re: What obscure piece of Louisiana history do you know?

andrew higgins is buried in a plain grave in metairie cemetery.

Bunkie is named as such bc the little girl of the towns mayor had a pet monkey and she was retarded. When the monkey got loose she ran through the house screaming Bunkie! Bunkie! Luckily, they were trying to name the town and Bunkie became the name

My great, great grandfather owned the land, and the springs, that are now Abita Springs, and his wife and son actually founded the town. It's origninal name was Bossier City, LONG before the Bossier City in NWLA.

My great great great great grandfather was Gen James Wilkerson, the first Governor of the Louisiana Territory in 1805. After his death it was discovered the bastard was a paid agent of the Spanish Crown.

Camp Lejeune in North Carolina is named after John A. Lejeune...who was born in Pointe Coupee parish and also attended a prep program at LSU.

The first capitol of Texas was in Louisiana - Los Adaes - just west of Natchitoches.

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Please do tell. Who is this? Give me a name, the number of slaves and your source.

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She was of mixed heritage and received the land and it's property from her husband

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In 1767, a Frenchman named Claude Thomas Pierre Metoyer met Marie Therese Coin-Coin from the Kongo and promptly fell in love. They became immediate occupants in Natchitoches, Louisiana where Marie and Claude lived together as man and wife. They had their first children together in January 1768, a set of twins. Things were rough going for the couple; the church would not have anything to do with the relationship and at this time Marie and her infant son Augustine were still enslaved. Early in 1776 Metoyer purchased his child and shortly after that in a private document he freed Marie and the child. Years later Marie and Metoyer broke up but, not before fathering six children. Marie stayed in Natchitoches and worked the Melrose plantation Claude Metoyer left for her; he then moved to New Orleans, left for France and married a proper French woman.

In 1778 free nonwhites were a very small minority in Natchitoches, Louisiana. By 1785, that had not changed. Marie, Augustine, and two additional sons born to her after manumission were half of the free nonwhite population. By 1786, she had eight children Augustine, Pierre, Joseph, Dominique, Francois, Toussaint, Louis, Marie Suzanne, four of whom were still enslaved.

From the money and land that Metoyer gave her, she started a plantation. The first crop was tobacco, and in 1792 she was shipping 9,900 rolls to Cuba for cigars (Mills, 30). She also produced indigo, manufactured medicine and the major source of her income came from hunting bears and fowl. All this was done with the help of her older sons, because she had no slaves at this time. She tried for nine years to free her other children from slavery and in 1815 when Metoyer died all her children were freed. In 1816 written Church documents show that she had twelve slaves, but local tradition credits her with many more. Marie Theresa now had three plots of land estimated at 11,000 acres. She was now in her late sixties and completely turned over the plantation to her children. She died sometime in the spring of 1816.

Augustine was now married and on his own since 1795. He was the first of Marie and Claude's children to acquire a plantation, and become a slave owner. Within two years he purchased his first slave, a male between the age of eighteen and twenty to help him clear the fields. Most of the slaves he bought were for labor, but he did purchase some for family devotion. In 1798, he bought his second slave, an eight-year-old named Marguerite who was his wife's sister. In 1800, $300 was paid for his third slave; this was a child of his still enslaved brother. The next year a slave named Marie was purchased and became Pierre’s wife. His second labor slave was purchased in 1806, a female to be the wife of the male he already owned. In June of 1809, Augustine purchased eight “African Negroes” for $3,500 cash: a male, five boys and two girls aged eleven to thirteen, and then three of the males were sold to his brother for $1,350. In 1810, he purchased two more slaves from a planter in the next county. Similar purchases and manumissions are recorded for of the Metoyer children. In 1810, Marie Suzanne purchased a slave costing $600; the peculiar thing was that she was still a slave herself. By the 1810 census Augustine had seventeen slaves; Louise, fifteen; Pierre, twelve; Dominique, eight; Francois, three; Joseph, two; and Toussaint, one. A total of fifty-eight slaves were acquired in just twelve years. The fifty-eight slaves had increased to 287 by the end of 1830. The Metoyer surname owned an average of 2.3 slaves per person, and the whites in the county only owned an average of .9 slaves per person. No other family group came close to matching the holdings of the Metoyer name.

The affluent period was between 1830 and 1840 for the Metoyer family. Pierre, one of the less prosperous brothers died in 1834 leaving a plantation of 677 acres, after giving his seven children land for their marriages. Augustine divided the land between six children and kept two plantations for himself, which contained 2,134 acres (Mills, 109). Early in 1850 the Metoyer family had improved their land by 5,667 acres and had a total of 436 slaves. In the treatment of Metoyer family slaves there are some contradictory statements.

When it came to the treatment of slaves black owners were “in a bind”. If they were nice to their slaves, they were considered by the whites to be overly tolerant. On the other hand, if they treated their slaves harshly the blacks would say they were abusive of “their people”. Legend has it that one of the original Metoyer brothers was a hard taskmaster, but not to his own slaves. He would try-out the slaves and makes them do the worst work on his plantation, things that he didn’t want his own slaves doing. After the work was done he would return the slave and claim poor working habits. That same tradition holds for one of the sisters also; there are also many written advertisements about runaway slaves that the Metoyer family put in the local newspaper. They occasionally hired a slave catcher to retrieve a slave. There is no real proof that the Metoyer family was any different from other slave owner’s black or white. Not all of the black slave owners worked and owned plantations. There were many black masters who were artisans and used slaves as workers. One of the most prominent of these owners was William Ellison.

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This should clear things up a bit for you

LINK

Human heads were put on sticks by Indians this giving br it's name