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LOREAUVILLE, La. (WAFB) - The small village of Loreauville has become ground zero for the beginning of Acadiana, the area of southwest Louisiana where exiled French Acadians settled and held onto their French language customs and culture for nearly 260 years.

Loreauville has a monument on Bayou Teche that commemorates the arrival of those first 200 Acadian settlers led by Joseph Beausoleil Broussard.

“We knew that the Acadian settled here with the, you know, a family name of Broussard being so prevalent here in, in Loreauville,” said Mayor of Loreauville, Brad Clifton.

But getting to this point follows 10 years of research. A team of archaeologists and students from nearby University of Louisiana Lafayette dug for old household artifacts and searched for unmarked graves in old family cemeteries, hoping to identify the spot where those first Acadians built their homes and were buried.

“Based on the maps that we found the portages, and based on the artifacts that we found on the ground, these are the three high probability areas that we’d like to go back and do more work,” Dr. Mark Rees of ULL said.

ULL archeology professor, Dr. Rees, has been leading the search effort. His team has found pieces of pottery that date from the 1760s when the first Acadians settled here.

“Like this, uh, tin enameled ceramic date from the right time period. It’s just that if we find the artifacts on the locations that are land grants to the Acadians, then we have two independent lines of evidence to suggest that, uh, people were living there in the 1760s and that the land is claimed by Acadians six or seven years later,” said Dr. Rees.

It’s also known that 39 of the first 200 Acadian settlers died of disease within months of arriving in this region.

“I firmly believe that while we don’t know today exactly where the burials of the 39 Acadians are, that the, the sons and daughters knew exactly where their parents and grandparents were buried, that perhaps they wanted to use it continuously as a graveyard, as a cemetery,” continued Dr. Rees.

Dr. Rees remains hopeful that the location of those very first settlements can be found, but enough is known to link Loreauville with a site of the Acadian expulsion in Nova Scotia 2000 miles away. Why is it important to Loreauville to be able to find and to identify and then to celebrate this moment in history?

“We’ve really gotten to a point where we understand that the visitors from Canada want to come and see actual places that their ancestors were able to create that Nouvelle Acadie, the new Acadia, that they were striving to, to create,” said Mayor Clifton.

The bronze plaque is a link to an exiled people who brought their families, their language, and culture to this far away land for a new beginning, a new Acadie.

More information on the first Acadians can be found on Heart of Louisiana’s website.

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