Brochure for Vermilionville

a
FRENCH LOUISIANA article

Cultures of Acadiana
a look at the French, Cajun, Creole, and Native American cultures of south Louisiana
(a project of Carencro High School - 721 West Butcher Switch Road, Lafayette, LA 70507)

Historic Bayou Attraction, An Interpretative Walking Tour

Recall your knowledge of history by placing these settlers in time with the American Revolution, the discovery of steam power, the invention of the cotton gin or the sewing machine, the Louisiana Purchase, Louisiana statehood, the War Between the States, followed by the era of the Reconstruction. Books on North American history are concerned with the English settlers, the English colonies, the Atlantic seaboard. The Acadians and the Creoles were French-speakers. Their culture was decidedly different.

The Festive Area is the first third of Vermilionville, encompassing the Visitors Center, Restaurant, Food Quarters, Cooking School, and Performance Center. The Visitors Center, or Bienvenue Chez Nous Autres, is modeled after a Creole plantation house. La Cuisine de Maman, the restaurant, takes its style from a plantation overseer's house, while Le Quartier Creole (Food Quarters)and the Cooking School recreate slave quarters. Le Jour de Fete, the Performance Center, is fashioned after an old cotton gin.

From the Festive Area, walk north. Follow the path to the Folklife Area; to your left is Bayou Vermilion. A nature trail of Louisiana plants, native or introduced in the 19th century, winds along the bayou to Fausse Pointe.

In the 18th and early 19th centuries, houses of the settlers were one to five miles apart. Acadians cherished their isolation. Then, in the 1800s, a growing population of craftsmen, businessmen and professionals gave birth to Vermilionville, (now known as Lafayette) incorporated in 1836.

Les gens de couleur libre, free men and women of color whose descendants are commonly known today as Black Creoles, made up 36% of the free community. They, like the Acadians, were farmers and artisans.

Our first stop in the Folklife area is Beau Bassin. This house, a blend of Creole and American Greek Revival styles, was built about 1840 of colombage (a half-timber wall framing system) and bousillage(a mixture of mud and Spanish moss). The exterior staircase leads up to the garconnier, where the boys in the family slept.

Spinning, weaving, quilting and textile crafts are demonstrated in Beau Bassin. In Canada, Acadian women wove in wool and flax. In this new land, they learned to weave cotton. Many new materials replaced the accustomed ones!

Next is Le Magasin. This replica of an Acadian barn features crucial early survival skills: boat building, net and trap making and decoy carving. Early Acadians lived near water and used the bayous for transportation, for communication, for hunting and fishing. Even the "prairie Acadians" chose home sites near bayous because the tree line at the bayou's edge gave them firewood, lumber and shade.

L'Academie de Vermilionville, a new construction, is typical of 1890's schoolhouse architecture. In l'Academie, summer programs teach French folk songs and early Acadian crafts and games to children. Look for exhibits on Acadian and Creole cultures.

La Maison Mouton is a reconstruction of an 1810 house: a basic four-room Acadian house with a detached kitchen. There were no glass windows; only shutters locked securely against weather and hostile Indians. The galerie is an early Louisiana form of climate control. La galerie served as an extra room in good weather and was a marvelous place for social activities.

The cabinet making and other woodworking skills demonstrated here were essential casks for the Acadian husband. Besides cypress wood, cherry and walnut were available. No tools arrived with the Acadians from Canada; they were given tools by the Louisiana government and new ones were fashioned as needed by the blacksmith.

Right behind la Maison Mouton is la Forge. In the isolation of les vacheries (the ranches) every household needed someone skilled in smithing. The blacksmith shop was generally near the center of each community, sometimes near the church. The smithy fashioned agricultural and construction tools, wagon wheels, hinges, nails. The "tit fer" (a corruption of petit fer i.e. little iron)--an early musical instrument, is made in la Forge.

La Maison Acadienne is unfinished. This little house was probably built as slave quarters--not a two-room cabin for one slave family--but a double pen cabin for two families. Look for bousillage and colombage construction.

La Maison Boucvale (c. 1860-1890) is a classic 19th century small Acadian/Creole house with front porch, two rooms across the front and two to the rear. A center chimney with rooms on either side gave it bilateral symmetry. Glass transoms let light in and hot air out. The louvered shutters are adjustable. The kitchen and bathroom were added around the turn of the century, and remain to show the changes brought about by the passage of time.

La Maison Boucvalt houses crafts including palmetto braiding, rosary making and horse-hair rope making. These early settlers adapted, using available materials. Materials found on the banks of the bayous or in the barn (in the case of the horse hair) were used to fashion utilitarian items--sometimes very beautifully. The rosaries are made of seeds of the coix lacrima jobi plant, known as Job's Tests.

La Maison Buller is a beautiful house built c. 1803-1807, its hipped roof of the crowning glory. The steeply pitched roof is typical of French construction and was replicated by the French in Canada (17th Century) and in the Mississippi River valley (18th Century). The large center room has a room on each side. At the rear corners of the house, placed directly behind the end bedrooms, are small rooms, cabinets. One small room opens into the parents' bedroom for the daughters, and the other opens to the porch with no entry to the interior of the house. This "stranger's room" was available for travelers in the days before commercial lodging--an early "bed and breakfast." If we could look into the attic we would see a roof trussing which permits the front porch to be supported without columns. All of the major structural members are secured with wooden pegs.

Fiddle making is interpreted at La Maison Buller. The fiddle, which can sound sad or bright, the "tit fer" and accordion create the basic sound of traditional Cajun music. Chair caning and basketry are also demonstrated here.

La Chapelle des Attakapas is a new building, but its style is based on the Catholic churches at Pointe Coupee (1760) and St. Martinville (1773). Catholicism was the only religion legally allowed to be practiced in Louisiana before the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. Since the Roman Catholic Acadians loved their religion and the priests visit infrequently, the Acadians celebrated la messe blanche (a prayer service conducted by a layman). The slaves practiced the religion of their masters. Free men of color enjoyed social prestige, were economically independent and engaged in many trades, worshipped in the same churches used by white people. Slaves sat in small pews on the side aisles.

Le Presbytere. The tiny cottage attached to the church is an example of primitive Acadian architecture. The rafters in the attic are tree trunks left rounded. The rear room was originally a porch. The (rebuilt) fireplace is rough and would have found a mud or clay chimney.

Le Parterre is fashioned after the formal gardens of France. The practical Acadians would have planted herbs and vegetables among the flowers. Some nineteenth century flowers are roses, coreopsis, daisies, pinks, Sweet William, violets, verbena, petunias. Shrubs include azaleas, camellias, oleander, sweet olive, and pittosporum. Herbs like thyme, rosemary, chives, and lavender or vegetables like carrots, asparagus, artichokes, eggplant, ceim, cucumbers, beans and melon were found in the south Louisiana garden in the first half of the 19th century.

Walk to the other side of the chapel. While waiting to take the ferry to Fausse Pointe notice the iron crosses. These symbols mark the simple Acadian cemetery. They were generally made of recycled materials by the local blacksmith. A wreath of flowers--made from paper treated with wax and dyes--often hung from the top of the cross.

Fausse Pointe, a living history farm, was once the home of the Amand Broussard family. Amand arrived in Louisiana from Canada at the age of eleven. He lived with a brother until he married at the age of sixteen, and registered his first cattle brand that same year. The following year his wife died in childbirth leaving him with a son. At eighteen he was given a land grant. Four years later Amand married again. Thirteen children were born to him and Anne Benoit. He was a Patriot of the American Revolution and at his death at the age of 64, his properties were worth over $65,000. The inventory included besides this house nine out buildings: a kitchen, a potato shed, a stone-mill, a smithy, a school-house, a schoolmaster's house, a cotton mill and press and two barns as well as other tracts of land.

It is easy to imagine yourself a member of this family. The house is the oldest (1790) and largest of the houses at Vermilionville. Of traditional colombage and bousillage construction, it is a French Creole house which borrows from Anglo-American architecture. The gable end roof is Anglo-American, adapted by the Acadians for the large attic spaces. The roof is made of hand-cut cypress shingles. Notice the topmost row of shingles which extends over the roof top. These generally faced the windward side as protection against rot and leakage from rainy weather. The porch, with three doors, serves as a passage way for the large center room and two side rooms. Look at the hand-wrought rams-horn hinges. In the living room is a French wrap-around mantel. Dark grey and black were popular colors for mantels. Furniture in this house may have come from the Atlantic coast way of New Orleans. The chandilers are French. Louisiana amoiresare made of cipre or baldcypress, which is not a true cypress, but a taxiodum. Cypress was always painted to conceal what Acadians concsidered to be an inferior wood. Gros rouge and Paris green were favorite Acadians colors.

The kitchen of this horse is attached by a gallery to make it handicapped accessible. In the 19th century it would have been detached. Why? Something delicious may be bubbling in a black iron pot in the fireplace. Check it out!

This interpretive tour guide is funded under a grant from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, the state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Text: Vermilionville Historical Steering Committee; text edited by Nancy N. Broussard; special thanks to Beverly Latimer, Richard Guidry, Phoebe Vermilion, Glen Conrad and Carl Brasseaux, Vermilionville Historical Steering Committee.