[StBernard] Delacroix was insulated from history by wetlands: Part two of four

Westley Annis westley at da-parish.com
Mon Aug 2 08:46:52 EDT 2010


Delacroix was insulated from history by wetlands: Part two of four
Published: Monday, August 02, 2010, 6:30 AM Updated: Monday, August 02,
2010, 7:12 AM
Bob Marshall, The Times-Picayune

As children Henry Martinez, Lloyd Serigne and Thomas Gonzales never
questioned why their home village of Delacroix was located deep in a
wetlands wilderness 30 miles south of New Orleans. It wasn't just a great
place for children -- with woods and bayous, marshes and swamps, fishing,
hunting and hundreds of friends and neighbors -- it also seemed like a
logical place for a growing, bustling community.

"We didn't feel isolated or anything," Serigne said. "To us, living there
seemed the way life was supposed to be. It just seemed like someone made a
smart decision."

History has another story, one that involves national ambitions in the age
of global imperialism, royal decrees, civil wars and traumatic social
upheavals.

It turns out the wetlands community of Delacroix, which thrived on the banks
of Bayou terre aux Boeufs for 200 years, was never meant to be.

"The people who left the Canary Islands never intended to live in the area
around what would become Delacroix," said William de Marigny Highland, St.
Bernard Parish historian, and president of Los Islenos Heritage and Cultural
Society. "This is a complicated story."

It begins in the late 1777, a period when the Canary Islands were not the
vacation mecca they are today. The archipelago off the northwest coast of
Africa was a strategically important staging area for Spain's colonial
ambitions in the New World, but it was a hard life for residents. They
struggled to scratch out a living on a dry, rocky landscape, with disease
and famine constant companions.


So when King Phillip III offered houses, a stipend and -- most important --
free holdings on fertile land in the far-off colony of Louisiana, it was no
surprise the response was overwhelming. The government had sought 700
volunteers; more than 2,000 would eventually make the trip.

King Phillip had a specific demographic in mind, according to historian
Gilbert Din. "The recruits were required to be from 17 to 36 years old,
healthy, without vices, and at least 5' 1/2" tall. Butchers, gypsies,
mulattoes, and executioners were not permitted to sign up."

The offer of new homes and land to this group was not an act of charity by
the king, but a move to protect his ambitions.

"Spain had acquired New Orleans from France and knew that holding that city
was the key to checking England's ideas for expanding its dominion west of
the Mississippi River," Hyland explained. "Whoever controlled New Orleans,
controlled the Mississippi River valley from the Gulf to Canada.

"Only about 4,000 people -- Europeans and slaves -- lived in New Orleans at
the time. Spain knew it needed more residents and settlements to protect its
claim."

New Orleans was vulnerable to attack via the high ground next to the river,
Hyland said, so Spain wanted to develop communities to address that
vulnerability.

The first Canary Islanders stepped off the Santisimo Sacramento in New
Orleans on Nov. 1, 1778, and by July of the next year almost 1,600 had made
the crossing. The newcomers would start four new settlements. Two would be
north of the city: Valenzuela, at the point where Bayou Lafourche left the
Mississippi River, near present-day Donaldsonville; and Galveztown, on the
Amite River off Lake Maurepas. Two would be south of the city; one on the
west bank of the river at Barataria, and the other on the east bank south of
the city at Saint Bernard -- San Barnardo to the Spanish newcomers.

"St. Bernard would become an area of plantations growing everything from
indigo and sugar cane to rice and vegetables, and raising livestock," Hyland
said. "Most of the Canary Islanders would settle in that area and work on
those plantations, as well as producing some of their own crops and goods on
their own properties."

The plantations occupied prime property along Bayou Terre aux Boeufs, which
at that time flowed directly from the Mississippi River. Centuries of annual
floods had spread rich alluvial soils and created high ground. The
plantation names are carried by many current communities: Poydras, Toca, St.
Bernard, Creedmore, Kenilworth and Contreras.

"This became a very prosperous area." Hyland said. "One of the first
railroads in the country would be built down there to carry goods to New
Orleans markets. Many of the residents would speak Spanish at home, but
learned French so they could do business in the city."

And Bayou Terre aux Boeufs was the main thoroughfare. The waterway flowed
south and east all the way to Chandeleur Sound, twisting through the wild
wetlands on the edges of the great delta. Trappers, fishermen and hunters
had outposts there, but otherwise the area was the domain of runaway slaves
and a few Native Americans.
The Civil War would change all that.

"The war destroyed the plantation culture," said Hyland. "Many of the Canary
Islanders no longer had jobs. They also didn't have property.

"So when they began looking for a place to settle -- to squat -- they
already knew about this area down Terre aux Boeufs that was owned by a
Frenchman who had never come to Louisiana."

The property was called La Isla du de la Croix -- the island belonging to
Francois du Suau de la Croix. It was a large section of high ridges, swamps
and marsh along both sides of Bayou Terre aux Boeufs, about 10 miles from
the plantations.

It was known simply as La Isla -- The Island -- because bayous, small lakes
and swamps surrounded a large tract of high ground. Sugar had been planted
in the area, but little else. It was still wild land, yet nature had plenty
to offer.

Los Islenos -- The Islanders, as the new settlers would become known --
could fish for shrimp, crabs, trout and turtles. They could trap fur-bearing
animals like mink and muskrat and otter, hunt ducks and geese and deer and
pick moss for furniture. They had plenty of high, dry land to grow
vegetables and crops, raise livestock, and build their homes from the
cypress and oak they also harvested.

They could consume everything they took from the land and they could also
sell it to markets in the city.

"They developed a subsistence lifestyle, but they weren't poor," Hyland
said. "They flourished."

The success of Delacroix led to other settlements, and by the 1930s a string
of communities were growing on the high bayou ridges on the St. Bernard
delta, including Reggio, Ycloskey, Shell Beach and Hopedale.

Even as world wars and economic upheaval ignited profound changes in the
nation and in New Orleans, life on the bayous, insulated from history by the
wetlands, changed little. Residents, spoke Spanish, married, started new
families and built new houses.

"My parents and my grandparents only spoke Spanish because they didn't know
English, and they didn't know English because they didn't need it,"
Gonzales, 72, explained. "And none of us kids spoke English until we went to
school -- if we went.

"I didn't know that made us any different from people on the outside, 'cause
we hardly ever went outside!"

Few residents ever left because, as Henry Martinez explained, there was no
reason to leave. They had everything they wanted in the world of Delacroix.




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