a VERMILION PARISH 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)

Lafayette (LA) Daily Advertiser, June 24, 1997

Jean-Pierre Gueydan

by Jim Bradshaw

Jean-Pierre Gueydan was born in 1827 at the village of St. Bonnet in the High Alps of France. He came to America in 1845, at the age of 18 and became involved in the merchandising business. Some years later he and his brother, Francois, organized the firm of Gueydan & Bodek who owned Le Maison Rouge (The Red House) near the French Market in New Orleans. Jean-Pierre attended to the out-of-town trade and traveled a great deal throughout south Louisiana.

He moved from New Orleans when Federal troops occupied the city during the Civil War, coming to Abbeville, where he began dealing in cotton and cattle. He also began to take hunting excursions into the western part of the parish, and to begin to think about its possibilities.

After the war he returned to New Orleans to reopen Gueytdan & Bodet, this time on Decatur Street. But business was difficult during the Reconstruction era, and he moved in 1874 to Corpus Christi, Texas. He and his brothers established a store there and also began a sheep and goat ranch with several thousand head of stock. The brothers fought rustlers, Indians, bandits and drought while in Texas, but the business prospered. Jean-Pierre during this time invented a better set of shears to shear sheep and, it is said, introduced cotton cultivation to south Texas.

But Jean-Pierre remembered the land he'd seen in western Vermillion Parish. He bought 40,000 acres there, for 12½ cents an acre. He had fence built enclosing a huge pasture 9 miles long and 6 miles wide and began building a residence on the salt dome fronting the present cemetery. The people of the countryside didn't mind the house, but they wouldn't abide his fence. Cattle had ranged free for a long time. One night 7 miles of the fence was chopped down.

But he persevered. He began advertising his lands in the U.S. Midwest hoping to attract farmers from there. In 1895 he secured the 11 miles of right-of-way for the Southern Pacific Railroad from Midland to Gueydan, and gave the Southern Pacific a section of land as an inducement to extend the road to his property. As soon as the railroad had been built, he laid out the town of Gueydan, and the first sale of town lots was held in 1895.

About the time the railroad was built he also began planting rice, and he and others established the first large pumping plant for irrigation to be instead in the region. That pumping station at Bayou Queue de Torque was for many years the largest pumping plant in the rice belt.

Jaen Pierre became an American citizen in his old age, but died in Marseilles, France on Sept 20, 1900.

This article is copyrighted © by the Lafayette (LA) Daily Advertiser and is used with permission.  This web site was originated through a grant awarded to Carencro High School (Joel Hilbun/Bobbi Marino, Grant Administrators) by the State Board of Elementary and Secondary Education from the Louisiana Quality Education Support Fund - 8(g).