Lafayette (LA) Daily Advertiser, January 27, 1998

Booster gives view of Lafayette in the early 1900s

by Jim Bradshaw

In 1910, the Southern Pacific Railroad published a book filled with lavish praise about the wonderful things to be found in Lafayette Parish. The title alone tells you what is to come:

A Comprehensive Review of the Agricultural Resources and Future Possibilities of Lafayette and Lafayette Parish Louisiana, Showing its splendid resources and making conspicuous some of the many opportunities existing there for Safe and Legitimate investment of capital and making incidental allusions to the advantages offered for the establishment and development of all lines of commercial and industrial endeavor in Lafayette and Lafayette Parish, Louisiana.

A part of this brochure is an essay entitled "Lafayette As Seen By A Booster." According to the brochure's editor, "The ... sketchy skit of Lafayette ... was evolved by a local booster in the occasion of the entertainment of the State Press Convention there a few years ago, is fairly accurate and unexaggerated, and will serve to indicate to the inquirer some of the lines along which the community has directed its course of progress." This is what that booster reported about this place in 1910.

Lafayette was once a small Acadian village named Vermilionville. It once had very few people, but more came. Even the few it had did not say much about it, but left things to be inferred. Some inferred it would never be a great town and some inferred it would; the latter were correct, eminently so. Thus we see that Lafayette is like New Orleans, Chicago and New York: that is, it was once quite small and afterwards grew larger. It is also a good deal like Boston in one particular: its streets were developed by the "a posteriori" method. In these days of restless impatience and the encroachment of science upon nature, the streets of a village are all planned out in advance -- which is the "a priori" method; but in Boston and Vermilionville man paid more respect to natural law, by waiting fill the cows had beaten a path to and from their grazing places and then adopting these paths for the lines of future streets, thus avoiding what Emerson called the "violence of direction" and substituting for harsh, inartistic straight lines a graceful curvature like that of a river.

A census was taken by the Government in 1900 and only 3, 314 people were at home. There was a big excursion to New Iberia that day and several thousand people were left out of the count -- but were probably included in the New Iberia count! Next time the census taker comes we are all going to stay at home, and it is likely there will be about ten thousand or more of us on hand. We will also tell the man to note down several other changes since his last visit, namely:

Lafayette has widened its streets, paved its sidewalks, enlarged its municipal electric light and water plant, laid several miles of good permanent solid road, under government construction, (and has) quit building its stores and principal buildings of wood, using brick and concrete blocks instead; it has taxed itself two mills for ten years as a bonus to the State for locating the Southwestern Louisiana Industrial Institute here, and taxed itself three mills a year for the support of public schools, and taxed itself $100,000 for the building of sixty thousand dollars worth of new school buildings -- one brick public central school building worth $50,000 and another worth $10,000 -- and other public improvements worth $40,000; it has built a three-story brick hotel, two new banks, a brick opera house, full lash with a capacity of 1,000 people, about fifty other new business houses and from two to three hundred new residences.

Lafayette is where the Southern Pacific Railroad starts from; it starts at five o'clock in the morning. It goes in four directions, one way to New Orleans, one way to San Francisco, one way to Alexandria, and the other way to Baton Rouge. It is also where the Vermilion River starts from. This stream used to be a bayou. but became a river in response to the demands of' the swift Current of' progress Lafayette hits been making during the past ten years: it is now being deeply dredged by the Government, as a result of agitation by the Lafayette Progressive League, and when this shall have been done, Lafayette will be in communication by water with Liverpool and all the other great ports of the world.

Lafayette is right in the exact mathematical center of a circle whose radius is a thousand miles and about this other concentric circles may be drawn at even greater distances. It is warm here in winter and cool in summer, rainy during the dry season and clear and crisp in wet weather. Clouds are lined with silver on one side, gold on the other. The sky comes down equidistant on all sides. The moon is full the year around but shines only on dark nights, thus providing for the greatest economic efficiency.