Hope for another old home

Even though it is only 10 miles up the road from my house, I was only vaguely aware of the old Alexander Fontenot home until an architect from New Orleans told me that the family that owns it is talking about restoring it.
The old Creole-style plantation home sits just off Hwy. 103 near the St. Landry Parish community of Grand Prairie. It’s been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1982, but has been vacant for some time. It was built about 1845 by Alexandre Fontenot fils, son of Alexandre Charles Fontenot.
The younger Fontenot was a great-grandson of Jean Louis Fontenot, a French soldier who was sent to Mobile and who is considered the progenitor of the huge Fontenot clan in south Louisiana.
When the Treaty of Paris transferred the Mobile area from French to English ownership in 1763, many of the French settlers moved to Louisiana. Six Fontenot brothers went to New Orleans, then moved upriver to Pointe Coupee. They moved from there to St. Landry Parish, settling on Bayou Courtableau near Washington.
One of those brothers was Jean Baptiste Fontenot, who married Marie Louise Lagrange. They had three sons and 15 grandsons. Their son Alexandre Charles, who married Adrienne Deshotels, apparently moved to the Grand Prairie area to raise cattle.
He was apparently not alone. Robert C. West, who did extensive research on Louisiana families with French names, writes that between 1811 and 1822 “nearly 50 members of the various Fontenot families had registered cattle brands,” most of them living in St. Landry and Evangeline parishes.
Biographer William Henry Perrin describes Alexandre Charles’s son, the younger Alexandre, as “a merchant and planter on quite an extensive scale” who was “one of St. Landry’s most prominent citizens.” He bought the property where the old house sits at an auction in March 1845, linking it to adjacent property he’d acquired in 1838.
According to National Register documents, the house he built is architecturally important because “it is almost pure French” Unlike many of the Creole plantation homes built about that time, the documents note, “there is almost no input from the then growing Anglo-American influence.” It is also unusual because it still has almost all of its original windows, doors and hardware.
It was the center of a prosperous plantation. According to an inventory in 1850, the year Alexandre died at the age of 46, he owned 26 horses, 550 cattle, 60 sheep, and 30 swine. In that year the plantation produced 1,500 bushels of corn, 3,000 pounds of cotton, and 150 bushels of sweet potatoes.
Alexandre’s son Ozeme, bought the plantation from his mother, the former Hyacinth Jaubert, in 1881. He’d fought with the Second Louisiana Cavalry during the Civil War, ran the plantation for his mother when he came home, and finally bought it. According to Perrin, he operated “a beautiful and fertile plantation of over one thousand acres of land, which he cultivates in cotton.”
Perrin notes, “A cotton gin, located near the plantation house, was operated during the late 1800s and served the whole community. The ginning of cotton was an important operation for over 80 years at the Fontenot plantation.”
Ozeme and his wife, Ernestine Debaillon, had only one child, Alma, who married Dr. James Parker of Ville Platte. When Ozeme died in 1927 at the age of 81, his grandson George Parker Sr. inherited the place and it was eventually passed on to his sons and grandsons.
The Parker family still owns the plantation home and is now looking into ways to restore it.
A substantial collection of Ozeme’s letters, plantation and business records, old newspaper clippings, and other documents can be found at the Hill Memorial Library at LSU. They reveal the rich history of this old house and the family that lived in it, and testify to why it is an important piece of south Louisiana history.

You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.