Concordia Parish, Louisiana: History
=== Prehistory ===
Concordia Parish was the home to many successive Native American cultures for thousands of years before European encounter. Peoples of the Marksville culture, Troyville culture, Coles Creek culture and Plaquemine culture built villages and earthwork mound sites throughout the area. Notable examples include Cypress Grove Mound, DePrato Mounds, Frogmore Mound Site, and Lamarque Landing Mound.
Historic Native American tribes encountered by early French explorers and colonists were the following:
Concordia was named by Anglo-American settlers for a Latin word meaning "harmony". They came mostly after the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, when the United States took over this formerly French colonial area west of the Mississippi. Like other parishes of the lands along the Mississippi River, in the antebellum era, the parish was developed for cotton cultivation on large plantations. The labor-intensive crop was profitable because of the labor of enslaved African Americans.
In 1789, Don Jose Vidal, a resident of Natchez, MS and later the founder of the city of Vidalia, LA asked for land grants to move his family from Natchez to the other side of the Mississippi River. In Natchez, there was a mansion built called Concord (Natchez, Mississippi), this
was a residence lived in by Spanish governors. Vidal moved his family across the Mississippi River to the Louisiana side after the time era of the US began.
The Mansion started the name "Concord" and ultimately later led to the birth of what would be Concordia Parish. During the year of 1804, a ceremony of transfer was held and the citizens and Mayor of Natchez crossed over to the Louisiana side of the Mississippi to honor the new land that was founded. The Mansion was later struck by fire in the early 20th century (1901) and burned down. Natchez people also lived on both sides of the land.
"Concordia County" was a creation of the first Legislative Council held in New Orleans on December 2, 1804. Its territory that included parts of the present parishes of East Carroll, Madison, and Tensas. Land between the Mississippi, Red, Black, and Tensaw rivers comprised the early local administration of Concordia.
Because Concordia's alluvial soil was unusually productive for cotton growing, it attracted large plantations, whose owners enslaved a very high number of people. In 1860, slaves made up 91 percent of Concordia Parish's residents, the highest percentage of any Louisiana parish. Only two counties in the United States — Washington and Issaquena counties in Mississippi — had a higher percentage of its population enslaved. As might be expected, the small number of white cotton planters in Concordia were fierce defenders of chattel slavery and strongly backed the Confederacy during the American Civil War.