville, Opelousas Post Census, 1771, 9, 10, 15; De Ville, Opelousas History, passim; Hebert, D., Southwest LA Records, 1-A: 653; Kniffen et al., Indian Tribes of La., 46, 75; Voorhies, J., Some Late Eighteenth Century Louisianians, 126-28 (note that the BERTRAND listed on p. 126 & the 2 DOUCETs on p. 127 were not Acadians but Creoles), 345-65; Appendix for a list of Acadian individuals & families in the Opelousas, 1765; map.
St. Landry, Evangeline, and Acadia parishes
St.-Gabriel d'Iberville/Manchac
Visited by Iberville and Bienville in their March 1699 exploration of the lower Mississippi, the stretch of river that would come to be known as St.-Gabriel d'Iberville was described as "the beautiful countryside" by the area's namesake. On his return trip downstream, Iberville and a hand full of companions in two canoes hoped to find a shortcut to the Gulf of Mexico via Bayou Manchac, which the French called first Ascantia then Rivière Iberville. They found a passage via the bayou, the Amite River, and lakes Maurepas and Pontchartrain, but the short cut existed only in space, not in time. The shallowness of Bayou Manchac, and especially the obstructions that blocked its channel, made the voyage impractical for anything heavier than an Indian canoe.
The first settlement in the area, though not much of one, was on the west side of the river at present-day Bayou Goula and served for a time as a staging site for cattle shipments from Natchitoches, far up the Red River, down to New Orleans. At the confluence of Bayou Plaquemine and the Mississippi, at present-day Plaquemine, also on the west side of the river, a non-descript settlement arose to serve travelers to and from the western reaches of the colony. But the French mostly neglected the place, concentrating their settlement efforts upriver at Pointe Coupée and downriver along the German Coast in what is now St. Charles and St. John the Baptist parishes. The Indians who lived in the area, the Bayougoula, were mostly friendly, so the French had no incentive to drive them from their river-side villages. When the French ceded Louisiana to Spain in late 1762 and the French and Indian War ended a few months later, the Bayou Goula/Plaquemine/Bayou Manchac area was virtually unsettled. This is how the Spanish found it when they took over the colony in early 1766. But the politics of imperial rivalry would not let such a state of affairs continue.
In February 1763, the Treaty of Paris gave West Florida to Britain, which now controlled that part of the present state of Louisiana from the Pearl River west to the Mississippi River north of lakes Maurepas and Pontchartrain. Bayou Manchac thus became an international boundary between the British and Spanish realms. Wasting no time, the British tried to clear Bayou Manchac of obstructions so that Iberville's shortcut via the Amite River and the lakes could become practicable. This would bypass New Orleans and transform British-controlled Baton Rouge into a new trading center in the region. Even more threatening to Spanish interests, in 1765 the British had built Fort Bute just north of Bayou Manchac, overlooking a bend in the Mississippi. Instigated perhaps by French officials still at New Orleans, Alabama Indians who had a village nearby attacked the British fort in August 1765 and drove away the small British garrison. The governor of West Florida, British naval captain George JOHNSTONE, refused to abandon the position. He ordered his officers to rebuild Fort Bute. When Governor Antonio de ULLOA finally arrived at New Orleans in March 1766 to begin the Spanish administration of Louisiana, the British were hard at work rebuilding their fort north of Bayou Manchac.
This motivated the Spanish to build their own fort south of the bayou. In April 1767, a small force under Lieutenant Juan ORIETA commenced the construction of Fort San Gabriel de Manchac. It was a modest four-gun stockade, but it served the purpose of checking the British and discouraging them from crossing the bayou. A small fort with a few guns and a tiny garrison was not enough for such an important position, however. British activity north of Bayou Manchac also motivated the Spanish to settle the area near Fort San Gabriel. Militia companies raised amongst the settlers could augment the Spanish soldiers in the fort to buttress the northwestern flank of the Isle of Orleans, the area encompassed by Bayou Manchac, the Amite River, and lakes Maurepas and Pontchartrain, with New Orleans at its center.
In the summer of 1767, Governor ULLOA directed a group of 200 Acadians who had recently reached New Orleans from Maryland to settle in the vicinity of Fort San Gabriel. Here was ULLOA's militia force. The Maryland Acadians had hoped to settle among relatives at Cabanocé, but ULLOA insisted that they go to Fort San Gabriel instead and threatened to deport them if they did not. After the disgruntled Acadians had moved to the fort, they soon realized that communication with Cabanocé, only two dozen miles down river, and even with the Acadian communities west of the Atchafalaya Basin, was easy by boat. This was the beginning of the settlement the Acadians called St.-Gabriel d'Iberville or St.-Gabriel de Manchac because it lay in the Spanish District of Iberville, sometimes called the District of Manchac. Like the Acadian settlements downriver, St.-Gabriel soon straddled both sides of the Mississippi, but its most important function lay on the east side of the river, where the community served as a strategic post from which to watch the growing British presence in the direction of Baton Rouge.
In 1769, a hand full of German Catholic families who had recently arrived in the colony via Natchitoches settled among the Acadians at St.-Gabriel. This led to the settlement of other German families in the area, some of whom were given sizeable land grants. In that same year, Acadian families who had become disgruntled with the settlement at Fort San Luìs de Natchez, far upstream, and who had supported the revolt against Governor ULLOA in October 1768, including the rebellious BREAUX brothers, received permission from ULLOA's successor, General Alejandro O'REILLY, to abandon the distant post and move to St.-Gabriel as well as Cabanocé. In 1775, O'REILLY's successor, Governor Luis de UNZAGA, ordered the rebuilding of the fort at St.-Gabriel. The Spanish built other, smaller forts along the bayou, assigning an officer and 10 Acadians to man each one.
One result of the influx of new settlers into the district was the creation of a separate Catholic parish at St.-Gabriel in 1773 during the governorship of UNZAGA. The church the Acadians built between 1774 and 1776 at St. Gabriel is the oldest surviving wooden church structure in the Mississippi Valley. By March 1777, when an important census was taken at St.-Gabriel, "the district ... included the area on the east bank, from Bayou Manchac to the present-day Ascension Parish line, and east to the Amite River. On the west bank, it ranged from Bayou Plaquemine down-river to the Ascension line and west to the Atchafalaya."
Nearly all of the settlers counted in the 1777 census lived behind the natural levee along the Mississippi River, and the majority of them were Acadians. It was not unusual for them to trade with British merchants from the north side of Bayou Manchac instead of Spanish merchants far downriver in New Orleans. Governor O'REILLY, in possession of formidable power, had attempted to suppress this trade and failed. Governor UNZAGA, a pragmatist, looked the other way. Soon after the 1777 census, however, Bernardo de GÁLVEZ replaced UNZAGA as governor. GÁLVEZ promptly expelled all British traders in the Spanish realm and resolved to keep them out, but, again, the illicit trade persisted and even flourished. Representing a substantial part of the colony's population, the Acadians in the river settlements like St.-Gabriel no doubt contributed much to the illicit trade with the British.
In January 1779, GÁLVEZ sent to the St.-Gabriel area the first contingent of Islenos, or Canary Islanders, to reach Louisiana. He settled them at Galveztown, also called Villa de Gálvez, just east of the confluence of Bayou Manchac and the Amite River, across from present-day Port Vincent. Anglo-Americans fleeing British forces in the area had started the remote settlement only a short time before GÁLVEZ came to survey the place in late November 1778, and they named their little town after the Spanish governor to win his favor. After the Islenos were settled along the Amite, GÁLVEZ ordered them to build a fort at Galveztown to intercept British traders who might penetrate the Isle of Orleans via that quarter and also to counter the build up of British defenses in the area.
Meanwhile, far to the east, the American Revolution raged on along the Atlantic seaboard. In 1778, France joined the Americans against their old enemies, the British. In 1779, Spain also declared war against Britain, and the faraway conflict came to Louisiana. The Spanish struck first. In late August, Sublieutenant Francisco COLLEL, commandant at Galveztown, leading his Spanish regulars and his militia of Islenos and Anglo-Americans, seized seven British vessels and 125 prisoners on the Amite River and captured the British post there. Meanwhile, Governor-General GÁLVEZ moved up the Mississippi to Bayou Manchac, picking up German Coast and Acadian Coast militia on the way. GÁLVEZ launched his offensive against the British from Fort San Gabriel in the first week of September. An authority on the action wrote that "the militia, particularly the Acadians," many of whom were old enough to remember what the British had done to them in Acadia, "behaved splendidly." GÁLVEZ and his trusty militia captured Fort Bute and the British forts at Baton Rouge and Natchez before moving against Mobile and Pensacola in East Florida. And so the former victims of British oppression tasted sweet revenge.
The second Treaty of Paris of September 1783 removed the troublesome British from the scene, but they were soon replaced by an even more aggressive people, the Americans, who claimed the Baton Rouge area for themselves. No matter, St.-Gabriel Acadians moved north of Bayou Manchac into the once-forbidden zone towards Baton Rouge, as well as west of the river into present-day West Baton Rouge Parish, all the way up to Pointe Coupée.
Meanwhile, the Islenos at Galveztown were miserable in their isolated enclave along the Amite River, which was prone to flooding and Indian attack and ravaged by disease. Several times they tried to abandon the place, but Spanish authorities would not let them. There they remained until the Spanish no longer controlled that part of Louisiana. Beginning in 1804, most of the Islenos still in Galveztown crossed the Amite and settled on the Spanish side of the river. By 1810, after 30 years of failure, Galveztown was no more.
But the rest of the St.-Gabriel/Manchac district thrived. In the summer and fall of 1785, hundreds of Acadian exiles reached New Orleans from France aboard seven French transports. Most of them chose to settle at Ascension and in the upper Lafourche valley around Valenzuéla, later called Assumption, downriver from St.-Gabriel. A few dozen of the new arrivals went to Baton Rouge and up to Bayou des Écores, north of Baton Rouge. But a few dozen more, mostly from the first ship, Le Bon Papa, chose to move to the St.-Gabriel/Manchac district. They settled on what the Spanish called the "Manchac Coast," between the church at St.-Gabriel and Bayou Manchac, at the northeast edge of the district. In subsequent years, many of these 1785 arrivals crossed Bayou Manchac and settled in the Baton Rouge district.
After the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, the Americans, now in control of the area west of the river and south of Bayou Manchac, organized the Territory of Orleans, and the old St.-Gabriel/Manchac district became part of Iberville County in 1805. Two years later, when the Americans created Louisiana's first civil parishes, old St.-Gabriel became the extreme eastern part of Iberville Parish. The area south of old Galveztown became the major part of Ascension Parish lying east of the Mississippi.
Sources: Brasseaux, Founding of New Acadia, 80-81; BRDR, 1a:1-7, Commentary by David Broussard; Crouse, Lemoyne d'Iberville, 184, 189-90; De Ville, St. Gabriel Census, 1777, Introduction by John J. Pastorek, [ii-viii], quotes from pp. [ii, v, v-vi], the p. [v] quote citing J. W. Caughey's Bernardo De Galvez in Louisiana: 1776-1783; Din, Canary Islanders of LA, chap. 3; Kinnaird, "The Revolutionary Period, 1765-81," xvii, xxii-xxiv, xxvii-xxviii, 17; Sternberg, Bayou Manchac, 42-43, 55-67; Winzerling, Acadian Odyssey, 133; map.
Iberville and Ascension parishes
Fort San Luìs de Natchez, which the Spanish also built in the spring of 1767, became the farthest north of the Acadian settlements along the Mississippi River. It was located near present-day Vidalia, Concordia Parish, across from present-day Natchez, Mississippi. The reason why the Spanish post was located on the west side of the river is simple: the east side, as of February 1763, belonged to the British, who had fortified the old settlement at Natchez on the east side of the river, about a league from the new Spanish fort. The British fort at Natchez was named Panmure.
After the Spanish built Fort San Luìs de Natchez, Governor ULLOA announced his determination to send Acadian immigrants there to serve as militia. He had allowed the Acadians who emigrated from Maryland and Pennsylvania in September 1766 to go to Cabanocé to supplement the Acadians already there; the ones who followed from Maryland and Pennsylvania in July 1767 he settled at Fort San Gabriel, above Cabanocé. Then along came the party of Acadians led by brothers Alexis and Honoré BREAUX, who reached New Orleans from Maryland in early February 1768. ULLOA ordered them to San Luìs de Natchez, but the BREAUX brothers refused to take their people to a settlement that was so far from their fellow Acadians. They insisted on going to Cabanocé instead. ULLOA refused to compromise on the matter, declared the BREAUX brothers trouble makers, and threatened to deport them and their families if they did not conform to his decision. With the assistance of other Acadians, Alexis and Honoré went into hiding, while Spanish officers with armed soldiers escorted the rest of the Acadians in their party to Fort San Luìs de Natchez. The disgruntled Acadians and their escort left New Orleans on February 20 and did not reach the upriver post until March 20. Far removed from their relatives to the south and threatened by hostile Indians, the Acadians at Natchez could not be happy with the place. They openly sympathized with the French Creole-led revolt against Governor ULLOA the following October.
ULLOA's successor, General Alejandro O'REILLY, suppressed the October 1768 revolt and hanged some of its leaders. However, intent on consolidating the Spanish defenses against the British at Natchez and Baton Rouge, in 1769 O'REILLY more or less pardoned the BREAUX brothers and allowed the Acadians at San Luìs de Natchez to abandon the settlement and move downriver to Cabanocé and St.-Gabriel. Concordia Parish thus was settled in subsequent decades not by Acadians but by Anglo-Americans who poured into Louisiana after Jefferson's Purchase to grow cotton in the fertile bottom lands along the Mississippi.
Sources: Brasseaux, Founding of New Acadia, 81ff; <thecajuns.com>, "Arrival of the Acadians in Louisiana"; Kinnaird, "The Revolutionary Period, 1765-81," xvii, 43.
The site of Baton Rouge, which is French for "red stick," got its name from Iberville and Bienville on their March 1699 exploration of the lower Mississippi. As they moved upstream through the territory of the Bayougoula Indians, the French explorers saw on the east bank a painted pole that the Bayougoula's hated enemies, the Houmas, had erected to serve as a boundary between their hunting grounds. The Indians called the pole "Istrouma," but the Frenchmen evidently were more fascinated with its color than its Indian name. Iberville and Bienville also could see what French explorers LaSalle and Tonty had seen nearly two decades before, that the site of Baton Rouge marks the first high bluff along the Mississippi River north of its delta. South of the red pole, all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico, the only "high" ground along the river was a natural levee formed by hundreds of years of annual spring flooding.
The first groups of Acadians who came to Louisiana in the middle and late1760s did not settle around present-day Baton Rouge for the simple reason that the Treaty of Paris of February 1763, which ended the French and Indian War, granted the area north of Bayou Manchac, along the east bank of the river, to the British. The French and later the Spanish authorities who controlled Louisiana naturally discouraged Acadian settlement anywhere outside of their territory, so Acadians were forbidden to settle north of Bayou Manchac. The British in fact built a fort just north of the bayou, Fort Bute, the guns of which discouraged any Frenchman or Spaniard from venturing into the area. The British also built a fort at the southern edge of the Istrouma Bluff, Fort New Richmond, and laid out a town, which they called New Richmond, where the Houma Indians' old red pole had stood many decades before. The British even tried to clear Bayou Manchac of obstructions so that a shortcut to the Gulf of Mexico via the Amite River and lakes Maurepas and Pontchartrain could bypass New Orleans and transform Baton Rouge into a new regional trading center.
When Spain entered the American Revolution on the side of France in 1779, Louisiana Governor Bernardo de GÁLVEZ was determined to seize Baton Rouge. He and his militia, including Acadians from the river settlements, crossed Bayou Manchac in early September and captured Fort Bute without a fight. They then moved on to Baton Rouge, which, unlike Fort Bute, offered stiff resistance, but to no avail. The surrender of Fort New Richmond in late September doomed British Fort Panmure upriver at Natchez, and British power was broken on the lower Mississippi.
In 1783, as a result of a second Treaty of Paris, this one ending the American Revolution, Baton Rouge now lay in Spanish territory, but by then the hundreds of Acadians who had come to Louisiana had settled elsewhere. In 1785, the Spanish sent nearly 100 Acadian families recently arrived from France to Baton Rouge and to the short-lived Acadian community of Bayou des Écores north of Baton Rouge along present-day Thompson Creek. Most of the Acadians who chose to settle in the Baton Rouge district moved to its southern edge, in the vicinity of Fort Bute, where the Spanish counted 145 of them in the summer of 1788. A smaller number of Acadians may have settled farther north along the river, within the boundaries of the present-day city. Others settled on the west side of the river as far up as present-day Plaquemine.
In the years that followed, more Acadians from St.-Gabriel to the south or Bayou des Écores to the north settled along the eastern bank, towards the present-day city, or crossed to the western bank and settled along the river as far up as Pointe Coupée. Some Acadians living west of the Mississippi moved to the east side of the river, but the size of the Acadian population there never came close to the numbers of Acadians who lived along the western bank.
After the Louisiana Purchase, the Baton Rouge area west of the river became part of Iberville County in the Territory of Orleans. In 1807, when the Americans created Louisiana's first civil parishes, the area west of the river became the Parish of Baton Rouge. After they seized West Florida from Spain in the Bonnie Blue Flag revolt of 1810, the Americans created East Baton Rouge Parish from part of the old Spanish realm. In 1812, when Louisiana became the twelfth state of the Union, the new state legislature renamed Baton Rouge Parish, West Baton Rouge Parish, which today is part of the 22-parish region known as Acadiana. East Baton Rouge Parish, where fewer Acadians settled, is not considered a part of Acadiana. The state legislature incorporated the town of Baton Rouge in 1817 and made it the "permanent" capital of Louisiana in 1849.
Sources: Conrad, ed., Readings in La. History, 18; Crouse, Lemoyne d'Iberville, 184; Kinnaird, "The Revolutionary Period, 1765-81," xxviii; Taylor, J. G., Louisiana, 3; Voorhies, J., Some Late Eighteenth Century Louisianians, 524-27; map.
West Baton Rouge Parish
Bayou Terre-aux-Boeufs in present-day St. Bernard Parish is what is known as a refluent stream. This means that in the old days, when the Mississippi River was "allowed" to flood, the bayou, whose name means "land of oxen" in French, would divert water from the lower river into Black Bay on the Gulf. In the 1720s, not long after the founding of New Orleans, French landowners raised indigo and sugarcane south of the city. Half a century later, however, the Creole plantations had extended no farther downriver than the head of Bayou Terre-aux-Beoufs and nearby English Turn. The bayou also served as the southeastern boundary of the Isle of Orleans.
The demographic history of the area changed dramatically in early 1779, when Governor Bernardo de GÁLVEZ sent 42 families of Canary Islanders, called Islenos, recently recruited for service in Spanish Louisiana, to settle the "high" ground along Bayou Terre-aux-Boeufs. The bayou probably took its name from the reputation of the Islenos as expert cattlemen. The Islenos called their settlement Nueva Gálvez in honor of the governor, and also Concepción, but both names eventually gave way to San Bernardo, or St.-Bernard, the governor's patron saint. Of the four Islenos settlements that GÁLVEZ established in South Louisiana in 1779, San Bernardo was the most successful and the most enduring despite frequent flooding and the ravages of hurricanes. In 1783, when more Islenos reached Louisiana, Spanish authorities sent most of them to San Bernardo, doubling the size of the settlement. Eventually, four distinct communities grew up along the bayou. Serving as commandant at San Bernardo from its inception was the French Creole aristocrat who had donated land for the settlement, Pierre DE MARIGNY de Mandeville.
Until early 1786, the population of San Bernardo was almost exclusively Islenos. Early that year, however, several dozen Acadians chose to settle there, and San Bernardo, too, became an Acadian community. These Acadian exiles had come to Louisiana only a few weeks before aboard two of the Seven Ships from France that the Spanish government chartered to bring more settlers to their Louisiana colony. Nearly 1,600 Acadians made the voyage aboard the Seven Ships ships, and most of them chose to settle near another Islenos settlement, Valenzuéla, on the upper Bayou Lafourche. The hand full of Acadians who elected to settle at San Bernardo came from the ships L'Amitié, which reached New Orleans in November, and La Caroline, which arrived in December 1785.
San Bernardo was an exceptional Acadian community. Unlike the other Acadian settlements along the river above New Orleans, in the valley of the Lafourche, or west of the Atchafalaya Basin, where the Acadians outnumbered all other ethnic groups and Acadian folkways determined the direction of the area's cultural evolution, in San Bernardo the Spanish-speaking Islenos always outnumbered the French-speaking Acadians. San Bernardo Acadians inevitably intermarried with their Hispanic neighbors and were slowly absorbed into the Islenos culture. So much so that when the Louisiana state legislature officially recognized the Acadiana region in 1971, St. Bernard Parish was not included in the 22-parish area.
Sources: Din, Canary Islanders of LA, chap. 4; <losislenos.org/history.htm>; map.
This settlement, called by the English Thompson Creek, its present-day name, lay north of Baton Rouge, along the boundary of today's West Feliciana and East Baton Rouge parishes, in an area claimed by both Spain and the United States after 1783. In late 1785, the Spanish sent 56 Acadian families fresh from France to the area, American claims be damned. The Acadians had just arrived from France aboard La Ville d'Archangel, which reached New Orleans in early December. The new Acadian settlement lay directly across the Mississippi River from Pointe Coupée. There was no church at Bayou des Écores, so priests from Pointe Coupée crossed the river and administered the sacraments to the Acadians along the bayou.
The Acadian settlement at Bayou des Écores was not destined to survive. Two especially destructive hurricanes struck lower Louisiana in August 1794. The resulting floods devastated the bayou settlement. This disaster, combined with the growing number of Anglo-Americans who moved into the area and the revolt of the Anglo-American inhabitants against Spain in 1810, compelled the few Acadians who had remained at Bayou des Écores to abandon the settlement. They moved to communities populated by their fellow Acadians either farther down the Mississippi or along Bayou Lafourche. As a result, the cultural future of the area north of Baton Rouge, which came to be called the Feliciana country, was established not by Acadians but by the Anglo-Americans who had risen in revolt beneath their Bonnie Blue Flag.
Sources: Brasseaux, Acadian to Cajun, 180; Brasseaux, Founding of New Acadia, 110; Brasseaux, Scattered to the Wind, 69; Dr. Brasseaux's essay at <www.acadianmemorial.org/english/ensembleencoreset.html>; BRDR, 1b:xiv; map.
Ascension/Assumption/Lafourche/Terrebonne
Bayou Lafourche is not a tributary of the Mississippi River but is rather an effluence or distributary, meaning that centuries ago the bayou was the lower main channel of the great river. Indians settled the site of present-day Donaldsonville, at the confluence of Bayou Lafourche and the Mississippi River, probably since prehistoric times. The French named the site Lafourche (which is French for "the fork") during Iberville and Bienville's March 1699 exploration of the lower Mississippi. At that time, the Chitimacha (also spelled Chitamacha and Chetimacha) Indians occupied "the fork." In January 1707, a war party of Chitimachas murdered a French missionary, Father Jean-Francois BUISSON de St.-Cosme, and several of his French companions on the Mississippi River near "the fork." Commandant Bienville launched a campaign against the Chitimachas that lasted until 1719, when a peace treaty led to the tribe's removal to the swamps around Grand Lake, far away from French settlements on the river. Years later, a small European settlement arose at "the fork" which the French called Lafourche des Chitimachas. The Spanish established a post there in the mid-1760s.
In 1764 and again in 1765 and 1766, Acadian refugees settled at nearby Cabanocé/St.-Jacques, or the First Acadian Coast, down the Mississippi from Lafourche des Chitimachas. Some of the Cabanocé settlers drifted upriver along the west side of the Mississippi and settled above and below the village post at "the fork," on what came to be called the Second Acadian Coast. In 1767, Spanish authorities established a new settlement upriver from "the fork" on the east bank of the Mississippi that Acadians called St.-Gabriel d'Iberville. Expansion of the St.-Gabriel settlement to the north was blocked by the British holdings north of Bayou Manchac, so settlers from St.-Gabriel crossed the river and drifted down along the west bank to the area north of "the fork."
In August 1770, Louis JUDICE of Cabanocé/St.-Jacques, whom the Spanish authorities had made commandant of the new district of Lafourche des Chitimachas, conducted a census of the Acadian settlers in his district and counted 84 families. By 1772, the area around Lafourche des Chitimachas had become populated enough for the Spanish to create a new church parish, which they called La Parroquia de la Ascension de Nuestro Senor Jesus Christo de La Fourche de Los Tchitimacha. The Acadian settlers called the area around the church L' Ascension. JUDICE served as commandant of the Lafourche des Chitimachas or Ascension district well into the 1790s. In April 1777, nearly seven years after his first census, he counted the same 84 Acadian families at Ascension and presented his Spanish superiors with these figures: 61 men, 67 women, 128 boys, 92 girls, 586 arpents, 137 slaves, 1,178 horned cattle, 158 horses, 80 sheep, 882 swine, 130 arms, 1 free savage, 12 goats, and 3 kids.
In early 1779, Spanish Governor GÁLVEZ established a new post a few miles southwest of Ascension, on upper Bayou Lafourche, near present-day Belle Rose. He called the new settlement Villa de Valenzuéla after the family of his aunt, the wife of José de GÁLVEZ, Spanish minister of the Indies. The first settlers at Valenzuéla were Islenos from the Canary Islands who were just arriving in the colony. The first commandant at Valenzuéla was Lieutenant Antonio de ST. MAXENT, Governor GÁLVEZ's brother-in-law. ST. MAXENT quarreled constantly with the commandant at nearby Ascension, Louis JUDICE, who claimed that Valenzuéla was part of his district. The Spanish gave an Acadian, Anselme BLANCHARD of St.-Gabriel, the contract to clear the land and build the houses for the first settlers at Valenzuéla. BLANCHARD, a captain in the Acadian Coast militia, succeeded ST. MAXENT as commandant at Valenzuéla in August 1781. He served in that post until 1784, when Islenos complaints led to his removal. Nicolas VERRET, who had served as co-commandant at Cabanocé/St.-Jacques with brother-in-law Louis JUDICE, succeeded BLANCHARD as commandant at Valenzuéla.
In 1784, Governor Estevan MIRÓ ordered the redrawing of the the boundaries between the Ascension and Valenzuéla districts. As a result of the new survey, the district of Ascension or Lafourche des Chitimachas ran not only along the river above and below "the fork" but also along both banks of Bayou Lafourche for the first 40 arpents from the confluence with the Mississippi where the Ascension church stood. (An arpent, in this case, was equal to 192 feet or 64 yards in the English measure, so 40 arpents of length would have been about 7,680 feet, or just short of a mile and a half, though the curvature of the bayou made it difficult to set the exact boundary between the two districts.) The Valenzuéla district ran the rest of the way down the bayou, the lower part of which was mostly uninhabited.
In late 1785 and early 1786, over 250 of the Acadian families who had just arrived from France chose to settle in the Ascension and Valenzuéla districts. Their tiny farms soon lined the banks not only along the Mississippi River near "the fork," but also along Bayou Lafourche around Valenzuéla. Some of the Acadians settled among the Islenos, but most of them settled below the Canary Islanders perhaps as far down as present-day Lafourche Parish.
The sudden arrival of over 850 Acadians dwarfed the original Islenos community. A census of the Valenzuéla district in mid-1784, before the Acadians arrived, had counted only 174 persons in 46 families, 150 of them Islenos in 40 families. By January 1788, when a "general census of the inhabitants established in Lafourche" was taken, the population of the Ascension and Valenzuéla districts had grown to 1,500 settlers--1,075 along the river and the rest on Bayou Lafourche, the great majority of them Acadians. Another general census in January 1789 counted 1,033 persons along the river, hinting at an exodus of Acadians from the river to the bayou. Two years later, in January 1791, the Spanish counted 1,191 persons along the river around Ascension. As more Acadians from the crowded river settlements drifted down into the Lafourche valley to find fresh land and to join their cousins already there, families from the nearby German Coasts moved south into the Lafourche valley and allowed their children to marry Islenos and Acadians. Spaniards from Màlaga, Canadians, Irishmen, Italians, and even Anglo-Americans joined the Islenos, Acadians, French Creoles, and Germans in populating the Spanish Distritto de La Fourche, as it was now being called.
By 1793, thanks to the dramatic increase in population, Catholic authorities established a second church parish in the area, which the Spanish called La Parroquia de la Assumption de Nuestra Senora de La Fourche de los Chetimachas de Valenzuéla, or the Church of the Assumption, at present-day Plattenville. By the late 1790s, settlers were cultivating the fertile natural levee along Bayou Lafourche for dozens of miles below the church. A 1797 census of the Valenzuéla District counted 1,797 persons along the bayou, the great majority of them Acadians, who preferred to call the area Assumption. None of the river districts or even the Atakapas region could boast such a large Acadian population.
The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 and the arrival of more Anglo-Americans that followed the purchase inevitably led to name changes in the area. Ascension became the town of Donaldson in 1806 and Donaldsonville in 1823. Thanks to the machinations of its founder, William DONALDSON, the town served briefly as the state capital from 1829 to 1831 before the legislature moved the capital "permanently" to Baton Rouge. The name Valenzuéla disappeared. Ascension survived as the name of one of the 19 original civil parishes created by the legislature of the Territory of Orleans in 1807. The same legislation also created Assumption and Interior parishes on Bayou Lafourche. In 1812, with the creation of the State of Louisiana, the legislature renamed Interior Parish, Lafourche Interior Parish. In 1817, Catholic authorities created St. Joseph Parish at the site of a trading post in Lafourche Interior Parish, Thibodeauxville, named after local planter and politician, Henry Schuyler THIBODAUX. In 1822, the state legislature carved a new civil parish, Terrebonne, with its seat at Houma, from the lower end of Lafourche Interior Parish, which became simply Lafourche Parish in 1853. The legislature incorporated Thibodeaxville as a town in 1830, and it became simply Thibodeaux in 1838. The town did not formally adopt its current name, THIBODAUX, the spelling favored by its namesake, until 1918. Houma, named after an important Indian tribe in the area, was founded in 1810 and incorporated in 1848. Catholic authorities created St. Francis de Sales Parish at Houma in 1847. Today, the churches of St. Joseph and St. Francis de Sales serve as co-cathedrals for the Catholic Diocese of Houma-Thibodaux, which church authorities created from part of the Archdiocese of New Orleans in 1977. The first bishop of the new diocese, Rev. Warren L. BOUDREAUX, was a native of the area and an Acadian descendant.
Sources: De Ville, Acadian Coast, 1779, Introduction by Kathleen M. Stagg, 8; Din, Canary Islanders of LA, chap. 5; <donaldsonville.org/dville_history.html>; Hébert, D, South LA Records, Foreword by Albert J. Robichaux, Jr.; Robichaux, Bayou Lafourche, 1770-98, Introduction by Henri J. Molaison, 8, 19, 110, 150, 181; Robichaux, LA Census & Militia Lists, 1770-89, 146; <retirethibodaux.org/PageDisplay.asp?p1=3272>; Winzerling, Acadian Odyssey, 136, 146, 151; map.
Ascension, Assumption, Lafourche, and Terrebonne parishes
Copyright (c) 2005-08 Steven A. Cormier