An old house worth saving

The St. Landry Preservationist Society recognized the importance of the two-centuries-old Prudhomme house in the 1970s, when the nonprofit group scraped up the wherewithal to acquire it. The old treasure is even more important today, but it’s in trouble.
It is almost certainly the oldest building in St. Landry Parish still on its original location, and that makes it one of the oldest in all Acadiana. When it was built, probably in the late 1790s, it was the center of a prosperous plantation. Today, it is hidden away on a half-acre of land, surrounded by the Opelousas General medical complex. Nobody’s lived in it for decades.
Over the years, donations and membership dues have allowed the preservationist society to make essential repairs – but that hasn’t been easy, and it isn’t getting any easier. Today, the house and the society that supports it are facing some major issues. The needed repairs are no longer cosmetic; they’re structural, and costly. Its recent inclusion in the Opelousas historic district will make the house – also known as Ringrose – eligible for some federal and state grants, but those are not as easy to get as they once were, take time for approval and funding, and often require matching money or in-kind contributions.
The biggest problem right now appears to be with a crumbling cypress column that helps to support the roof, though there are other big issues as well. The price tag to repair that one column is in the $5,000 range. When it goes, at least part of the roof could also tumble.
The money is worth spending on this old house. Besides being what the National Register of Historic Places calls “an excellent example of 18th century French-influenced building,” it is a monument to much of the history of the Opelousas Post and the area around it.
Most researchers think Michel Prudhomme, a young blacksmith from Strausbourg, in the Alsace region of eastern France, came to Louisiana about 1759, stopping first on the so-called German Coast (the area around des Allemands) before coming to the Opelousas area. In 1774 he paid 70 piasters to Antoine Pilette for a big piece of land, 120 arpents of which he later gave to the St. Landry Church, along with enough lumber from a cypress swamp bordering his property to build a church and rectory as well as a jail. I tried to figure out how much 70 piastres would be in today’s money; suffice it to say I’m better with words than with figures. It was probably a substantial sum.
When Prudhomme built his house, about 100 families were living at Opelousas, a military post established about 1720. It is interesting to note that this was one of the few early settlements that was not on a navigable body of water. Almost all of Louisiana’s early communities were on waterways because boats were the best way to get around. Opelousas, according to most histories, was established at the intersection of two Indian trails. The post became a stopping point for travelers going to and from Louisiana’s first two towns, Natchitoches and New Orleans.
There apparently had not been even a chapel at the old Opelousas fort until Prudhomme made his donation for a church. According to an old record, “At the fort there was … no place where [the visiting priest] could offer the holy sacrifice but a room open to all, even to poultry, so that a hen once flew on the altar, just as he was finishing Mass.”
Union officers used the Prudhomme home during the occupation of Opelousas in 1863, Civil War records recount how they “stood on the second-story balcony and used it as an observation post,” from which they could “see the numerous troops that were camped out on the grounds around the house and the new church.”
The Ringrose family bought the house in 1894 and gave the plantation and manor the family name. The house stayed in that family until 1945, when Ruth Fontenot bought it.
In many ways, she and the house belonged together. She was born Ruth Alexander Robertson, daughter of William Alexander “Alex” Robertson and Marie Céleste “Lelle” Dupré, and was a direct decedent of Gov. Jacques Dupré of Opelousas and of Gabriel Fuselier de la Claire, the fourth commandant of Poste des Opelousas.
After acquiring the plantation home, she became known as the “gracious Châtelaine of Ringrose Plantation.” She was a noted historian of the region and an accomplished artist, and was known to ring the old plantation bell from time to time to summon neighbors and family to her historic home for a gathering that invariably included stories of days gone by.
Mrs. Fontenot lived at Ringrose until 1975, when the preservation society acquired it and placed it on the National Register. Documents associated with that placement note: “This house is representative of a type which is becoming increasingly rare in Louisiana, and as such should be recognized and preserved.”
Those words are even truer today than when they were first written 40 years ago.
If you’d like to help preserve this important piece of Acadiana history, you can contact the Opelousas Tourism Commission, (337) 948-6263, or James Douget, president of the preservationist society, (337) 942-8011.

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