Natchitoches was not the first European "settlement" in present-day Louisiana. That was Fort de la Boulaye, also called Fort de 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 during the governorship of Le Mothe de Cadillac by a young Canadian-born adventurer and kinsman of Iberville's wife four years before Bienville founded New Orleans in 1718. Louis Juchereau de St.-Denis had commanded at Fort de Mississippi during its brief existence. After Bienville abandoned the fort, St.-Denis shifted the French observation post on the lower Mississippi to the site of present-day New Orleans and then became the commandant of the post at Old Biloxi on the Mississippi Sound. But he did not remain there. Governor Cadillac, representing Louisiana's proprietor, Antoine Crozat, was determined to establish a French post in the Louisiana interior to trade with the Indians, especially the friendly Caddos, and with the Spanish in Mexico and Texas.
In 1714, on orders from Governor Cadillac, St.-Denis sited Fort St.-Jean-Baptiste on an island in a branch of the Red River just below a huge log jam that impeded further navigation upstream. From Natchitoches, St.-Denis moved on to Presidio del Norte, now Eagle Pass, Texas, to fulfill the governor's charge. The Spanish arrested him, took him to Mexico City, and imprisoned him there. The Spanish viceroy relented, however, and sent the young Frenchman to eastern Texas to help re-establish Spanish missions among the Caddo Indians. This fit nicely with French commercial plans, and St.-Denis saw his opportunity. He slipped back to French Louisiana, purchased a consignment of goods, and engaged in smuggling to the new missions in eastern Texas. As a result, the clever Canadian spent more time in Spanish prisons.
Spanish mercantilist policy had long prohibited trade with foreigners, and they did not welcome a new French post among Indians they hoped to dominate. In 1721, the Spanish countered by establishing a mission post, the Presidio de Nuestra Senora del Pilar de Los Adaes, or Los Adaes, also named after local Caddo Indians, near present-day Robiline, only 15 miles southeast of Natchitoches. Fort St.-Jean-Baptiste, then, served not only as a trading post from which to win the favor of local Indians but also as a strategic point from which to observe the Spanish at Los Adaes. By then, despite his smuggling ventures and his part in capturing Pensacola from the Spanish when Spain and France went to war again, St.-Denis had established ties with Spanish Texas by marrying Manuela Sánchez y Navarro, the step-granddaughter of a Spanish commandant on the lower Rio Grande, in 1715. Four years later, Louisiana Governor Bienville, Cadillac's replacement, appointed St.-Denis as commandant of Fort St.-Jean Baptiste. A tenuous peace between France and Spain returned in 1721, and, despite Spanish mercantilist policy, St.-Denis restored commercial ties with the missions in East Texas. He served as commandant at Natchitoches for the next quarter century, until his death in June 1744.
When the Spanish took over Louisiana in early 1766, they were very aware of the strategic and commercial importance of the post at Natchitoches. In their general plan to defend the new colony against an imminent British threat, authorities in New Orleans found no reason to send newly-arrived Acadians to a long-established French Creole community on Red River. After their harrying adventure in Spanish Texas, a wayward group of Acadian exiles from Maryland came to Natchitoches in October 1769, but they did not remain there. Typically, they moved on to communities where their kinsmen had settled, far away from Natchitoches.
When Acadians migrated outward from their original settlements during the late colonial and antebellum periods, they moved deeper into the Bayou Lafourche valley or farther out onto the southwestern prairies, not northward into the Red River valley. It should be no surprise, then, that Natchitoches Parish is not a part of the 22-parish region known as Acadiana.
Sources: Burton & Smith, Colonial Natchitoches, passim; Crouse, Lemoyne d'Iberville, 208-09; Winston Deville, "JUCHEREAU, de Saint-Denis, Louis," DCB, 3:317-18; "JUCHEREAU DE ST.-DENIS, Louis," DLB, 1:449; 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.
René-Robert Cavelier, sieur de La Salle and his downriver expedition may not have been the first Europeans to come upon the site of today's New Orleans--that would have been Spanish explorers who had thoroughly explored the region since the 1540s--but they were the first Europeans to describe what may have been the future site of the city. La Salle noted in his journal that in early April 1682, he and his men "went ashore on the borders of a marsh formed by the inundation of the river" to see for themselves the site of a village that "the whole of this marsh, covered with canes, must be crossed to reach...." All the Frenchmen found was a destroyed village of the Tangipahoa people. The Frenchmen trudged back through the thick canes down to their boats and resumed their journey to the great river's mouth only 30 leagues away.
Seventeen years later, during their first exploration of the lower Mississippi in March 1699, the Le Moyne brothers, Pierre d'Iberville and his teenage brother Jean-Baptiste de Bienville, passed a site on the left, or east bank, of the river, at the head of a prominent bend. Iberville's Indian guide demonstrated that a short portage existed between the natural levee of the river there, where an Indian village had stood among the high canes, and the head of a short bayou which flowed northward into a huge inlet of the Gulf that Iberville later named Lake Pontchartrain. Iberville visited the site a year later, on his second exploration of the lower Mississippi. This time he approached the portage from the north via Lake Pontchartrain. He ascended the bayou and its muddy banks from where it flowed into the lake to its narrow upper reaches, crossed a natural ridge near the bayou's head, and then trudged southward through a back swamp to the natural levee above the sweeping river crescent which he had passed the year before. Further exploration of the area revealed that the natural levee at the portage site was "the widest swath of relatively dry land within one hundred miles of the Mississippi's mouth ...." Most importantly, the portage greatly shortened communication between the Mississippi Valley and the Gulf coast settlements at Biloxi and Mobile.
Despite its promising geography, however, the portage site on the beautiful crescent did not become the first French "settlement" on the lower Mississippi. Erected by Iberville in 1700, Fort de Mississippi, also called Fort de la Boulaye, stood 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 among the thick canebrakes, 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 Mississippi in 1707, the only French military presence on the lower Mississippi was an observation post at the portage site on the beautiful crescent manned by Louis Juchereau de St.-Denis, who had commanded at Fort de Mississippi, and a few of his sturdy Canadians, who had garrisoned the fort. According to one historian, "It was Saint-Denis who first reported to Bienville ... on the richness of these lands [at the portage site] 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 little bayou at the portage site, which the French called Bayou St.-Jean, and granted them 4-arpent-by-36-arpent holdings along the stream. These Canadians included Antoine Rivard de La Vigne, Francois Dugue, Jean-Baptiste Poitié, 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 abandoned the portage site and established a post at Natchitoches on the Red River, projecting French power deeper into the region. 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 settlement there.
The next post founded on the lower Mississippi was even more distant from the portage site than had been Iberville's Fort de Mississippi, and, interestingly, it was Bienville who sited the new garrison. Indian relations and the need to improve communications with French Canada via the upper Mississippi dictated the founding of Fort Rosalie at the site of present-day Natchez, Mississippi, in 1716. Nearby stood the grand village of the powerful Natchez. The soil around Fort Rosalie was fine and well-drained, and the post stood on a bluff above the river's flood plain, so the Natchez settlement thrived.
Even after Bienville became governor of Louisiana for a third time in 1718, the founding of New Orleans was a close thing. In April of that year, financier John Law's Company of the West, which had taken control of the colony the year before, ordered a new post 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, and this gave Bienville his opportunity. Later in the year, he ordered that the company's new post on the lower Mississippi be constructed not at Bayou Manchac but farther down at the portage site 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'Orléans, nephew of King Louis XIV, regent of the boy king Louis XV, and patron of John Law, La Nouvelle-Orléans became the capital of the colony by 1722. Despite a devastating hurricane in September of that year, ever-present disease, and frequent desertion, New Orleans could boast a population of a thousand souls a decade after its founding.
There was a problem with the location of New Orleans, however, that required the creation of another post on the lower river. As a recent historian has observed: "The lower Mississippi presented serious problems for tall sailing vessels. Besides the dangerous and unpredictable nature of the riverbed, a sandbar in the main pass of the river often had a sounding of only 10-12 feet, while most large ships laden with cargo drew 15-20 feet. To address these problems, the French built La Balize ('the beacon'), a fort at the mouth of river's birdfoot delta. There incoming ships could hire resident pilots or transfer their cargo to barges and smaller craft (called lighters) that would complete the journey to New Orleans." New Orleans lay a hundred miles above La Balize, so relatively few large ships risked the passage.
Despite these problems, by the time Louisiana reverted to a royal colony and Bienville became governor for a fourth time in 1733, his little city on the beautiful crescent had become the head, heart, and soul of French Louisiana.
When the Acadian exiles reached Louisiana in the 1760s, it was to La Balize and New Orleans that they came to recuperate from their long, trying Grand Dérangement. And it was from New Orleans that French and Spanish officials sent them to posts on the river above the city, into the prairie region west of the Atchafalaya Basin, or to the upper stretches of Bayou Lafourche. Owing to their proclivity to reunite with members of their extended families, few Acadians remained at New Orleans, 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, two of the Seven Ships. They chose to settle at Nueva Gálvez in present-day St. Bernard Parish, on the river below the city. Only in the twentieth century, when superhighways, industries, and a material economy opened up the modern world to them, did Acadians/Cajuns 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: Campanella, Bienville's Dilemma, passim; Cowan & McGuire, LA Governors, 14-15; Crouse, Lemoyne d'Iberville, chaps. 8, 9; Dawdy, Devil's Empire, 23, quotes from pp. 62m 110-11; 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 came to Louisiana in the mid-1760s, 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 at Pointe Coupée. The same held true for the Acadian community at Baton Rouge, which lay on both sides of the river south of Pointe Coupée. Baton Rouge did not have a church of its own until 1793, so Pointe Coupée priests also administered the sacraments there.
Pointe Coupée priests also contributed to the spiritual well-being of the prairie settlements. It was not unheard of for Atakapas and Opelousas baptisms and marriages to be recorded by priests at Pointe Coupée in the 1770s and 1780s. Evidently the church parish at Atakapas, created in 1765, at times did not have a priest of its own because of its remote location, and church authorities did not create a parish at Opelousas until 1776. Pointe Coupée lay near a northern route across the Atchafalaya Basin and was thus the closest church on the river to the western prairie settlements. Priests from Pointe Coupée, then, would have served as missionaries to these outlying settlements until Atakapas and Opelousas had priests of their own.
Despite its history as a French Creole and not an Acadian community, Pointe Coupee is considered one of the 22 parishes of Acadiana. So is Avoyelles Parish, northwest of Pointe Coupee, where many French Creoles, but few Acadians, settled in the late colonial and antebellum periods.
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 far above New Orleans. 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 Upper 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 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 French authorities in New Orleans 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 unrecorded, Jean-Baptiste, called Jean, Poirier of Menoudie, Chignecto, age 26, and Jean-Baptiste, called Jean, Richard, of Nappan, Chignecto, age 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, to where the British had deported them in 1755, not from New York, and had left Savannah in December 1764 for Mobile, which they believed was still in French hands. 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 [Jacques] 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 right, or 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. Acting governor Charles-Philippe 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. But, to the consternation of the Acadians, Ulloa did not send them to Cabanocé. He sent them, instead, farther upriver to a new settlement the Acadians called St.-Gabriel, which later was called the Second Acadian Coast.
The sudden increase in population on the Acadian Coast created a burden for the nearest parish priest. Father Barnabé 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 Barnabé 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, Nicolas Verret, would cooperate in the venture. In July 1768, Judice informed the governor that the church shed had been built and that Father Barnabé had blessed and consecrated it in 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 west bank, upriver from the original settlement, was called St.-Jacques, 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 had donated the site for the permanent church, where he was buried in October 1777.
Meanwhile, in the fall of 1768, Acadian and German Coast settlers and French Creoles from New Orleans rose up against the unpopular Ulloa. The following year, Spanish authorities sent a large force from Cuba to suppress the revolt. Ulloa's successor, General Alejandro O'Reilly, crushed the revolt and re-evaluated the colony's sad state of defense. O'Reilly created militia units for Louisiana's various districts in 1769. All able-bodied males between the ages of 16 and 50 were required to serve in the militia, and future Spanish land grants would be based on militia service. Nicolas Verret commanded the company at Cabanocé/St.-Jacques. Louis Judice commanded the company at Lafourche des Chitimachas, or Ascension, just upriver from St.-Jacques. O'Reilly's order was not popular with the Acadians, many of whom remembered similar treatment at the hands of British governors back in Nova Scotia.
The combination of having to support a new church parish with more taxes and labor and to serve in the Spanish militia in order to secure more land angered many Acadian Coast settlers. In 1772, St.-Jacques Acadians, through Commandant Verret, petitioned Governor Luis de Unzaga, General O'Reilly's successor, for permission to move to Ascension to be closer to kinsmen or to leave the colony entirely. "While the bureaucracy digested this information, the families negotiated with a captain for passage from Louisiana," such was the determination of these St.-Jacques Acadians to have their way. Unzaga viewed the request as a disruption of the colony's defensive arrangements at a time when tensions were high between Spain and Britain. The governor "threatened the Acadians with having to return money invested in them by the Spanish Crown." The Acadians countered with complaints about hostile local Indians and the worthlessness of their lands on the Acadian Coast. Unzaga did not budge, so some of the St.-Jacques Acadians packed up their families and moved upriver to St.-Gabriel, above Ascension, where they did not have permission to go. They then petitioned the commandant at St.-Gabriel, Frenchman Louis Dustisne, for permission to join relatives in the Opelousas District! Unzaga, like many another powerful official who thought he could control these people, was learning a lesson in Acadian stubbornness. Instead of sending troops to escort the wayward Acadians back to St.-Jacques, he gave them permission to remain at St.-Gabriel, which is probably what they wanted all along. Judging by the number of Acadians the new commandant, Michel Cantrelle, Jacques's son, counted at St.-Jacques in January 1777, only a handful of Acadian families left the district in 1772.
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 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, between St.-Jacques and St.-Gabriel, on the Second Acadian Coast.
Eventually, the name Cabanocé slipped away into obscurity, 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 American influence.) 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 local historian Lillian Bourgeois, 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. It was also called the Cantrelle Post and even Cantrelle Parish. One also finds in early-1800 church records the name St. Michel instead of St. James; this refers to the church of St. Michel or St. Michael at Convent, on the east bank, named after the patron saint of Jacques's son Michel, which opened its doors in 1809.
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; Frederick, "In Defense of Crown & Colony," 397, 412-13, quotes from p. 413; <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 may have been one of those rare tribes of North American Indians who ate human flesh. According to local historian Harry Lewis Griffin: "At one time they were very powerful and made themselves feared by all the surrounding tribes of Indians. Tradition has it that neighboring tribes formed a league for the purpose of resisting their aggressions. There followed then a war of extermination. After a few preliminary fights, according to Indian tradition, the forces of the two enemies met in a great battle on a hill about three miles west of the present town of St. Martinville. There the hated Attakapas were completely overwhelmed and nearly annihilated. The remnants of the once powerful tribe, now reduced to a harmless condition, were either incorporated into the victorious tribes or allowed to remain unmolested in the land of their former greatness."
From the time of Bienville's governorship, the Atakapas region was administered by the French from New Orleans. According to Harry Lewis Griffin, "the New Orleans officials seldom visited the district as it was then populated principally by Indians, trappers, and smugglers." The Poste des Atakapas, at the present site of St. Martinville, created sometime in the 1750s, served as a strategic point from which to control the vast prairie region west of the Atchafalaya Basin, where cattle could be raised to feed the rest of the colony. Thus, the first "settlers" in the area were livestock concessionaires, most of whom did not live in the district. They sent itinerant drovers to watch their herds and to drive the cattle to market. For most of the 1750s and early 1760s, then, the region was inhabited only by the Atakapas, whose villages stood on the Teche near present-day Loreauville, on the lower Vermilion above and below present-day Abbeville, and on the Mermentau River at the western edge of the district. In November 1760, Gabriel Fuselier de la Claire, future commandant of the Atakapas District during the Spanish period, began purchasing from the Atakapas chiefs huge tracts of land that stretched for leagues between the Teche and the Vermilion. He, too, managed large herds of semi-wild cattle for the New Orleans market. Édouard Masse and his partner Jean-Antoine-Bernard Dauterive, "a retired French military officer and a large Attakapas landholder," also were major cattle producers in the district. Typically, Dauterive lived on the river in present-day Iberville Parish though his major holdings were out on the Atakapas prairie.
The first permanent European settlers in the Atakapas District were French Creoles called Alibamons who left Mobile and the Alabama River valley in 1764 after France ceded that part of Louisiana to Britain. Some of these Alibamon families were Begnaud, Berard, Bonin, Fontenot, and Guillory. They also were the first permanent European settlers of the Opelousas District north of Atakapas.
It was to Dauterive's large 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, over 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 settlements were not at the post but on the east bank of the Teche downstream from the post, probably at today's Fausse Pointe, at what was called le premier camp d'en bas, or the first place lower down, and le dernier camp d'en bas, or the last place lower down, which also may have been called Beausoleil. Another of their communities stood above the post at 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 and the local priest fled from an epidemic that killed three dozen Teche valley Acadians, including the Broussard brothers, in the summer and fall of that year. [see below for details]
By the spring of 1766, radiating out from Fausse Pointe and La Pointe de Répos, other Acadian communities had sprung up along Bayou Tortue (not to be confused with Bayou Queue de Tortue) west of present-day St. Martinville; at La Manque, later called Grand Prairie on upper Bayou Vermilion near downtown Lafayette; and at Côte Gelée near Broussard. Communities also appeared at Anse La Butte, on the upper Vermilion between Lafayette and Breaux Bridge; along Bayou Carencro at the northern edge of the district; at Beaubassin on the upper Vermilion east of Carencro; at La Grand Pointe, also called La Pointe and Anse de la Pointe, on the upper Teche near Breaux Bridge; along the middle and lower Vermilion River from Lafayette down to Abbeville; along Bayou Petite Anse near Avery Island; and farther down the Teche at Chicot Noir near Jeanerette. [map]
The arrival of the Broussards and their extended family substantially increased the district's population, so in 1765 Church authorities established a 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. Still, it was not unheard of for Atakapas baptisms and marriages to be recorded by Pointe-Coupée priests in the 1760s and 1770s. Perhaps because of its remoteness, the Atakapas parish at times did not have a priest of its own. Pointe-Coupée, whose parish, St.-Francois, dated back to 1728, lay near a northern route across the Atchafalaya Basin and was thus the closest church to Atakapas (the Opelousas church was not founded until 1776). Pointe-Coupée priests, then, served as missionaries to Atakapas when there was no priest at the post. The church council of St. Martin de Tours owned the land around the church, which included most of what became 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 the fall of 1768, when French Creoles from New Orleans and German and Acadian settlers from the river districts turned on Spain's first governor of Louisiana, the unpopular Antonio de Ulloa, Atakapas Acadians probably did not participate in the revolt. Nonetheless, in 1769, Ulloa's successor, General Alejandro O'Reilly, who crushed the revolt, re-evaluated the colony's sad state of defense and ordered militia units to be raised in each of the colony's districts, including those that had not joined the revolt against Ulloa. All able-bodied males between the ages of 16 and 50 were required to serve in the militia, and future Spanish land grants would be based on militia service. O'Reilly appointed Gabriel Fuselier de la Claire as the first commandant of the Atakapas District. Fusilier also commanded at Opelousas. O'Reilly's militia order was not popular with the Acadians, many of whom remembered similar treatment at the hands of British governors back in Nova Scotia. Nevertheless, in the autumn of 1779, during the American Revolution, the Atakapas and Opelousas militia company served under Louisiana Governor-General Bernardo de Gálvez in his attack against the British forts on the Mississippi River. By all accounts, the Acadians, many of whom were old enough to remember what the British had done to them in Acadia, fought gallantly.
Earlier that same year, 1779, Governor Gálvez established a Màlaguenos settlement at Nueva Iberia on the Teche, a few miles below the Acadian community at Fausse Pointe. Isleños families from the Canary Islands also settled along the Teche, adding their bloodlines to that of the French Creoles, the Alibamons, the Atakapas Acadians, and the Màlaguenos. When hundreds more Acadians reached Louisiana from France in 1785, a few of these families chose to settle in the Atakapas District near their kin already there.
Two years after the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, the old Atakapas District became Attakapas County in the Territory of Orleans. When the Americans created the first civil parishes for Louisiana in 1807, the old Atakapas District 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 country 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; Frederick, "In Defense of Crown & Colony," 397; Griffin, Attakapas Country, quotes from pp. 5, 21; 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 present-day southeastern New Brunswick and the eventual settlement of Broussard's extended family in the Atakapas region of South Louisiana is one of the most dramatic episodes in Acadian/Cajun history:
In the summer of 1755, at the beginning of Le Grand Dérangement, British forces rounded up Broussard and hundreds of other Acadians from the Chignecto area and held them in Forts Cumberland and Lawrence. Before the deportation ships arrived to take them away, some of the Acadians managed to escape. Joseph dit Beausoleil was one of the escapees. He rejoined his family, and they headed into the wilderness north of their home at Petitcoudiac, not only hiding from the British patrols 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 November1759, 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. The British held him at Georges Island, Halifax, for a time, then transferred him to Fort Edward at Windsor, formerly Pigiguit, as a prisoner of war. There, he managed to communicate with French forces in the region, so the British sent him back to Halifax, where he and his extended family spent the next few years in close confinement.
In the prison camps of Nova Scotia--at Fort Cumberland, Fort Edward, and Halifax--the Broussards were joined by hundreds of other Acadians whom the British 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 and Fort Edward 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 Acadian prisoners 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. Article 14 of 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. The Acadian settlements in Nova Scotia had not been part of French territory for half a century, and Chignecto, Chepoudy, and Petitcoudiac now were part of Nova Scotia as well, so British authorities refused to allow any of the Acadian prisoners 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. If they stayed, they must also take the hated oath of allegiance to the new British king, George III, without reservation.
Most of the Acadians held in Nova Scotia in the last years of the war were still there in the autumn of 1764. Nova Scotia's new governor, Montague Wilmot, "tender'd to them" the oath of allegiance as well as "offers of a settlement in this Country." The Acadians rebuffed the oath as was well as the offer. British leaders in Halifax, led by former lieutenant governor and current colonial chief justice Jonathan Belcher, Jr., a protégé of the now deceased Charles Lawrence, still felt threatened by the Acadian presence in Nova Scotia. Belcher encouraged Governor Wilmot to remove the Acadians from the province despite entreaties from the New England "planters" to keep them around as cheap but highly skilled labor. When Wilmot demurred, Belcher and others hatched a scheme to send the Acadians from Halifax to Baskenridge, New Jersey, to work as indentured servants on an English nobleman's land; Belcher's father just happened to be the governor of New Jersey, and the nobleman was one of his father's political allies. Governor Wilmot also received a proposal to send 30 Acadian families to New York colony to work as indentured servants.
Too proud to work for wages, unwilling to work as indentured servants in colonies where they could lose their religion and culture, unable to return to their precious farms in the upper Fundy basin, and unwilling to take the hated oath, the Broussard party had to find a suitable place to put down new roots. The St. Lawrence valley was out of the question. They were hearing stories of how the French Canadians treated with contempt Acadian refugees who had settled there. Besides, Canada was as much a British possession now as Nova Scotia and settling there would require them to take the oath. 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 a viable option, but the British would not allow them to take the shortest route there via Canada, and France had just ceded the eastern part of Illinois to Britain. However, France still controlled the western bank of the upper Mississippi, across from Cahokia and Kaskaskia. The French, or so most of the world believed, also retained control of the Isle of Orleans and the western bank of the lower Mississippi in what was left of French Louisiana. France also controlled St.-Domingue, today's Haiti, where hundreds of Acadian exiles from the British colonies had gone recently 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 there at the hands of French officials. There was always the mother country itself, where the British had deported hundreds of Acadians during the war and where the Acadians held in England had been recently repatriated. Even with permission from the French crown to go there, however, a cross-Atlantic voyage would be difficult and expensive, but so would a voyage to the Indies. There was much for the Broussards and their relatives to consider, and time was running out.
After much deliberation, Joseph Broussard and his compatriots chose to go to St.-Domingue. No higher authority planned their move from Halifax to Haiti. Pooling the money they had saved from their months of labor on land they once had owned, the Broussard party--slightly over 200 men, women, and children--left Halifax in late November 1764 aboard a chartered English schooner. They reached Cap-Français, Haiti, in January and could see even in that winter month that the island's climate was unsuitable for them. They had hoped to reunite with relatives there, but many of the St.-Domingue Acadians were either dead or dying from tropical diseases, starvation, and overwork. Just as disturbing, there was little chance of acquiring productive farm land for themselves in the island's plantation-slave economy. They could see no future for their children in St.-Domingue, despite its being a French colony.
So the Broussard party changed ships at Cap-Français and sailed on to New Orleans, gateway to the Illinois country. They reached Louisiana in late February 1765. They were not the first Acadians to reach the colony--20 individuals in four families had come to Louisiana from Georgia via Mobile exactly a year before--but the Broussards and their kin were the first large party of Acadian exiles to seek refuge in Louisiana. Surprised French officials counted 193 of them as they disembarked from their chartered vessel. Although Louisiana at the time was officially a Spanish province, having been ceded by France to its erstwhile ally in the secret Treaty of Fontainebleau in late 1762, French officials were still in charge at New Orleans. The Acadians' reputation for hard work and loyalty to France having preceded them, interim governor Charles-Philippe Aubry was determined to keep this large group of Acadians in the New Orleans area. Aubry first planned to settle the Broussard party on the west bank of the Mississippi across from the city, the site of present-day Algiers. Unfortunately, the place was low and subject to flooding, thus requiring the building of high, expensive levees. The site was also "blanketed by dense, hardwood forests," unsuitable for the weary Acadian exiles, most of whom were Chignecto cattlemen who had lived in the wide, treeless marshland along the upper Fundy shore. Before Aubry could concoct another settlement scheme, Joseph Broussard and his fellow Acadians again seized control of their collective destiny.
In April, while still recuperating from their voyage and weighing their options, Broussard and seven other leaders of his extended family (brother Alexandre, son Victor, nephew Jean-Baptiste Broussard, cousin-in-law Olivier Thibodeau, and associates Joseph Guilbeau dit L'Officier, Jean Dugas, and Pierre Arseneau) signed a contract with former French army officer Jean-Antoine-Bernard Dauterive, now 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."
Aubry agreed to the arrangement. The French had opened up the Atakapas region in the 1750s, establishing a post on Bayou Teche at present-day St. Martinville. They hoped the cattle raised on the wide, open prairies would provide much-needed food for the growing population of New Orleans. But, aside from its aboriginal inhabitants and itinerant cattlemen, the huge area was virtually uninhabited until 1764, when French officials had allowed families of Alibamons, French Creole exiles from the Mobile/Alabama River area recently ceded to the British, to settle in the prairie districts. The Broussard Acadians would substantially increase the district's population. Aubry directed retired French engineer officer Louis-Antoine Andry to lead the Broussard party to Bayou Teche "via Bayou Plaquemine and the network of waterways lacing the Atchafalaya Basin." Andry was also tasked with surveying Bayou Teche from the new Acadian settlements 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 Civray, a Capuchin priest who decades before had served at Natchitoches on the Red River and whom church officials in New Orleans had chosen to minister to the Acadians.
And so by May 1865 the Acadian refugees from Nova Scotia established La Nouvelle-Acadie, as Father Jean-Francois called it, along the banks of Bayou Teche. But it came at a terrible price. The rigors of exile, adjustment to a new climate, the hard work required to prepare their new homesteads, and a mysterious epidemic that struck them in early summer, combined to wear down the tough old fighters who had endured so much during their Grand Dérangement. Joseph dit Beausoleil and his older brother Alexandre died that autumn with nearly three dozen of their fellow Acadians and were buried beside the Teche. In mid-September, only months after they had reached their Nouvelle-Acadie, 82 of the Atakapas Acadians from La Pointe de Répos, north of the post, fled with Father Jean-Francois to Cabanocé on the Mississippi to escape the epidemic. But most of the Teche Acadians survived the sickness and remained on the Atakapas prairies, where they fulfilled the dream of the heroic old fighters by starting a new life for themselves.
The most complete account of the Broussard party's travails along the Teche during the first year of settlement is in a letter sent by one of the young Acadian survivors, Jean-Baptiste Semer, to his father in France. The letter is dated 20 April 1766 and was sent from New Orleans to Le Havre:
"My very dear father,
"I arrived here in the month of February 1765 with 202 Acadian persons, including Joseph Bro[u]ssard, called [Beausoleil] and all of his family, ... all coming from Halifax and having passed by [Haiti]. Beausoleil led [the group] and paid the passage for those who didn't have the means. After us, there arrived yet another 105 in another ship and then eighty, forty, [and] some twenty or thirty, in three or four others. I believe there are about 500-600 of us Acadians, counting women and children. We the first ones have been sent seven or eight men to look over the land and locations in order to find a suitable site, and we were told that at Attakapas there were magnificent grasslands with the finest soil in the world. ...
"We went to Attakapas with guns, powder, and shot, but as it was already the month of May, the heat being so intense, we started to work in too harsh conditions. There were six plows that worked; we had to break in the oxen [and] travel fifteen leagues to get horses. Finally, we had the finest harvest, and everybody contracted fevers at the same time and, nobody being in a state to help anyone else, thirty-three or thirty-four died, including the children. ... [We are] hoping for a very fine harvest this year, with God's help, having cleared a great deal [of land]. We have only to sow, and we already have oxen, cows, sheep, horses and the finest hunting in the world, deer, such fat turkey, bears and ducks and all kinds of game. ...
"The land here brings forth a good yield of everything anyone wants to sow. Wheat from France, corn and rice, sweet potatoes, giraumont [a kind of zucchini], pistachios, all kinds of vegetables, flax, cotton. We lack only people to cultivate it. We produce indigo, sugar, [and] oranges, and peaches here grow like apples in France. They have granted us six arpents [similar to acres] to married people and four and five [arpents] to young men, so we have the advantage, my dear father, of being sure of our land [ownership], and of saying I have a place of my own. ... A person who wants to devote himself to property and make an effort will be comfortably off in a few years. It is an immense country; you can come here boldly with my dear mother and all the other Acadian families. They will always be better off than in France. ..."
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>; Brasseaux, ed., Quest for the Promised Land, 26-27; Brasseaux, Scattered to the Wind, 55; <thecajuns.com/acadians.htm>, "Arrival of the Acadians in Louisiana", citing Brasseaux, Founding of New Acadia, 101; Burton & Smith, Colonial Natchitoches, 14; C. J. d'Entremont, "Brossard (Broussard), dit Beausoleil, Joseph," DCB, 3:87-88 & online; Faragher, A Great & Noble Scheme, chaps. 14 & 15; Jehn, Acadian Exiles in the Colonies, 269-70, quotes from Gov. Wilmot's letter of 18 Dec 1764 on p.269; 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 chose 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 & 3 kindred families had been exiled to GA in 1755 & had reached LA in Feb 1764 via Mobile. After settling in the colony, 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 Thibodeau, was a kinswoman of the wives of the Broussard brothers. Joseph De Goutin de Ville, known as "The First Acadian in LA," born at Port-Royal in Mar 1705, came to New Orleans as a French officer in c1746 from Île Royale, where his family had taken refuge after the fall of Acadia to Britain in the early 1710s. Joseph married a young LA woman, Marie-Jeanne Caron, 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 Acadians who reached LA from GA in 1764, so De Goutin may also have communicated with Landry in GA. See <www.acadian-cajun.com/degoutin.htm>; NOAR, 1:81.
The version of the Jean-Baptiste Semer letter used here is from Bernard, Cajuns & Their Acadian Ancestors, 30, a well-edited translation of the full letter found in Mouhot, ed., "Letter by Jean-Baptiste Semer." On p. 31 of this same work, Cajuns & Their Acadian Ancestors, Dr. Bernard asserts: "The British deported him [Joseph Broussard dit Beausoleil], his family, and his followers to the Caribbean island of Saint Domingue (Haiti). There they heard that Spanish administrators wanted non-English settlers for Louisiana, where they would serve as buffers against infiltration by English settlers from the eastern seaboard. Eager to settle in a land that welcomed them, Broussard's group sailed to Louisiana, where the Spanish gave them provisions, tools, and farmlands in a south Louisiana region called Attakapas." This is a novel interpretation in two ways. First, it implies that Broussard & his party were thrown out of Nova Scotia by British Governor Wilmot. One wonders if British officials had the authority to banish Acadians to a French colony. As the Semer letter says, Beausoleil Broussard "paid the passage for those who didn't have the means." British stinginess notwithstanding, one would think that in the case of a deportation, the passengers would not be expected to pay their own passage! Their paying for passage implies that they hired their own vessel to take them from Halifax to Haiti, further implying that their leaving was voluntary. Second, Louisiana was officially Spanish in 1764-65, during the time that the Broussard party made its voyage from Halifax to New Orleans via Haiti; however, Spanish Governor Antonio de Ulloa did not assume control of the colony until Mar 1766, over a year after the Broussards reached New Orleans and settled on the Teche. The official in charge of the colony when the Broussards arrived, interim governor Charles-Philippe Aubry ,was French, not Spanish, and he answered to French superiors, not Spanish. A close reading of the correspondence between Aubry & his superiors reveals that the interim governor was somewhat surprised to find so many Acadians at his doorstep. See Brasseaux, ed., Quest for the Promised Land, passim, especially pp. 25-27, 31; Brasseaux, Founding of New Acadia, 33-34. Ironically, a careful reading of the Semer letter, which can be found on the page opposite Dr. Bernard's assertion, supports the notion that the Halifax Acadians left Nova Scotia on their own hook & that they simply "passed by [Haiti]."
NEW IBERIA
In the spring of 1779, Governor Bernardo de Gálvez ordered Lieutenant Colonel Francisco Bouligny to lead 600 Spanish-speaking settlers recently arrived from Màlaga and the Canary Islands to the lower Teche valley, where they established Nuéva Iberia, now the city of New Iberia. Spanish authorities chose as the site for the new settlement a prominent bend in the river just below the Acadian settlement of Fausse Point and 10 miles south of Poste des Atakapas, now St. Martinville. Nuéva Iberia arose the same year in which Gálvez created four Isleños, or Canary Islander, settlements in other parts of the colony--at Galveztown in present-day northern Ascension Parish, Valenzuéla on upper Bayou Lafourche in today's Assumption Parish, Barataria in today's southern Jefferson Parish, and Nuéva Gálvez, or San Bernardo, in today's St. Bernard Parish. Of these five Hispanic communities, only San Bernardo and New Iberia survived the test of time. (Twenty years after the founding of Nuéva Iberia, Francisco Bouligny served as acting governor of Spanish Louisiana after Manuel Gayoso de Lemos y Amorin, who had served as governor since 1797, died in office. Bouligny died in 1800; he was 64 years old.)
The Màlaguenian families who founded Nuéva Iberia bore the surnames de Aguilar, Artacho, Balderos, Fernández, Garcia, Garrido (Gary), Lagos, López, Míguez, Ortiz, de Porras, de Prados, de Puentes, Romero, Segura, Vidal, and Villatoro (Viator). They soon realized that there was not enough room for all of them in the Spanish concession along the banks of the bayou, so some families moved westward into the surrounding prairies or to the shores of nearby Lake Tasse, now Spanish Lake. The Spaniards soon assimilated with the French settlers in the area, especially with the Acadians of the upper Teche, whose numbers dictated that Acadian folkways would remain dominant in the region. The location of the settlement on a prominent bend in the Teche, coupled with the growing cattle, sugar, and cotton industries on the prairies, created the potential for a thriving commercial center at Nuéva Iberia. After the Louisiana Purchase, Anglo-Americans came to the community and added not only their wealth but also their bloodlines to the complex culture evolving around the settlement. One of the more prominent Anglo-American families who moved to New Iberia was that of David Weeks and his wife, Mary Clara Conrad; Weeks and his father owned nearby Grand Côte, now Weeks Island, which they transformed into a huge indigo, cotton, and sugar plantation.
Francophones called the Spanish settlement on the Teche Nouvelle-Ibérie. Anglophones called it New Town. In 1814, the United States government opened a post office at Nuéva Iberia and called it New Iberia. But locals persisted in calling it various names, including Nova Iberia. By 1819, what is now downtown New Iberia boasted half a dozen houses, a general merchandise store, warehouses, and of course a busy saloon. St. Martin Parish authorities encouraged the creation of a town on the site of the old Spanish settlement. Entrepreneurs subdivided local landholdings into town lots first in 1829 and again in 1831. (Shadows-on-the-Teche, planter David Weeks's magnificent townhouse, was built between 1831-34 on land Weeks had purchased in 1825 near the village.) In 1837, Frédéric Henri Duperier donated land for a church at the site of the growing village. The next year, Catholic authorities created St. Peter's parish. In 1839, the state legislature gave the town its charter, calling it, officially, Iberia, but locals were not happy with the name. In 1847, the legislature responded by changing the town's official name to New Iberia. Entrepreneurs carved more adjacent land holdings into subdivided town lots in the 1850s.
Meanwhile, in 1819, the Attakapas Steamboat Company opened a faster, more efficient passenger and commercial link between New Orleans and Bayou Teche, and the little settlement of New Iberia became one of its stops. For the next 60 years, until 1879, when the railroad finally came through, steamboats provided the major means of transportation between the town and the metropolis on the Mississippi. This more efficient means of transportation had its downside as well; yellow fever ravaged the Teche valley in 1839. In the 1850s, construction began on a railroad line that would connect New Iberia and the lower Teche with New Orleans. The coming of the War Between the States in 1861, however, ended railroad construction in the area before the line reached New Iberia.
Despite the delay in railroad construction, the war brought opportunity. Due to its commercial prominence and its proximity to essential salt mines in the nearby prairie, the Confederates established a depot at New Iberia early in the war. After the Confederate government authorized conscription in early 1862, Camp Pratt, on the shores of nearby Spanish Lake, became a training center for hundreds of new soldiers in gray. Then the war caught up to the bustling community. With New Iberia as one of its principal targets, a Federal army invaded the lower Teche valley in the spring of 1863. When the Confederates re-established control of the town, they, too, added to the misery of the people as they scoured the area for supplies and men. The Federals appeared again in the fall of 1863, and this time they stayed. (One of the homes they occupied was Shadows-on-the-Teche, where owner Mary Conrad Weeks Moore died in late December 1863 when the Yankees were still using her house.) Even before the war ended, emancipation came to the lower Teche, with its resulting economic and social turmoil. ...
After the war, in 1868, the state legislature created Iberia Parish from the lower half of St. Martin Parish. New Iberia became the parish seat. ...
Sources: Brasseaux & Fontenot, Steamboats on Louisiana's Bayous, chap. 3; Din, Canary Islanders of LA, chap. 4; Glenn R. Conrad, "The History of New Iberia," <cityofnewiberia.com/historyarticle.html>; <shadowsontheteche.org>.
VERMILIONVILLE/LAFAYETTE
In the beginning, there was the river, or the bayou--Vermilion. Locals insist that the Vermilion is a river below Pin Hook Bridge, and a bayou above it. According to Lafayette historian Harry Lewis Griffin: "The early English traders who smuggled their wares up the Vermilion, contrary to French and Spanish law, found their progress blocked at that point [Pin Hook Bridge] due to the failure of deep water. Consequently they tied up their boats there and waited for the Indians, scattered trappers, and ranchers to come to purchase their merchandise. Little Manchac was the name given by the traders to this place. In the course of time, however, the name Little Manchac gradually gave way to the more familiar name of Pin Hook."
The traditional founder of the city of Lafayette, which calls itself the Hub City and insists that it is the Heart of Acadiana, is Jean Mouton dit Chapeau of Chignecto, Acadia, who came to Louisiana as an 11-year-old with his father Salvator, his mother Anne Bastarache, older brother Marin, and infant sister Marie-Geneviève in 1765. The family settled at Cabanocé/St.-Jacques, now St. James Parish, on the river above New Orleans, with other Acadian exiles from the prison camps of Nova Scotia. Jean's mother died soon after they reached the colony, and his father promptly remarried. A few years later, in April 1773, Salvator died at the hospital in New Orleans; he was only 40 years old. Jean and Marin, age 19 and 20 at the time of their father's death, did not remain long on the Mississippi River. In January 1777, Marin married French Creole Marie-Josèphe Lambert at St.-Jacques and crossed the Atchafalaya Basin to the Atakapas District, where he was counted with his wife in May of that year. Jean did not appear in an Atakapas census until April 1781, but he probably had followed his older brother to the upper Teche valley in the late 1770s. The April 1781 census reveals that Marin and his wife owned 20 animals on 5 arpents of land in the Atakapas District. Jean, still a bachelor, owned 100 animals on 10 arpents of land, so his short time in the district had been well spent.
The Mouton brothers probably had earned their distinctive dits by then. Teche valley neighbors called Marin dit Capuchon and Jean dit Chapeau for the distinctive head gear the brothers favored. An older first cousin, Jean dit Neveu, or Jean the Nephew, also had come to Louisiana in 1765 and had moved from the river to the Teche Valley in the 1770s, so Jean dit Chapeau's nickname also may have been his neighbors' way of distinguishing one Jean Mouton from another. In June 1783, at age 29, Jean dit Chapeau married Marie-Marthe, called Marthe, daughter of Atakapas Post surgeon Antoine Borda, a native of France, and Chignecto native Marguerite Martin dit Barnabé. Jean dit Chapeau and Marthe had a dozen children in the Atakapas District, which in 1807 became St. Martin Parish.
In c1800, Jean dit Chapeau built a small house a few hundred yards from the upper Vermilion River near the northern edge of the old Atakapas District at a place the Acadians called Grand Prairie. This was only one of his houses. Originally, Grand Prairie was part of the ecclesiastical and civil parishes of St. Martin, centered at St. Martinville on the Teche. In 1819, Grand Prairie became part of the new ecclesiastical parish of St. Charles Borromeo of Grand Coteau, a few miles to the northeast in St. Landry Parish. In two years, however, the population around Grand Prairie had increased enough to warrant the building of its own church. The new parish and its church, called L'Église St. Jean du Vermilion and later St. John the Evangelist, was named in honor of the patron saint of Jean dit Chapeau, who donated the land for the church and cemetery, only a few hundred yards from his house at Grand Prairie. The original church was built of cypress lumber fashioned by Jean dit Chapeau and his slaves.
Two years later, in January 1823, the state legislature created a new civil parish from the western portion of St. Martin Parish. Lafayette Parish was named after the French marquis whom all Americans cherished on the eve of his triumphant visit to the United States. (The parish originally included what is today Vermilion Parish, created by the state legislature in 1844.) In early 1824, Jean dit Chapeau, spurning a site at Pin Hook already chosen by a local commission, offered land for a parish courthouse only a stones throw from his cottage and the St. John church at Grand Prairie. With the state legislature's approval, Mouton hired John Dinsmore, Jr. to lay out a village to be named Vermilionville, after the stream that flowed past it, around what Mouton hoped would be the site of the new courthouse. The original streets were all straight and ran precisely north and south and east and west. Meanwhile, the state legislature approved a special election to be held in July 1824 to allow local voters to choose between the two proffered courthouse sites. Mouton and his adherents won the election, and, after the inevitable court challenge, the Lafayette Parish courthouse was erected not at Pin Hook Bridge but in the middle of Vermilionville. The original courthouse, which stood from the 1820s to the eve of the War Between the States, was a single-story brick structure with slate roof and brick floor. Mouton donated a dozen lots in the village to the parish government and sold the others for $150.00 each. The state legislature incorporated Vermilionville in March 1836, creating a five-man city council elected by free white male citizens 21 years or older who held at least $300.00 worth of property within the town limits. Councilman held their offices for only a year. The new charter also authorized the appointment of a town clerk, constable, and treasurer. The five councilmen chose a president of the council, but there was no mayor.
Jean dit Chapeau died in November 1834, at age 80. He was buried in the cemetery behind St. John church. One of his younger sons, Alexandre, the future governor, inherited the old house in Vermilionville and expanded it over the decades (it is today a museum devoted to a history of the city of Lafayette and the Mouton family). In 1847, Alexandre laid out more lots on property he owned at the edge of the village. In the late 1850s, he built his magnificent plantation house, Île Copal, overlooking Bayou Vermilion southeast of the village. The mansion was connected to Vermilionville by an oak-lined thoroughfare called Emma K. Lane after the governor's second wife.
Vermilionville stood on a stream that was exceedingly difficult for steamboats to navigate, so the village did not become an important commercial center ... just yet. Steamboats did attempt to navigate the Vermilion up to Pin Hook in the decades before the War Between the States, but with limited success. Unlike at New Iberia and other towns on the Teche, no regular steamboat traffic appeared on the Vermilion. Beginning in the 1840s, the Lafayette Parish police jury authorized appropriations to pay for removal of stumps and driftwood in the lower Vermilion, but not until the 1940s was the stream thoroughly dredged from Vermilion Bay to above Pin Hook Bridge. In the antebellum period, then, except on court days or religious holidays, Vermilionville remained just another sleepy village surrounded by agricultural prosperity.
And then the war came. In 1861 and 1862, Louisiana authorities raised several companies of infantry and cavalry among the healthy young sons of Vermilionville and Lafayette Parish. Federal incursions up the Teche and Vermilion valleys came through Vermilionville three separate times during the war. The village was on the road that ran from New Iberia to Opelousas, which for a time was the capital of Confederate Louisiana. During the first Federal offensive that came through the area, on 17 April 1863, the rear guard of Confederate General Richard Taylor's retreating force fought a spirited skirmish with leading elements of Federal General Nathaniel Banks's army at Pin Hook south of the village. The so-called "Battle of Vermilion Bridge" was a prolonged slugfest between opposing artillery and infantry. When General Taylor's supply train was well away from the river, he and his rear guard retreated with it up to Opelousas, and the Federals crossed into Vermilionville. But the village was too insubstantial a place for Federal troops to occupy. The Yankees did not hesitate to emancipate the area's slaves, however, with its resulting economic and social turmoil. The Federals returned twice more, in the autumn of 1863 and again in the spring of 1864, but, again, they did not hold the village. Meanwhile, Confederate forces added to the misery of the local inhabitants by scouring the countryside for fresh supplies as well as more men to conscript into Confederate service. At war's end, not all of the local boys in gray returned to Vermilionville. Some of them lay in unmarked graves across the Southern Confederacy, especially in a city cemetery outside of Vicksburg, Mississippi.
In 1869, the state legislature approved a new charter for Vermilionville that authorized a mayor-council form of government as well as boundary expansion at the expense of the parish. The new town council would consist of seven members. The voters also would elect the town's mayor. The first mayor of Vermilionville was Alphonse Neveu. Later mayors were William Brandt, Auguste Monnier, John O. Mouton, G. C. Salles, John Clegg, and W. B. Bailey. This form of town government prevailed until 1914, when local voters chose a commission-style government with an ex-officio mayor and no city council. Three elected, full-time city commissioners--of public safety, who served as ex-officio mayor, of finance, and of public property--ran the city, along with an elected police chief.
The years after the War Between the States were a dismal time for the town and the surrounding parish. As Harry Lewis Griffin describes it: "Prior to the ... War Vermilionville was a much more prosperous town than in the eighteen seventies. Surrounded with cattle ranches, sugar and cotton plantations it was the center of much wealth. There was much buying and selling of land[,] and slaves were in ready demand. After the war came hard times. With their slaves gone and their plantations ravaged, the planters knew not where to turn. Land became a drug on the market with no labor to cultivate it. Because of the heavy taxes and penalties levied by the carpetbag government many were forced to dispose of their lands. Consequently many of the younger sons turned to other occupations. The village progress was slowed up by these conditions."
The railroad from New Orleans via Morgan City and New Iberia finally reached Vermilionville in 1880. Only then did the town become anything more than a political and ecclesiastical center for the surrounding civil parish. Population figures for the following decades tell the story best. In 1870, Vermilionville was home to 777 people, 454 of them white, 323 of them "colored." In 1880, the town's population numbered 815. But by 1890 it had grown to 2,100.
In 1884, the state legislature authorized a new name for the town, and Vermilionville became Lafayette. The name change would have come years earlier, but there already had been a Lafayette, Louisiana--in Orleans Parish, just outside of New Orleans. In the early 1880s, New Orleans subsumed the suburban town, and the original Lafayette ceased to exist. Only then would the legislature allow Vermilionville to abandon its clumsy name.
The new Lafayette saw its first water works and electric light plant emerge in 1897. Its first concrete sidewalks appeared in 1903. And its first paved street bore automobile traffic in 1919. ...
The town had its own schools as early as the 1840s, but the opening of a secular institution of higher learning in Lafayette soon after the turn of the century marked a milestone in the town's history. In 1901, Southwestern Louisiana Industrial Institute, later Southwestern Louisiana Institute, the University of Southwestern Louisiana, and now the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, opened on a 25-acre campus at what was then the northern edge of town. The following year, a "public" high school opened its doors to the town's younger students. Vermilionville Academy, a private school, had existed from the early 1840s to 1872 for the area's more affluent children; trustees for the academy had included Acadians Joseph and Francois Breaux, Charles Mouton, and Lucien Guilbeau. Mount Carmel Academy, run by the priests of St. John the Evangelist Church, opened in 1846 originally as a girls' school and survives to this day. The first "public" school opened in the village in 1847 but did not last. Modern, sustained, tax-supported primary and secondary education in Lafayette, like in the rest of South Louisiana, did not exist until the twentieth century.
In January 1918, authorities in Rome created a new diocese from that part of the Archdiocese of New Orleans lying west of the Atchafalaya River. They could have located the seat of the new diocese at the old church in St. Martinville, but they chose, instead, a more centralized church in a thriving young city, and Lafayette became even more important as an ecclesiastical center. When Reverend Jules Benjamin Jeanmard, a native of nearby Breaux Bridge, took his seat in May 1918 as the first Bishop of Lafayette, St. John the Evangelist Church became the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist. Reverend Jeanmard served as first Bishop of Lafayette until his retirement in 1956 (one of Bishop Jeanmard's paternal great-grandmothers was an Acadian Granger, and one of his paternal aunts was a Richard). ...
Sources: Brasseaux & Fontenot, Steamboats on Louisiana's Bayous, chap. 3; Griffin, Attakapas Country, passim, quotes from pp. 27, 57; Hébert, D., Southwest LA Records, CD; Raphael, Battle in the Bayou Country, 145-47; <dol-louisiana.org>.
BREAUX BRIDGE
A prominent Acadian community of the Atakapas region has its own interesting story:
Firmin Breau of Rivière-aux-Canards in the Minas Basin, son of Alexis Breau and Marguerite Barillot, came to Louisiana in February 1765 with the Joseph Broussard dit Beausoleil party. He was only 16. After moving to the Mississippi, where he married a distant cousin, and then moving back to the Atakapas District, Firmin became a major land owner in the area known originally as La Pointe de Répos and later as La Grand Pointe 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 Grand 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 one of his younger sons, 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 Melanie submitted plans for a village at Grand Pointe in the area around her dead husband's vehicular bridge. Scholastique Melanie's father was a French Creole, but she had Acadian blood on her mother's side. Nicolas Picou, fils was born in New Orleans in February 1754 to Nicolas Picou, père and Marguerite Lavigne. The Picous were an old New Orleans family. Nicolas, fils's paternal grandfather, Urbain, was a native of Brest, France, who had married Marie-Josèphe Larmusiau in New Orleans in 1733. Nicolas, fils moved upriver to the Acadian community of St.-Jacques probably in the 1780s. Scholastique, daughter of Joseph Bourgeois and Marie Girouard of Chignecto in Acadia, was born at St.-Jacques in c1770, five years after her parents had come to Louisiana with Joseph Broussard dit Beausoleil. Nicolas Picou, fils married Scholastique Bourgeois at St.-Jacques in the late 1780s. Their daughter Scholastique-Melanie was born at St.-Jacques in July 1796. Nicolas, fils died at St.-Jacques in February 1800 when Scholastique-Melanie was only three years old. Her mother remarried to fellow Acadian Charles Melançon at St.-Jacques in 1803. Scholastique, her brothers Jean Baptiste dit Fletcher and Nicolas III and sister Melanie Félicité, called Émeline, moved to the La Pointe or Grand Pointe community on upper Bayou Teche when Scholastique was still a girl. In June 1813, at age 16, Scholastique married Agricole, son of Firmin Breaux (who had been dead for five years) and Marguerite Breaux. Agricole and Scholastique had eight children.
(Scholastique's siblings also married and settled at La Pointe. Brother Fletcher married Ludivine, daughter of Acadian Pierre Guidry, in June 1815. Younger sister Émeline married Charles, son of Acadian Athanase dit Cobit Hébert of Fausse Pointe, in December 1817. Younger brother Nicolas III married Ludivine, daughter of French Creole Marcel Patin of La Pointe, in June 1820; Nicolas died the following year from a self-inflicted gunshot wound; he was only 26 years old.)
In May 1828, Agricole Breaux died suddenly at age 41, leaving Scholastique 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 1847, church authorities created St. Bernard parish, and a church rose up barely a stone's throw from Agricole Breaux's old bridge. ...
Meanwhile, in 1836, at age 40, Scholastique remarried to Jean Francois, son of Jean Pierre Domengeaux and Marie Marguertie Victoire Lefebre of Haiti. Jean Francois's first 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, 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, 747-48; 2-C:104, 110, 3:203, 517, 4:147; 5:447; NOAR, 1:207-08, 2:228; <dol-louisiana.org>.
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 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 a Poste des Opelousas. (Professor Carl Brasseaux says that the original post was "located along Bayou Teche below present-day Port Barre," east of the present city of Opelousas, but local historian Winston De Ville says the post was at Washington, on Bayou Courtableu, pronounced car-TOB-luh by the locals, north of the present city.) The caretaker French government at New Orleans appointed former infantry lieutenant Louis-Gérard Pellerin as the first commandant of the post and the district.
The first permanent settlers in the Opelousas District were French Creoles from Mobile and the Alabama River valley, called Alibamons, who came to western Louisiana in 1764 after France ceded the territory east of the Isle of Orleans to Britain. The Bonins, Fontenots, and Guillorys were especially prominent Alibamon families.
When the Spanish took over Louisiana in March 1766, they maintained the post at Opelousas. 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 on the western prairies to settle in the Atakapas District south of Opelousas, but a hand full of Acadian families had already moved to Opelousas 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 Comeau, Cormier, Guénard, Hébert, Léger, Pitre, Richard, Savoie, Saulnier, and Thibodeau. 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 the present city 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. Acadian families who came to the Opelousas District after 1765 were Bellard, Benoit, Boudrot, Bourg, Boutin, Brassaud, Broussard, Chiasson, Forest, Granger, Guédry, 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 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 Opelousas prairies.
Meanwhile, in September 1767, prominent Opelousas settlers, representing the residents of the district, petitioned the court in New Orleans to remove Louis Pellerin as commandant. They accused him of "forcing the Indians to trade only with him, telling them that as 'chief' of the post, only he had that right. It was alleged that at the most inopportune times--the planting and harvest seasons, for instance--he would demand public improvements and exact these labors from the inhabitants." Pellerin also had built a tavern within five arpents of the church and thereby alienated the local priest. The inhabitants' wish was granted, Pellerin was sacked, and the government of the post was "vested in a magistrate to be chosen annually by the inhabitants from among themselves."
In the fall of 1768, when French Creoles from New Orleans and German and Acadian settlers from the river districts turned on Spain's first governor of Louisiana, the unpopular Antonio de Ulloa, Opelousas Acadians probably did not participate in the revolt. Nonetheless, in 1769, Ulloa's successor, General Alejandro O'Reilly, who crushed the revolt, re-evaluated the colony's sad state of defense and ordered militia units to be raised in each of the colony's districts, including those that had not joined the revolt against Ulloa. All able-bodied males between the ages of 16 and 50 were required to serve in the militia, and Spanish land grants would be based on militia service. Gabriel Fuselier de la Claire of Atakapas commanded the company for Atakapas and Opelousas. O'Reilly's order was not popular with the Acadians, many of whom remembered similar treatment at the hands of British governors back in Old Acadia. O'Reilly formally appointed Fuselier as commandant of the Opelousas District in February 1770. He was replaced in 1774 by another resident of the Atakapas District, Alexandre Declouet.
In 1773, a hurricane damaged many Acadian homesteads on the Opelousas prairie. Dissatisfied with life in the district and with forced militia service, some of the Opelousas Acadians asked Governor Luis de Unzaga for permission to migrate to St.-Domingue, today's Haiti. Unzaga refused to let them go, so they sought permission at least to move south into the Atakapas District, where many of them had relatives. Again, Unzaga refused to let them leave, but some of them sold their lands and moved to Atakapas anyway. Unzaga, like many another powerful official who thought he could control these people, was learning a lesson in Acadian stubbornness. The governor relented. When hundreds more Acadians reached Louisiana from France in 1785, a few of these families moved to the Opelousas District, mainly to join their kin already there.
Despite the relocation to Atakapas, by 1776 there were enough settlers in the Opelousas District to create a church parish there. It came to be called St. Landry, after St. Leandre or Landry, the seventh-century bishop of Paris. The first St. Landry Church, a simple wood structure, was located at the post. Still, it was not unheard of for Opelousas baptisms and marriages to be recorded by Pointe-Coupée and Atakapas priests in the 1770s and 1780s. Evidently the Opelousas parish at times did not have a priest of its own early in its history. Pointe-Coupée, which had a church since 1728, lay near a northern route across the Atchafalaya Basin and was, next to Atakapas to the south (founded in 1765), the closest church to Opelousas. Pointe-Coupée and Atakapas priests, then, may have served as a missionaries to Opelousas until it had a priest of its own.
In the autumn of 1779, during the American Revolution, the Atakapas and Opelousas militia company, still commanded by Alexandre Declouet, served under Louisiana Governor Bernardo de Gálvez in his attack against the British at Baton Rouge. By all accounts, the Acadians, many of whom were old enough to remember what the British had done to them in Acadia, fought gallantly.
Declouet, now advanced in age, retired as commandant of the district in March 1787. He was succeeded by Nicolas Forstall, native of Martinique and scion of a noble family. Forstall was succeeded in the spring of 1795 by Martin Duralde, who remained as commandant at Opelousas until the Spanish surrendered the colony to France in December 1803. Honoré de la Chaise served as commandant of the post during the few months the French were again in control of the colony. American army Captain John Bowyer sent the young Frenchman packing in October 1804.
In 1798, two years after local physician and planter Michel Prudhomme, a native of France, donated land for a new church, a priest's house, and a jail on property he owned near the old post, Spanish authorities moved the Opelousas Post to the site of the present city of Opelousas (Michel Prudhomme is an ancestor of world-renown Cajun chef Paul Prudhomme of Opelousas).
Despite Spanish settlement restrictions, during the late colonial period the Acadian presence in the Opelousas District, though relatively small in numbers compared to the Atakapas, was not economically insignificant. In the census of 1796, Acadian families in the Opelousas area numbered 49, only 17 percent of the total number of families in the district. Most of the Acadians lived at Bellevue and Grand Coteau, with a hand full of others residing in the North Plaquemine, Grand Prairie, Grand Louis, and Faquetaique sub districts west of the present city. In fact, half of the district's 12 sub districts contained not a single Acadian family that year. But, as this and earlier censuses reveal, many of these Acadian cattlemen were among the shakers and movers of the district. In 1788, for instance, nearly a quarter century after the first Acadians came to Opelousas, 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.
After the Louisiana Purchase, the old Opelousas District became the civil parishes of St. Landry, sometimes called Imperial St. Landry (1807), Calcasieu, also called Imperial Calcasieu (1840), and, after the War Between the States, Cameron (1870), Acadia (1887), Evangeline (1910), Allen (1912), Beauregard (1912), and Jefferson Davis (1912).
For a few months during the War Between the States, Opelousas served as the capital of Confederate Louisiana. ...
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, quotes from pp. 21, 22; Frederick, "In Defense of Crown & Colony," 397, 413-14; 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 French Creoles), 345-65; Appendix for a list of Acadian individuals & families in the Opelousas, 1765; map.
St. Landry, Calcasieu, and Cameron parishes
Acadia, Evangeline, and Jefferson Davis 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 from Maryland to settle in the vicinity of Fort San Gabriel. Here was his 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 Breau brothers, received permission from Ulloa's successor, General Alejandro O'Reilly, to abandon the distant post and move to St.-Gabriel and other Acadian settlements on the lower river. St.-Gabriel Acadians, in sympathy with the Breaus, probably had participated in the revolt against Ulloa.
In the wake of the 1768 revolt, General O'Reilly re-evaluated the colony's sad state of defense and created militia units for Louisiana's various districts in 1769. All able-bodied males between the ages of 16 and 50 were required to serve in the militia, and future Spanish land grants would be based on militia service. The Acadians at St.-Gabriel served in the company commanded by Louis Judice, commandant at Lafourche des Chitimachas, or Ascension, just downriver from St.-Gabriel. O'Reilly's order was not popular with the Acadians, many of whom remembered similar treatment at the hands of British governors back in Old Acadia. Another of O'Reilly's military reforms that year was the abandonment of the fort at St.-Gabriel. In 1775, however, O'Reilly's successor, Governor Luis de Unzaga, ordered the fort rebuilt. 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 Unzaga's governorship. 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. General 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 he moved the Islenos to 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.
While this was going on, far to the east the American Revolution raged on along the Atlantic seaboard. In 1778, France joined the Americans against their old enemy, Britain. 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 other 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 around old Fort Bute and 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.
The rest of the St.-Gabriel/Manchac district thrived, however. 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 Bayou 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, and the third ship, Le Beaumont, chose to move to the St.-Gabriel/Manchac district. They settled on what the Spanish called the "Manchac Coast," which lay between the church at St.-Gabriel and Bayou Manchac, at the northeast edge of the St.-Gabriel District, and around old Fort Bute north of the bayou at the southern edge of the Baton Rouge District.
After the Louisiana Purchase, 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 south of the bayou 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; Frederick, "In Defense of Crown & Colony," 397-98; 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
In 1716, two years after Louis Juchereau de St.-Denis founded Natchitoches on the Red River and two years before Bienville established New Orleans, the French created a new garrison at the site of present-day Natchez, Mississippi, on the east bank of the river. Indian relations and the need to improve communications with French Canada via the upper Mississippi dictated the founding of Fort Rosalie. Nearby stood the grand village of the Natchez (pronounced NOT-chee), whom the French were determined to overawe. The soil around Fort Rosalie was fine and well-drained, and the post stood on a bluff above the river's flood plain. The Company of the Indies, which controlled the colony, allowed settlers from the lower river to move to Fort Rosalie and establish tobacco plantations on Natchez land. The new settlers brought Old World diseases that decimated the Indian population. In November 1729, the Natchez, with the help of local African slaves, turned on the French and massacred most of the 200+ settlers at Fort Rosalie. French retaliation was swift and hard. For two years, the French and their Indians allies, including the Choctaw and Caddo, attacked the Natchez refugees wherever they fled and recaptured or killed the rebellious Africans. By 1731, the surviving Natchez were reduced to impotence, but French fears of more Indian and African uprisings compelled King Louis XV to revoke the charter of the Company of the Indies. Louisiana was once again a royal colony, and for the fourth (and final) time, Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, sieur de Bienville served as the colony's governor.
In February 1763, at the end of the French and Indian War, France ceded the area around Natchez to Britain. The British occupied Natchez in force and called their new post there Fort Panmure. After the Spanish took control of Louisiana in March 1766, they were determined to protect their new colony against British encroachment. In the spring of 1767, Governor Antonio de Ulloa ordered the construction not only of Fort San Gabriel south of Bayou Manchac but also a new fort across from British-held Natchez. Fort San Luìs de Natchez stood on the west bank of the river near present-day Vidalia, about a league away from the British fort on the east bank of the river.
After the Spanish built Fort San Luìs, Governor Ulloa was determined to send Acadians there to serve as militia. He had allowed the Acadians who had immigrated from Maryland in September 1766 to go to Cabanocé although it was already thickly settled by refugees from Halifax who had come to the colony the year before. The Acadians who arrived from Maryland in July 1767 he settled at Fort San Gabriel, above Cabanocé. As a result, the stretch of river from Cabanocé up to St.-Gabriel became known as the Acadian Coast. Then along came the party of 150 Acadians led by brothers Alexis and Honoré Breau of Pigiguit who reached New Orleans from Port Tobacco, Maryland, in early February 1768. Ulloa ordered them to Fort San Luìs de Natchez, but the Breau brothers refused to go there--it was too far upriver. They insisted on going to the Acadian Coast, where their older brother Jean-Baptiste had settled in 1766. Ulloa refused to compromise on the matter, declared the Breau brothers trouble makers, and threatened to deport them and their families if they did not obey his order. With the assistance of other Acadians, Alexis and Honoré went into hiding, while Spanish officers with armed soldiers escorted the members of 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. Resentful of the hard hand of Spanish control, far removed from their relatives to the south, and threatened by the hated British and their Indians allies, the Acadians at Fort San Luìs de Natchez could not be happy with the place. They openly sympathized with the French Creole-led revolt that ousted Ulloa and Spanish authority the following October.
The next year, Ulloa's successor, General Alejandro O'Reilly, suppressed the October revolt, hanged some of its leaders, and re-established Spanish control of Louisiana. O'Reilly the soldier was a more astute administrator than Ulloa the intellectual; the Irishman saw more clearly the Acadians' role in the future of the colony. Intent on consolidating Spanish defenses against the British and keeping the Acadians happy, O'Reilly ordered the abandonment of Fort San Luìs de Natchez, essentially pardoned the Breau brothers, and allowed their kinsmen to move to the Acadian Coast, where they had wanted to settle all along. None of the Breau party remained at Natchez. As a result, Concordia Parish was settled in subsequent decades not by the francophone Acadians who had gone there in 1768 but by Anglo-Americans who came to Louisiana after Jefferson's Purchase to grow cotton in the fertile bottom lands of the Mississippi delta.
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, coming from the other direction, had seen nearly two decades before, that the site of Baton Rouge marks the first--or last--high bluff along the Mississippi River north of its flat, open 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, on the east bank of the river, to the British. This included Baton Rouge. The French and later the Spanish authorities who controlled Louisiana forbid Acadians to settle anywhere outside of their territory, so the area north of Bayou Manchac was off limits to Acadians. The British in fact built a stockade 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 New Richmond 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 and prairie settlements, crossed Bayou Manchac in early September and captured Fort Bute without a fight. They then moved on to Baton Rouge, which 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 late 1785 and early 1786, 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 along present-day Thompson Creek north of Baton Rouge. Most of the Acadians who chose to settle in the Baton Rouge District moved to the Manchac Coast at its southern edge, in the vicinity of old 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 bank 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, especially at Manchac, or they 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. Baton Rouge itself, on the east side of the river, still lay in Spanish territory. In 1807, when the Americans created Louisiana's first civil parishes, the area west of the river became the Parish of Baton Rouge. After Anglo rebels seized West Florida, including Baton Rouge, 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 American 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 Isleños, 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 Isleños as expert cattlemen. The Isleños 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 Isleños 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 Isleños 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 Isleños. 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 had chartered to bring more settlers to their Louisiana colony. Nearly 1,600 Acadians made the voyage aboard the Seven Ships, and most of them chose to settle near another Isleños settlement, Valenzuéla, on 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 became 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 Isleños always outnumbered the French-speaking Acadians. San Bernardo Acadians inevitably intermarried with their Hispanic neighbors and were slowly absorbed into the Isleños 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. Still, the Isleños of St. Bernard Parish today are often called "Spanish Cajuns."
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 February 1786, the Spanish sent 56 Acadian families to the area, American claims be damned. The Acadians had just arrived from France aboard La Ville d'Archangel, the sixth of the Seven Ships, which had reached New Orleans in early December. The new Acadian settlement lay along lower Thompson Creek, then called Bayou des Écores, directly across the Mississippi River from Pointe Coupée. There was never a 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 doomed from the start. It was not contiguous to any of the other Acadian communities on the river above New Orleans. As a result, some of the La Ville d'Archangel Acadians drifted south towards the Acadian Coast. Spanish officials counted a number of them, in fact, at Baton Rouge and at Fort Bute, Manchac, south of Baton Rouge, as early as July 1788.
Two especially destructive hurricanes struck lower Louisiana in August 1794. The resulting floods devastated the bayou community. This disaster, combined with the earlier loss of Acadian families, compelled the Acadians who had remained at Bayou des Écores to abandon the settlement. More of them moved to Baton Rouge and Manchac, and others to Ascension and Assumption on upper Bayou Lafourche.
Another motivation to leave were the political tensions over who actually "owned" the Bayou des Écores area. After the American Revolution ended in 1783, Anglo-Americans began moving into the Baton Rouge area and spurned Spanish efforts to control them. After December 1803, the Americans claimed that the swath of Mississippi delta north of Bayou Manchac was part of what they had purchased from Napoléon, but the Spanish insisted that the territory north of Bayou Manchac, including Baton Rouge and Bayou des Écores, still belonged to their West Florida colony with its capital at Pensacola. If Acadians still remained along Bayou des Écores after 1803, this political brouhaha would have sent them packing. Acadians hated nothing more than the kind of political instability that had plagued them back in Acadia.
As a result of the Acadians abandoning the area, the cultural future of the Feliciana country, as it came to be called, was determined not by francophone Acadian refugees whom Spain had sent there in 1786, but by Anglo-Americans who rose up against Spain beneath their Bonnie Blue Flag in 1810.
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 Acadians on the right, or west, bank of the river settled above and below the village post at "the fork." In 1767, Spanish authorities established a new settlement upriver from "the fork" on the left, or 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 St.-Gabriel Acadians crossed the river and settled along the west bank north of "the fork." This came to be called the Second Acadian Coast.
In the fall of 1768, Acadians on the river, along with German Coast settlers and French Creoles from New Orleans, participated in an uprising against Spain's first governor of Louisiana, the unpopular Antonio de Ulloa. Spanish authorities sent a large force from Cuba to suppress the revolt. Ulloa's successor, General Alejandro O'Reilly, who crushed the revolt, re-evaluated the colony's sad state of defense and created militia units for Louisiana's various districts in 1769. All able-bodied males between the ages of 16 and 50 were required to serve in the militia, and future Spanish land grants would be based on militia service. O'Reilly's order was not popular with the Acadians, many of whom remembered similar treatment at the hands of British governors back in Old Acadia. O'Reilly appointed Louis Judice, former co-commandant at Cabanocé/St.-Jacques, to command the militia company for the new district at Lafourche des Chitimachas.
In August 1770, Commandant Judice 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 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 Bernardo de 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 Isleños 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 Isleños 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, the year of Verret's appointment, 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 "at Bayou de la Fourche." Their tiny farms soon lined the banks not only along the Mississippi at "the fork," but also along upper Bayou Lafourche. Some of the Acadians lived among the Isleños at Valenzuéla, but most of them settled below the Canary Islanders as far down as present-day Lafourche Parish.
The sudden arrival of over 850 Acadians dwarfed the original Isleños 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 Isleños 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 at Ascension. As more Acadians from the crowded river settlements drifted into the upper Bayou Lafourche valley to find fresh land and to join their cousins already there, families from the nearby German Coasts moved south into the valley and allowed their children to marry Isleños and Acadians. Spaniards from Màlaga, Canadians, Irishmen, Italians, and even Anglo-Americans joined the Isleños, Acadians, French Creoles, and Germans in populating the Distritto de La Fourche, as the Valenzuéla District also was being called.
By 1793, thanks to the dramatic increase in population, Church authorities established a second parish in the area. The Spanish called it 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/Lafourche District counted 1,797 persons along the bayou, the great majority of them Acadians, who preferred to call the area Assumption, after the church. 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 the legislature of the Territory of Orleans created in 1807. The same legislation also established 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, Church authorities founded St. Joseph Parish at the site of a trading post in Lafourche Interior Parish, Thibodauxville, 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. Meanwhile, the legislature incorporated Thibodauxville 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. Church authorities created St. Francis de Sales Parish at Houma in 1847. Today, St. Francis de Sales serves as cathedral and St. Joseph as co-cathedral for the Diocese of Houma-Thibodaux, which Church authorities formed from part of the Archdiocese of New Orleans in 1977. Reverend Warren L. Boudreaux, a native of Berwick, near Morgan City, and an Acadian, served as the first bishop of the new diocese.
Sources: De Ville, Acadian Coast, 1779, Introduction by Kathleen M. Stagg, 8; Din, Canary Islanders of LA, chap. 5; <donaldsonville.org/dville_history.html>; Frederick, "In Defense of Crown & Colony," 397; 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) 2005-10 Steven A. Cormier