St. John the Baptist Parish, Louisiana: History
St. John the Baptist Parish was established in 1807 as one of the original 19 parishes of the Territory of Orleans, which became the state of Louisiana. St. John the Baptist Parish is part of the New Orleans–Metairie metropolitan statistical area.
The parish was considered part of the German Coast in the 18th and 19th centuries, named for numerous German immigrants who settled along the Mississippi River here in the 1720s. On January 8, 1811, the largest slave insurrection in US history, known as the German Coast Uprising, started here. It was short-lived, but more than 200 slaves gathered from plantations along the river and marched through St. Charles Parish toward New Orleans. This is part of the Sugarland or sugar parishes, which were devoted to sugar cane cultivation. Planters held large numbers of enslaved African Americans as workers before the Civil War. Many freedmen stayed in the area after emancipation because of their ties to family and associates. They worked as tenant farmers, and numerous freedmen stayed in the area to work on these plantations afterward.
The parish includes three nationally significant examples of 19th-century plantation architecture: Evergreen Plantation, the Whitney Plantation Historic District, and San Francisco Plantation House.
Present-day St. John the Baptist Parish includes the third permanent settlement in what is now the state of Louisiana, after Natchitoches (1714) and New Orleans (1718). It was considered part of the German Coast. The area was settled in the early 1720s by a group of German Catholic colonists. Many families established settlements close to the Mississippi River in the areas now known as Lucy, Garyville, and Reserve. The area was under the French regime until 1763, when France ceded Louisiana to Spain after losing the Seven Years' War to Great Britain (this was known as the French and Indian War on the North American front).
At the beginning of the Spanish colonial period, many Acadians, people of French descent, began arriving in south Louisiana due to being expelled by the British from what is now Nova Scotia and eastern Canada. The British took over French territory in Canada and in North America east of the Mississippi River. The first Acadian village in Louisiana was established in what is now Wallace. The German and French cultures thrived alongside one another, but French came to be the dominant language. They developed a culture known as Cajun.
In 1769, the Acadians who settled in the area began a search for land to build a church. The governing Spanish authority at the time approved the request, and the land was expropriated on February 21, 1770. The first church stood in the same location as the modern St. John the Baptist Church. The new church carried the same name as the original chapel of the German Coast settlement.
The first pastor was Spanish Capuchin Father Bernardo de Limpach. The first church records note a marriage between Antoine Manz and Sibylla Bischof in 1772. The first church survived until being swept away by floodwaters in 1821.
The early settlers in the area received land grants from the Spanish or French royal governments, depending upon which country ruled the territory at the time of application. The French style of property allotments was made up of narrow frontage on the river so that each plantation had access for transportation of goods to and from New Orleans and world markets. …