Lafayette (LA) Daily Advertiser, June 24, 1997

La Chapelle, courthouse made Abbeville parish center

by Jim Bradshaw

The land on which Abbeville had been laid out was purchased by the Capuchin missionary Father Antoine D. Megret in 1843, when the place was still part of Lafayette Parish. Father Megret was pastor at Vermilionville (Lafayette) at the time, and was embroiled in a rancorous dispute with the trustees of the church there. That dispute, and the breadth of his parish, prompted him to look for a place to build a new chapel. (Which is why Abbeville was first known as La Chapelle.)

According to the act of sale, still on record at the Lafayette Parish Courthouse (Act No. 448), Father Megret bought the land that would become Abbeville from Joseph LeBlanc "of Calcasieu Parish" on July 25, 1843, for $900. The priest was to pay $400 within 12 months of the sale and another $500 within 18 months.

The tract of land purchased by Father Megret was apparently part of a Spanish grant to Joseph Melancon, and Joseph LeBlanc acquired it from him.

The LeBlanc home became Father Megret's first chapel. Within a few years a church was built on the site of the present St. Mary Magdalen Church. It served the congregation for several years, until it was blown down in 1856 by the famous Last Island Hurricane that took hundreds of lives on the Louisiana coast. That church was rebuilt almost immediately. Another new church was built in 1884 on the same site.

When Vermilion Parish was created in 1844, the year after Father Megret bought the LeBlanc land, Father Megret tried to get the parish seat placed at his church site. But Robert Perry, businessman, landowner, and political leader, held considerable property just three miles away, and had his own lands made the parish seat. (It helped that Perry's son-in-law was the state representative who introduced the legislation.)

Father Megret then asked Robert Perry if he could move his chapel from the LeBlanc property to Perry's Bridge. Perry, resenting Father Megret's attempt to land the parish seat himself, told the priest that he could move his chapel to a low, swampy spot along the river, if he wanted to. Father Megret declined the offer, and decided instead that he would build a town around his chapel, and that Mr. Perry had not yet heard the last of the parish seat business.

It was about 1847 when Father Megret laid out squares and lots for the original town site, following a European scheme that provided for two central squares, one facing the church and one facing the principal government building. He sold the land to buyers on the condition that they would pay an annual "interest" to support his church. Although he laid out a place for a rectory, Father Megret continued to live in Vermilionville. He never actually made Abbeville his home, although he named it for the place of his birth-- the town of the same name on the Somme River in France.

Father Megret's new Abbeville was made the parish seat by an act of the Legislature approved March 3, 1854, that provided that "from and after the passage of this Act, the place called Abbeville in the said parish of Vermilion shall be the permanent seat of Justice." A courthouse was built there shortly thereafter.

The first jail was an old log structure. Prisoners were chained to the floor to keep them from escaping, although with limited success. In 1899, according to one account, parish prisoners escaped six times.

Among the earliest settlers of Abbeville were Hilaire Davide and Emile Bodin, who owned the first store. Jean-Pierre Gueydan was also among the first merchants to open a store there. His store was located on Rue-de-bas-de-ville, now Washington Street, opposite the Catholic cemetery.

One of the first houses in Abbeville was built by the Demary family. On Nov. 4, 1847, a post office was established at the town, probably at the Demary property, since Nicholas Demary was the first postmaster. Joseph Harrington, a substantial stock owner, lived on the edge of town. John Cavailhes, a Spaniard, opened a store on Magdalen Square. Alonzo Spaulding ran a brickyard m the town.

The first newspaper in Abbeville, and all of Vermilion Parish, was the Independent. It was started in 1852 by Val Veazey, who was editor and publisher, and who printed it in both English and French. He sold it in December 1856 and the Meridional was published it its place. The first issue of the Meridional came out on January 1, 1857, under the management of E. I. Guegnon, who ran the newspaper until his death in 1862.

In fall 1853, an epidemic, probably yellow fever, swept south Louisiana. (Smallpox, yellow fever, and cholera were all epidemic in the middle 1800s. Smallpox usually came in the late winter, cholera in mid-summer, and yellow fever in late summer and early fall.) Father Megret divided his time between Vermilionville and Abbeville, attending the sick and burying the dead until he contracted the disease himself. It is said that he was the last to die in the epidemic, on December 5, 1853. He was buried in Abbeville, but later his body was transferred to Lafayette.

On the night of Monday, April 6, 1885, the Vermilion Parish Courthouse was set on fire. On April 17, the police jury held a meeting of the leading citizens of the parish, to put up a $500 reward for the identity of the arsonist, and to try to find a way to recreate parish records, all of which had been burned. They were unsuccessful in each instance.

There were destructive fires in downtown Abbeville in 1900 and again in 1903, but much of the downtown had been rebuilt by January 1907, when Abbeville hosted dignitaries from across the state for the reopening of The Palms Sanitarium. The medical facility had been rebuilt after a fire destroyed an earlier hospital there. The new sanitarium was used as a medical facility and, later, was a rooming house until the 1960s. It was torn down in 1965.

But, according to old accounts, Louisiana Gov. Newton C. Blanchard was there for the 1907 dedication, as were the mayor of New Orleans, Archbishop James Blenk, and other notables. The New Orleans Daily Picayune reported that "when the train ... reached Abbevile, hundreds of people ... were at the station. A committee was on hand to receive the party and they were escorted to carriages and driven at once to the Palms Sanitarium, passing through the business center of Abbeville and seeing the many new brick buildings as their carriages made (their) way through the heart of town. The two large rice mills were viewed first, next they drove by the new brick High School building which was near the tracks ... then about a block or two later was the Abbeville Bank Building, a brick edifice which proudly faced the magnificent Catholic Church, Mary Magdalen. The hosts were proud to show off their city, which then boasted 5,000 inhabitants and had its own electric plant and an almost completed new sewer system."

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