Lafayette (LA) Daily Advertiser, September 30, 1997

Chrétien Point remembers plantation days, Civil War

by Jim Bradshaw

The mansion was built in the early 1830s by Hypolite Chrétien II and his wife Félicité Néda Chrétien and was once the center of a 1,200-acre plantation. The original Spanish land grant for what would become Chrétien Point Plantation was given to Pierre de Clouet in 1776. Hypolite Chr6tien bought the place around 1800 and built a cotton plantation.

He apparently did well enough to enjoy a hand or two of cards with the pirate brothers Jean and Pierre Lafitte, whom we are told were regular visitors to Chrétien Point.

In time, Chrétien's son, Hypolite II, married Félicité Néda, the daughter of a neighboring Spanish landowner, and they began to build the mansion in 1831. It took four years to build, and, shortly after its completion, Hypolite II was dead of yellow fever.

His widow, always a strong-willed woman, would carry on the work of the huge plantation. She was not your typical Southern Belle. Like her father-in-law, she loved to play cards and, with luck and skill, extended her land holdings at the gambling table. She smoked cigars. One night, during the pre-Civil War era of cattle rustling and vigilante committees in Acadiana, she shot a would-be robber who thought he'd try her nerve.

According to that tale, the fiery mistress of Chrétien Point, living alone with a reputed horde of gold and precious stones, was fair game for bandits traveling the Old Spanish Trail. Or so they thought, until the night a robber forced his way through a back door, only to be challenged in the dark by a voice from the top of the stairs.

He continued up the stairs and lunged at Félicité. She put a bullet into his head. His body was stuffed into a small closet under the stairs, says the tale, until Félicité's servants could fetch the sheriff in the morning.

Félicité moved to New Orleans shortly before the Civil War, leaving the mansion and plantation to the care of her partially paralyzed, 40-year-old son, Hypolite III, and his wife, Céléstiné, nee Cantrelle.

Hypolite III and Céléstiné would be the ones to face down the Yankees when the war came to St. Landry Parish. That was in 1863, during the Red River Campaign, when Federal troops marched through Louisiana, burning plantation houses, cotton gins, and sugar mills as he went.

Céléstiné had heard of one home that had been spared when the mistress of the house prepared a feast and emptied her wine cellar to the Union officers and men. She had heard a German countess had used the same tactic to save her castle during Napoleon's invasion of Germany.

Céléstiné figured she had nothing to lose by doing the same thing. So, when a slave returning from Opelousas told her that the Union soldiers were on the way, she turned not to the gun, but to the kitchen. She ordered her servants to slaughter every chicken on the place, along with a number of hogs, several sheep, and cow, and to barbecue them all. Then she ordered them to bring the finest wines from her cellar and to prepare a feast for the Federal officers.

As one version of the story is told, Hypolite III, ill and crippled, aided the cause by rising from his sick bed as Gen. Godfrey Weitzel and his Federal troops approached, to struggle to an upstairs balcony and make the Masonic sign. As the tale goes, the Union commander was a Mason, too, and was thus influenced to spare the house.

Even though the Federal leader had promised not to disturb the Chrétien household, his soldiers left with everything they could carry, including much of the furniture.

The plantation's sugar house was set on fire, as were the slave cabins. The 500 slaves who worked on the place were scattered and warned not to return.