Turn back history’s dusty pages and Lafayette’s past is revealed in bright colors, rich aromas and a cacophony of appealing sounds.
Here’s what settlers must have embraced first about this area — rolling, verdant, virgin land that welcomed subsistence farm families who survived on what they could grow or hunt. They brought with them a rustic cuisine, often prepared in three pots: one for a main dish, one for rice and one for an available vegetable. To their kitchen skills they eventually added new techniques borrowed from West Africans, French, Spanish, Italians.
And Acadians carried with them ballads from France and Nova Scotia, later enlivened by the accordion, and presented the world with a culture replete with hard work, self-reliance, great food and culturally rich and identifiable music.
As influential as Acadians were in settling Lafayette, and the village of Vermilionville before it, Louisiana Creoles, Native Americans, Germans, Swiss and European French eventually all made the census pages early in the town’s history. Vermilionville and its outlying communities welcomed industrious outsiders.
But Lafayette was not all gumbo and fiddles. Post Civil War, it became a rail town and developed into a center of learning, of commerce and industry, an energy and health center. New people and the good influence of new cultures and people all had their own, individual impacts.
An early influence in Vermilionville was the Roman Catholic Church; much of the population was Catholic. Town life revolved around the square where the church, now the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist, was located. The third of three churches built on the site — in 1916 — was grand enough to be acceptable as a cathedral for the new diocese in 1918. But like other aspects of Lafayette life, the community also welcomed those of other faiths to town. Lafayette people who grew into leadership roles and made enormous impacts on the principal city and beyond included French Huguenots, Jews, Baptists, Methodists and those of other faiths.
Another early influence was the emerging influence of what was to evolve into the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Its initial goals were to provide something akin to a high school education and some vocational training for local youngsters. But within two decades, it was offering college courses as Lafayette Parish moved into the age of oil exploration, business and commercial development. Today, it has arrived into a new era of entrepreneurship, STEM research and big ideas, even as it safeguards and expands our knowledge of the region’s roots.
Viewpoints expressed in this section about Lafayette’s 200th anniversary have less to do with the city’s past and more to do with its future. How will our community shape its future?
How will the biggest agent of change in this community — UL Lafayette, an elite research institution — drive tomorrow? How will Lafayette people build on what their forbears provided and educate their children — and their children’s children — to be globally competitive? How might we do business locally and globally? How will we recognize the divine in life and how will that influence us? How will we build on our cultural past to create our cultural future?
Lafayette’s capacity to prosper and thrive was created on the prairie and along the coastline by people who treasured their past but gazed toward their future. How might this generation accomplish the same? And the generations to follow?
Ken Stickney was the metro editor at The Acadiana Advocate.
