The Cajun Capital of Texas
Some of Jim LaBove’s favorite childhood memories are the nights he spent at his Uncle George’s house, which stood on six-feet pylons sunk into the shores of a saltwater lake. He remembers, “After we’d completed all our work for the day”—fishing, trapping, shrimping, and the like—“we’d go under Uncle George’s house, with kerosene lanterns. Uncle George played the accordion. One of his sons would fill old Coke bottles with different amounts of water and play them with spoons. A cousin fashioned a T’fer out of scrap metal, another played guitar. Another cousin played the harmonica really well, and I played the harmonica poorly.” They’d sing old Cajun classics, like “La Port d'en Arriere,” and it was one of the only times the kids were allowed to speak French with their elders, without being scolded or spanked. “It was such a wonderful time.”
These nights, a time capsule of mid-century Cajun life at its purest, took place not in Louisiana at all, but in Texas—in Port Arthur, known to the Cajun locals as “Port-Ar-Ture” and to everyone else (including the Texas Legislature) as the “Cajun Capital of Texas”.
LaBove’s family are among the hundreds of Acadian descendants who embarked on the “second diaspora” of the Louisiana Cajun people. Following the devastation of the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927—the most destructive river flood in our nation’s history—people who had depended on the river and the lands surrounding it for their livelihoods turned West. Not only did Port Arthur, with its coastline and salt marshes, closely resemble the landscapes and ecosystems the Cajuns had long called home; but it also offered a path out of poverty. The area was quickly becoming a center of the country’s emerging petrochemical industry, and well-paying jobs were abundant at the new refineries.
On his mother’s side of the family, LaBove’s grandfather came to Port Arthur in the 1920s to work in the shipyards, “and he was able to continue trapping and hunting and fishing just like he did in the Atchafalaya Basin,” he said. His paternal grandfather, on the other hand, saw the opportunity in a growing community of working class Cajuns. Originally from Cameron, he moved his family across the Sabine River to set up whiskey stills where the authorities were less likely to bother with him: in the mosquito-infested salt marshes of Southeast Texas. “Cajuns have always been a little hostile to authority,” laughs LaBove.
And as they did when they were forced to move from Acadie to Louisiana, the Cajun people held tight to their identities. To this day, Louisiana Cajuns would find themselves right at home in Port Arthur, where their cousins have cultivated a world where French is heard on the radio, there is need for a local accordion maker, boudin is served at all the gas stations, and Saturdays are spent at the local restaurant-dancehalls. Port Arthur is even home to Texas’s largest concentration of gators!
Image courtesy of Visit Port Arthur Texas
Port Arthur native son Jim LaBove shows off a crab pulled from one of Port Arthur's many waterways
Early History of Port Arthur
Of course, long before the Cajuns arrived in Port Arthur, the area’s access to the resource-rich Gulf and coastal marshes sustained various other communities. Records from 1800 describe ceremonial mounds in nearby Port Neches indicating the presence of the nomadic Karankawa tribe, who were later displaced by the Attakapas—who had themselves been pushed out of the Vermilion River area in Louisiana by the French.
European explorers arrived in Port Arthur in the late 18th century from England, Spain, and France, and soon after Sabine Lake became an avenue for trade. Jean Lafitte’s operations on the adjacent Sabine River have given rise to long-held rumor of hidden treasure. Legend has it that he stole $2 million of silver from a Spanish galleon and then hid it in the Sabine.
Port Arthur was established in earnest in 1898 at the hands of Arthur E. Stilwell, founder of what is today the Kansas City Southern Railroad. Envisioning the city as a future hub of trade and tourism, Stilwell attracted financing from Dutch investors and established the Port Arthur Channel and Dock Co., which carved a canal along the edge of the lake, clearing the way for a commercial port. Drawn to the activity, colonists began to settle the area and build homes—many of them Dutch in style. In 1901, the Lucas Gusher eruption at Spindletop sparked the soon-to-be-monumental petrochemical industry—the center of which would come to be the port city beside the Sabine. And the rest, of course, is history.
To learn more about Port Arthur and the surrounding region, click HERE.
