Forgotten Corners of French Louisiana

Everybody knows about New Orleans, though the mythical city that lives in most people's minds is not always the same city found on the Mississippi River in southernmost Louisiana.  Sometimes it isn't even the same city that lives in my mind, and I lived there for over eight years, but a long time ago.  Lots of folk who lived there just five years ago find that the city that is there now isn't the same city they left, and many of those who came back after the Katrina cleansing still long for the city that they knew.

 But New Orleans is a topic for another day.  Today I want to share some of the pleasures of a part of the state that is often not considered part of the more Gallic, Catholic, hedonistic southern sections of the state.  North Louisiana is predominantly Protestant, Anglo-American and less-often-visited by non-Louisiana residents.  But the oldest French settlement in the state is in this northern section, close to the Texas border.  Natchitoches, settled as a French trading post by Juchereau de St. Denis, retains its colonial atmosphere and its French flavor, blended with a  rich African-American heritage and a treasure trove of early colonial and southern planter architecture.

                                               The Badin-Roque House Kitchen at Isle Brevelle

The kitchen of the Badin-Roque House as it is known today is a well-preserved example.  One of the oldest surviving structures in the Mississippi Valley, it served the bousillage (mud and timber), dirt-floored house built by and for the Ursuline Nuns when they first arrived in the still largely unexplored Louisiana territory in the 1790s.  By that time Natchitoches, only a short ten or so miles away, was a thriving settlement.  The house itself stands nearby in an amazing state of preservation.

                                               The House, once the home of the Ursulines

 The small Cane River Community of Isle Brevelle is home to several generations of Louisiana Creole families descended from a former African slave named Marie Therese but called by her more familiar name of Coin-Coin and a French military officer and planter named Metoyer from the Natchitoches Post.   Theirs is not an unusual story in some ways, and extraordinary in another.  After fathering twelve children with Coin-Coin, Officer Metoyer decided that he had to have a white, Catholic, French wife.  Giving her forty acres miles away on the Cane River, Metoyer freed her, but not her children.  Cultivating the land diligently, she succeeded in buying all of her children from slavery and with them built one of the most famous early-nineteenth century plantation homes in Louisiana, Melrose, just across the Cane River and about a mile from the Badin-Roque house.  The house came into the families of some of her descendents who intermarried into other free famililes of color, many of whom in Louisiana were affluent, highly skilled, and well-educated.   Some of  Coin-Coins own grand-children were educated in Paris, returning home to Louisiana with worldly ideas as well as silver-headed walking canes and rock-crystal tumblers decorated with sterling heads of Napoleon Bonaparte.

     A visit to Natchitoches offers  a fascinating opportunity to explore deeply into the inter-connected history of Old World France and New World Louisiana.  Anyone seeking European side roads would be well repaid in spending several days in the too-often forgotten corner of the American south.  And a day or two relaxing at nearby Toledo Bend Lake, especially in the Fall and Spring, will provide some of the best of Louisiana's pleasures.