Lafayette (LA) Daily Advertiser, July 29, 1997

St. Martin communities vital part of parish history

by Jim Bradshaw

Jacques Arnaud, one of the three Arnaud brothers from Lausiers, France, established himself in Louisiana in 1804. His family had a silk factory. The area called La Jonction, because of the junction there of Bayou Teche and Bayou Fuselier, became known as L'habitation des Arnaud, then became Arnaudville. The town was chartered in 1870.

Jacques made a fortune in Mexico after coming to Louisiana. During his last voyage there, when he was carrying home $35,000, he fell into an ambush and was killed by bandits. He was buried in Mexico.

Jacques' great-grand son, Alcee, became mayor of Arnaudville in 1905.

There were churches, schools, and stores in the community in the early 1920s, when its population numbered about 500. The only transportation for the residents was by boat, but they were able to find small farm plots in the basin near the community where they could raise crops and cattle. These would either be consumed in the community or would be shipped aboard flatboats to the outside market.

Swampers and lumberjacks moved into the community in the years after 1876, when the federal Timber Act resulted in the sale of millions of acres of cypress swamplands to raise money to build a levee system. It was then, during the 1880s, that Louisiana cypress began to attract the eye of northern investors who began to introduce the manpower and technology--steam skidders, then pullboats plying manmade canals, then railroads--that would allow even the biggest trees to be harvested.

In felling the bigger trees, the swampers built scaffolds 5 or 6 feet above the ground, sometimes higher, to reach a point where the trunk had tapered enough to be cut.

Lafayette industrialist Dailey Berard reminisced in his autobiography, "This Cajun Ain't Bashful," about growing up in the Atchafalaya Basin, the son of a swamper:

"For the early swampers, cutting the great cypress trees for crude saw mills provided the meager wages to purchase the necessities of life. The loggers leveled axes and saws that seemed ludicrously inadequate to the task....

"The huge bases of the cypress trees made it necessary to use elevated perches of planks driven into slits cut in the cypress trunks. Some of the large red cypress measured more than ten feet across the base. Some were so large they took many days to fell, trim, and cut into manageable lengths. The felled trees were pulled to centralized locations by wire cables hooked to steam-powered engines. A common practice was to float the felled trees to the mill by chain-dogging each log into a massive raft.

"This was indeed the greatest concentration of some of the largest trees known to the first swampers. At times the swamp was so dense it was almost dark under a bright mid-day sun. Just as these trees were vast beyond our comprehension, so were they badly needed to provide lumber for the fast-growing population. The exploitation of this great swamp began when the Acadians first set foot in the Basin, and by the turn of the century much of the large cypress was cut."

By the 1950s, the cypress industry was pretty well played out in the Atchafalaya Basin and sawmills along its edges began, one-by-one, to shut down. It was also the time when Bayou Chene would finally disappear forever.

The Flood of 1927 had convinced the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers that a spillway had to be built through the Atchafalaya Basin to funnel water during major flooding on the Mississippi River. The Bayou Chene community was in the middle of that spillway, and the people were told that they would have to leave.

Some of them moved onto houseboats and stayed as long as they could. Most of them dismantled their houses, loaded the lumber and their belongings onto barges and moved to Plaquemine, or New Iberia, or some other town bordering the Basin.

The late Celestin Rose, a Chitimacha Indian, claimed that the place was named for one of his ancestors who lived there. There is another story that royalists coming to the area during the French Revolution made the butte their home and named it for the flower that was the symbol of their fallen society.

The community is located at a high point on the Atchafalaya River, where it makes a sharp bend and divides into the Little Atchafalaya River to the south and the Upper Grand River to the north.

Butte la Rose began life as a farming community, but in 1861, a great raft of logs and debris that had blocked the river was finally broken up, and the river began to flood the place too often for profitable farming.

The good news was that there were now more fish to be caught in the river, and, particularly after the location of fish companies at the nearby Atchafalaya community, a good living could be made catching them. Butte la Rose residents augmented their incomes by working as moss-gatherers (it was used to stuff mattresses and to wind into rope) and as loggers bringing lumber out of the swamp.

Travel for the 25 or 30 families who lived in the area, as in all of the swamp communities, was by boat. Families used skiffs to pole through the swamp, a sternwheeler visited from time to time to bring groceries and other goods.

In 1927, Monsignor Paul Borel, pastor of St. Bernard Church in Breaux Bridge, asked Bishop Jules Jeanmard (a native of Breaux Bridge and first Bishop of the Diocese of Lafayette) to establish a mission church at the community. Sebastian Benoit donated land for the church and a small building which had been used as a dance hall. Father Borel visited there twice a month until 1937, when Father R.J. Gobeil, the pastor at Charenton, was assigned the missions of the lower Atchafalaya Basin.

In 1913, the St. Martin Parish School Board established a one-room school in the community. Beginning in 1927, a "boat transfer" was used to transport pupils from isolated areas of the Atchafalaya swamp to the school. The school was closed after about 12 years of operation with two teachers serving as the entire faculty during that time.

Cade bought the lands in the southwest part of the parish from the federal government in 1853, developed the property into a sugar cane plantation, and built a sugar mill there in 1887.

He was also instrumental in the construction of the Great Western Railroad, whose tracks were later to become a link to the Southern Pacific system. He gave land on his plantation to the railroad to build a depot and switches for a branch to St. Martinville. The depot was named Cades station, with an "s," and the post office adopted the same name when it was established there in 1881. Aladin Broussard was first postmaster. The name was changed to Cade on June 13, 1919.

During the 1920s, there were two schools in Cade, one for black children and one for the white children.

Farming continues around the community, including on a 600-acre experimental farm operated by USL near the town. The community is also the site of the Episcopal School of Acadiana, built on land where the old Cade sugar factory had once been. The sugar factory had been destroyed by fire in 1956.

At one time, there had been a hotel in the community, operated by Luke Guilbeau, but it was also destroyed by fire.

Catahoula is about 10 miles northeast of St. Martinville on Catahoula Lake, beside the Atchafalaya floodway levee. Legend has it that the area was occupied centuries ago by a band of Chitimacha Indians whose village was consumed by an earthquake. The gap filled with water and created the lake.

The tribespeople who survived believed that the catastrophe was an act of the Great Spirit, and named the lake Cata-oulou, lake of sacrifice, and began worshipping what they believed were sacred waters. Indians all around the region began making pilgrimages to the place.

Attakapas Indians were said also to have visited the lake, to bathe in the water and dip their arrows into t it to make them fly straight and true.

Whatever its origin, the deep, clear lake and surrounding woodlands lured the first European settlers to the area around the turn of the century.

Louis Alcide Olivier of Youngsville "got fed up with civilization," according to an old newspaper interview with his granddaughter. He moved his family to the secluded lake area around 1901 and began harvesting cypress from the swampland. He established a timber business that drew loggers to the area, and a community was born.

Olivier was a Fordham (New York) University graduate and believed strongly in education. He helped set up the first one-room schoolhouse in Catahoula in the early 1920s.

Aurelian Doucet, a fisherman, trapper, and moss gatherer, was also one of the early settlers of the area.

Both Olivier and Doucet reared large families and the community grew as they did.

Although fishing, trapping, and logging were the primary livelihood for many years, more of the men turned to farming or found work in the oil industry during the last half of the century, particularly after the levees went up to protect them from floods, but diminished access to the basin and to the lake.

Electricity was introduced in Catahoula in 1939 and a natural gas line replaced butane fuel in 1959. A gravel road was laid sometime before 1927 and asphalt replaced it in 1955.

Much of the filming for the 1929 movie of the story of Evangeline was done in the Catahoula area. "The Buccaneer" was filmed there in 1938.

A Catholic chapel was built there in 1927. The present church was built in 1952.

It was because of these basic needs that the community became more than a crossover on the bayou trail between Opelousas and St. Martinville, the two early trading posts in the region.

Pierre Guidry, the first settler of Cecilia, acquired three tracts of land from Mrs. Joseph Alexander Declouet in 1791. Joseph Angelle settled nearby soon after.

Both men apparently settled on lands that had been given to Declouet by a Spanish land grant dated May 16, 1772, that included some 2,600 acres of land.

Grover Rees, in his history of Breaux Bridge, describes Guidry's land as "fronting 50 arpents on Bayou Teche and 50 arpents deep, for which he agreed to deliver in payment 100 bulls." Guidry married three times and fathered 20 children, many of whom remained in the area and established their own farms.

There was a chapel at La Grande Pointe sometime after 1874. Some sources say that it was named for St. Etienne, but that is not a certainty. In January 1889, Father Borias of Breaux Bridge wrote that "the chapel was originally located about midway between the Four Corners and Grand Anse area, but later was moved closer to what is now Cecilia." A church parish was created at Cecilia in 1890 and Rev. Augustin Blanc became first pastor. He would serve there for more than 38 years. St. Rose of Lima Church was established there for the African American congregation in 1944.

During the Civil War, the settlement was also known as La Place. This name was dropped when postal authorities began to confuse it with the LaPlace in St. John the Baptist Parish.

There are several stories about how the place got to be named Cecilia, the most logical of them being that it was named for Cecilia Lastrappes, the first postmistress there.

On April 19, 1964, dedication ceremonies were held on the banks of Bayou Teche, in a grove of live oak trees about three miles south of Cecilia on Hwy. 328, to mark the grave of Confederate General Louis Hebert, who was an editor and teacher in St. Martin Parish after the war. He taught at Huron Plantation near Cecilia.

About that same time, farmers began clearing the rich lands of the Coteau Holmes area to plant corn, cotton and potatoes.

Early family names in the area included Segura, Dugas, Broussard, Bernard, and Berard. The St. John Levert company also invested in land in the Coteau Holmes area for farming.

When the cypress industry began to play out, several of the Coteau Holmes families turned to moss picking for a livelihood.

Mrs. Emmeline Broussard's father, Delma Broussard, moved his family to Coteau Holmes in 1920. In 1986, she reminisced for the Teche News about picking moss and pecans in the Coteau Holmes area.

"It was rough," she recalled, "because there were more people in the woods picking than there was moss or pecans to pick. But you could go to the general store and sell it to Mr. Olivier, and later to J. Z. Berard, or trade it for goods in their store."

Alfred BuPord, recollected in that same article, "I don't think there was as much farming until after the levee was built because everything would flood and it was densely wooded. We'd have to get around in pirogues in the springtime, the water got so high. l do remember a lot of moss picking. We'd bring it to the moss gin in St. Martinville' and sell it for the manufacturers to make powder or upholstery stuffing. The Randazzo brothers handled most of the moss that was picked around here."

Two large lakes, Lake Charlo and Lake Martin, occupy much of the island. These lakes occupy parts of an old Mississippi River channel and are surrounded by cypress-tupelo swamps. Cypress Island and the adjacent Teche Ridge were important areas of prehistoric Indian settlement. There are San Patrice sites dating from 6,000 years there, along with sizable settlements from the Tchefuncte period (2,000 to 3,000 years ago) near the mouth of Bayou Tortue. Most of the live oak ridges in the area contain Native American artifacts indicating that in later times the area was sparsely settled by small groups from the Attakapas nation.

The name Cypress Island was first applied to a small "island" of forest surrounded by prairie just northwest of St. Martinville. Over time, the name has come to encompass about 15,000 acres of woodland between Lafayette, Breaux Bridge, and St. Martinville.

Until the 1950s, Lake Martin was a headwater of Bayou Capucin, a tributary of Bayou Tortue, which drains into the Vermilion River through Lake Charlo. In the early part of this century, the Ruth Canal was constructed, diverting water from Bayou Teche and the Cypress Island area into the Vermilion River. This reduced flow into Lake Martin, but the lake continued to be filled by rainwater. The lake was surrounded by a ring levee in the 1950s and is filled by rainwater now.

There was a school at Cypress Island as early as 1913, but it was closed in 1945, and students were sent to St. Martinville.

The locks were completed in 1913, when boats were getting deeper but the bayou wasn't. It was full of silt and tree stumps by then, and boats of any size had real trouble with navigation. The locks were designed to impound water above St. Martinville to raise the water levels so that grocery boats and others could get up to Arnaudville or into St. Landry Parish via Bayou Courtableau and on. (The Teche connects to Bayou Courtableau at Port Barre.)

There was considerable commerce on the Teche before the Civil War. At that time, steamboats are said to have plied up and down the bayou, entering Courtableau at high water to travel on to Washington--which was the shipping point for what is now St. Landry, Acadia, Evangeline, Jeff Davis and even Calcasieu parishes.

But trucks and trains have long since replaced the grocery boats that once ran the Teche--so much so that there has been virtually no commercial traffic through the locks in the 1990s.

Among the early settlers who expanded their bayou-front holdings into the Nina area were Baptiste Calais, Louis Semere, Antoine Derouselle, and Alexander Estillette.

In 1902 H.L. Griffin of Lafayette established a cotton gin in Nina. It was a central part of community life until it was closed in the late 1950s.

Near the cotton gin was a general store owned by Aurelien Dupuis and a saloon owned by Rene Thibodeaux of Breaux Bridge.

Children from the Henderson area and Nina attended primary school at a little school at Nina, which was called the Cypremort school until 1918, when its name was changed to Beauregard School.

De Clouet was the descendant of Alexandre Francois Joseph de Clouet de Piedre, who came to New Orleans in 1758. He was the first Commandant of the Arkansas Post under Spanish rule. Then, in 1774, he replaced Gabriel Fuselier de la Claire as Commandant of the Posts of St. Martinville and Opelousas. He died on July 30, 1789, at St. Martinville.

The little fishing communities, and all of the old Sixth Ward of St. Martin, were to have been included in Iberia Parish, but they were left out when the legislation was drafted, and have never been put back in. The result is a finger of Iberia Parish splitting St. Martin into two parts, Upper St. Martin and l'autre bout, the rest of it.

You start in Morgan City in St. Mary Parish, not St. Martinville, if you want to get to Stephensville, unless you want to go by boat, which was the only way to go for a long time.

Until the 1970s, children from Stephensville went to school in Assumption Parish, and for awhile they got there on a 30-foot, 19-passenger School Boat that traveled up and down Four Mile Bayou and Bayou Genevieve each morning and afternoon.

Stephensville began as a fishing community and continues so today, though when a blacktopped road was put down in the early 1970s it became as attractive to recreational fishermen as to those who fish for a living.

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