Lucie Monk Carter
The St. Gabriel Catholic Church, built by the area's Acadian residents in 1776, stands as the oldest church in the Mississippi River Valley.
Editor's Note: Country Roads is thrilled to announce Breanna Smith's essay "A Place For Exiles" as a semifinalist in our 2019 All Roads Lead to Home Young Writers' Contest. Read the work of our winner and two other semifinalists at the link, here.
“Where are you from?” someone asks. I always have the same, over-extended response.
“Baton Rouge, but I grew up in St. Gabriel.”
It has always felt important to distinguish that I grew up in the enclave tucked in the Baton Rouge Metropolitan Statistical Area. Settled just inside Iberville and just outside of East Baton Rouge, it’s the sort of place you might find yourself when stuck in contra-flow after an LSU game or taking a wrong turn leaving the casino.
My dad put the last nail into the fifth house on the left on Bayou Paul Road the same year I was born. It was before the Nicholson extension and the L’Auberge Hotel & Casino, in the country, but only thirty minutes from the city.
That time in my life represents some of my favorite memories: afternoons spent with my brother in the backyard, fighting over who would roll the wire pecan-picker and inventing tales about the people who lived there before we did. He liked to tell me, assuredly, that our house was built atop an ancient burial ground and that some of the unrested souls liked to hunt blonde-haired little girls. I didn’t believe him, at least not completely.
For a brief time after the release of the movie Holes, my best friend Catherine and I became obsessed with digging. We held tightly to the glimmer of hope that we would stumble upon a treasure, bone, or artifact that would reveal the stories of long ago—maybe even that burial ground.
St. Gabriel’s history captured my imagination early on and has held on tightly even as I’ve entered adulthood.
As the youngest of the family, I had no say-so in our move to Baton Rouge. I came home from my first day of fourth grade and in the stifling heat of the August afternoon said goodbye to the sprawling acreage, plentiful pecan trees, and constant droning of insect activity. I said hello to a house in a cul-de-sac where I could ride bikes on the sidewalk and have Chinese food delivered.
Lucie Monk Carter
Some of the author's most treasured memories are of childhood days spent playing in a 1799 Acadian-built cottage restored by her friend Catherine's parents, David and Nancy Broussard.
In the years that have passed, and alongside the process of growing up, I’ve found myself longing for St. Gabriel and my yesteryears held there. Occasionally, I’ve even spent lonely afternoons parked at the corner of Lawrence Parkway, peering into the yard of the home my dad built, taking inventory.
The pecan trees that once guarded the yard are gone. There’s a fence around the front. My playhouse is gone, as is my brother’s fort. The old barn where my brother batted at wasp nests while I waited outside and collected buttercups has been demolished.
Only once did I muster up the bravery to stop and talk to an artist who rented the apartment above the garage. When I think about knocking on the front door, I’m filled with a nagging fear that carpet over hardwood floors and the absence of mom’s decorative touch will forever taint the childhood memories I hold so dear.
In revisiting my own history in St. Gabriel, I set out to answer the questions I asked a decade ago. Who were the people who lived here before us? As each story unraveled, it became clear that St. Gabriel has stood, generation after generation, as a place of new beginnings.
Acadians in St. Gabriel
During the 1990s and early 2000s, in the days of Holes and treasure hunting with Catherine, her house—a 1799 Acadian-built cottage—was my second home. And while I knew from the way the floors creaked as I ran through its halls that it was old, its history hid from me in plain sight.
Catherine’s parents—Nancy and David Broussard—purchased the historic home in 1986, and—having considerable experience in preserving historic homes—David worked to recreate many of the original structures, including the Norman truss connecting the ceiling to the building.
Mechanization put the Norman truss out of use in the early 1800s. A home built in 1810 would not have had one, David said. That puts their home in a unique period. The tailend of Old World architecture, yet the dawn of Acadian and Creole architecture.
Lucie Monk Carter
David and Nancy Broussard purchased their 1799 Acadian-built cottage in 1986 and worked to recreate many of the building's original structures.
When I sought out the story of the Acadians in St. Gabriel, the builders of a home so central to my imagination, I discovered that, according to Spanish travel documents signed in the port of New Orleans on July 27, 1767, the Acadians’ initial banishment from Nova Scotia brought them to St. Gabriel by way of Baltimore, Maryland, spelled by the Spanish as “Merlán.” Regardless, that same year, the then-Spanish territory’s first governor, Antonio de Ulloa, ordered the Acadians to settle along the Bayou Manchac near Fort San Gabriel to create a buffer between the Spanish and English territories.
It was a place—according to letters written by Joseph de Oñieta ,the Spanish commandant who was posted to the fort at St. Gabriel,—plagued with disease, hunger, and humidity. Just after the Acadians arrived in New Orleans, he reported an epidemic at the fort—one so bad that all work had been suspended.
“There seems to be an epidemic on the Acadian coast,” he wrote to Ulloa. “For some time the rains have been continuous and very heavy, the sun very harsh and hot, all of which contributes to the problem.”
Nonetheless, on August 17, 1767, a small band of slightly more than 200 Acadian settlers arrived at St. Gabriel after an eleven-day walk and declared it home. Immediately declared subjects of the Spanish king and assigned plots of land by Commandant de Oñieta, the Acadians received several forms of aid from the Spanish, including medical care, hunting parties, land grants, sites for religious worship, and lessons on building levees to deter winter floods. Building their own cabins in the Louisiana heat, however, couldn’t have been easy work.
About seven years later, the Acadians began construction on St. Gabriel Catholic Church, which stands today as the oldest church in the Mississippi River Valley. It was declared complete in July 1776, the same month our founding fathers inked their names on the Declaration of Independence.
Through centuries of hardship, trauma and displacement, the people here have always persisted, transforming St. Gabriel into a beautiful place to call home.
Today, the church stands as an homage to the durability, adaptability, and creativity of its builders, reflecting this pivotal time in the evolution of Creole culture. It serves as an early example of Creole architecture, a beautiful blend between Old World science and new ideas necessitated by Mother Nature—an epitome of a future for this community of lost people. David Broussard, with his considerable experience in preserving historic homes, contributed to the drawings and research displayed in the church’s museum.
The pervasiveness of the last names carried by those original settlers in the Baton Rouge area today speaks to their success in making the untamed wilderness home. In Oñieta’s report to Ulloa, he lists several Babins, Heberts, LeBlancs, Landrys, and Richards, among others, as settlers of St. Gabriel.
Slavery in St. Gabriel
By the 1800s, the river parishes established sugar cane as a highly profitable commercial crop, exclusive to the area since it could only be grown in the climate found between latitudes 35°N and 30°S. Wealthy and semi-wealthy Scotchs-Irish immigrants from the East Coast saw an opportunity in the alluvial soils of the Mississippi and began to parcel together several Acadian land grants, creating larger plantations like the Indian Camp Plantation in Carville.
Along with large farming operations sure to make some men rich came another wave of exiles to St. Gabriel: African slaves. When the U.S. ban on the importation of slaves took effect in 1808, the domestic slave trade boomed—creating a forced migration of thousands of slaves into the Deep South from other portions of the country. The slave population in the Greater Baton Rouge Metropolitan Area, which includes St. Gabriel, grew from 266 in 1820 to 1,247 in 1860.
Lucie Monk Carter
The historic St. Gabriel Catholic Church's graveyard is the resting place for many of the town's first Acadian residents.
The American slaves’ path to freedom was a long one, filled with false promises and stunted hope. And along the fertile grounds of the River Parishes, it was made longer by the fact that these Union-held regions were excluded from the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation. Even when Louisiana passed its Constitution of 1864, officially abolishing all slavery in the state, African Americans in Louisiana could still neither vote nor attend public schools. 1865 brought the implementation of Black Codes in Louisiana, ushering in the infamous Jim Crow era.
In the face of seemingly insurmountable adversity, the former slaves and free people of color rose, as the exiles of St. Gabriel have done for generations—making a life in a place where they, for centuries, were seen as less than, and always fighting for more. Today, 61% of St. Gabriel’s population is made up of their ancestors, and African Americans (and lifelong residents), like Mayor Lionel Johnson, Jr., make up most of the town’s leadership.
The Lepers of Louisiana
In one abandoned plantation home, the Indian Camp Plantation, yet another story of exiles emerged.
In December 1894, after being outed by a newspaper reporter in New Orleans, seven lepers fled to St. Gabriel on a coal barge in the cloak of night. They lived in the forsaken plantation for two years, suffering from one of mankind’s most historically feared diseases, before the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul arrived and made a 109-year commitment to care for them in April 1896.
The disease was so feared, misunderstood, and stigmatized that the founders lied to St. Gabriel residents and said the land would house an ostrich farm. Family members, disgraced and terrified, often dropped patients at the gate.
The first question nurses asked the exiles: “What would you like your name to be?”
Lucie Monk Carter
Such was the collective cultural fear of leprosy that when Coca Cola delivered bottles to the Carville leper colony, it refused to collect them for fear of contagion. As a result, the residents found use for them as landscaping decoration in their gardens, still on display at the National Hansen's Disease Museum today.
The cemetery headstones bear vague initials and, as in the case of a “George Washington” buried there, pseudonyms to conceal the lepers’ identities even into death.
Hardly anything entered the leper colony, now called the National Hansen’s Disease Center, and nothing left. Coca-Cola shipped products to the facility, but refused to collect used bottles for fear of contagion, so residents used the bottles as landscaping decoration in several gardens, a few of which remain today. Most other objects used by the patients were destroyed by fire on-site—the incinerator still casts its shadow over the cemetery.
In 1920, the federal government purchased the land and developed the center into a hospital with more than 450 patients, some of whom married and lived in a separate tract on the compound. Then came the 1941 “Miracle at Carville,” the name given to the facility’s successful development of sulfone. By the 1980s, after the discovery of more, multi-drug treatments, leprosy officially became a disease demoted to outpatient treatment.
Lucie Monk Carter
For over a century, the Carville leprosarium was home to most of the nation's lepers, who formed a community outside of the society that had rejected them.
In 1999, the federal government returned the only operating leper colony in the continental U.S. to the state, though patients were allowed to stay if they chose. To come out of exile was its own form of banishment for many who spent the vast majority of their lives at Carville.
In 2016, the few remaining residents were moved to a facility in Baton Rouge. The property is now a National Guard base, which houses the National Hansen’s Disease Museum, a site dedicated to telling the century-long story of this forsaken community in St. Gabriel.
Still a Home for Exiles
Today, this sleepy country town, now just fifteen minutes from a growing Baton Rouge, is home to a population of just over 7,000 people, made up of the descendants of African slaves and Acadian exiles, centered around a national monument to society’s most cast out community, lepers. And still, in 2001, when St. Gabriel was designated as a city, it relied upon the population of people imprisoned in Elayn Hunt Correctional Center and Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women to meet the 5,000-people requirement to be incorporated.
Through centuries of hardship, trauma and displacement, the people here have always persisted, transforming St. Gabriel into a beautiful place to call home. The history in the cane fields and along the banks of the Mighty Mississippi are steeped in a sense of longing so prevalent, it touched me to my core, even before I knew why.
In learning the history of those exiled to St. Gabriel, I’ve drawn the strength to face my homesickness for the first time in over a decade. Their stories made my longing for home seem insignificant, almost silly.
I’ll never knock on the door, nor will I loiter on Lawrence Parkway again. But there will still be days I head straight down Highway 30, roll the windows down and wave to neighbors who do not know me. Hazy memories of discovering kumquats, scavenging for treasure, and the corn maze no longer tug me into the city limits. Now, I ride alongside the cyclists and enjoy picturesque Bayou Paul Lane, thinking about all the people who have made this place their home whilst longing for a home elsewhere, and seeing—in all that they left behind—a horizon for new beginnings.
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