Forty acres yielded riches
When I was a small child I thought all pickup trucks were painted gray and carried on the door a yellow decal with a red devil in the center. I also thought these trucks carried potted meat. As ...
Nothing like Louisiana politics The old story goes that in the early 1970s Louisiana sold some used voting machines to Matamoras, Mexico. They were used for the first time in a local election in Mexico several months later, and ...
Henri mixed news & drugs Pioneer St. Martin Parish newspaper publisher Henri A. Vander Cruyssen was a man of many interests and varied talents. In addition to publishing an early newspaper in Breaux Bridge, he was an arc...
Jan 20, 2011 | 0 | 5 |
by
Jim Bradshaw jhbradshaw@bellsouth.netTeche Today.Com
Sisters brought school in 1881 Sister Mary Philomena and Sister Mary Dolores spent Mardi Gras night in New Iberia in 1881 but probably didn’t do much partying. The next morning, Ash Wednesday, they attended Mass at “the pretty ...
Jan 17, 2011 | 0 | 3 |
by
Jim Bradshaw jhbradshaw@bellsouth.netTeche Today.Com
Did Ada and doc meet in heaven? When James LeBoeuf, Morgan City's power plant superintendent, disappeared on Friday night, July 1, 1927, his wife, Ada, said he'd probably gone to Lafayette. She didn't report his disappearance to...
Legend of
buried treasure Gabriel Fuselier de la Claire was the first commander of the Poste des Attakapas, now St. Martinville, and later became commandant at the Poste des Opelousas also. He was a rich and powerful man i...
Jan 12, 2011 | 1 | 21 |
by
Jim Bradshaw jhbradshaw@bellsouth.netTeche Today.Com
The soldiers kept coming back
Nothing is left where the farmhouse of Louis Francois Desire Arnaud and his wife Sarah Burleigh Arnaud stood in the middle 1800s near Grand Coteau.
It was a nice house, well situated. Their big far...
Farmer, guerilla fighter, Acadian leader History tells us that war leaves in its wake the sweetness of victory and the sorrow of the vanquished. War makes heroes, also. That includes Joseph “Beausoleil” Broussard, who was the leader of t...
Intrigues bounced off early St. Martin settler James White was a popular man wherever he went, and he had been many places before he came to St. Martinville in the early 1800s and became a judge. He might have been the original “Teflon Man,” b...
A New Year’s retrospective
Over the half century that I have been writing about Acadiana, I’ve driven down practically every road in south Louisiana, visited (or at least passed through) every named community, and met and b...
A pipeline of cypress carried salt water in 1920s A pipeline made of hollowed cypress logs once ran from Anse Le Butte to Lafayette. It wasn’t made to carry oil. It carried salt water, which turned out to be pretty valuable stuff back in the day.
Santa Claus is watching Jim Santa Claus is real, you know. I’ve seen him, twice.
It was only a glimpse each time, mind you, but Santa has to move quickly to get done all he’s got to do, and the glimpses I got were enough to...
