Anna "Nanette" DuParc (Prud'homme)

From "Memories of the Old Plantation Home" by Laura Locoul Gore, pp. 122-124:

"Anna "Nanette" Prudhomme was born at Fort St. Jean-Baptiste in Natchitoches, a third generation Louisianian. Nanette's French-Canadian ancestors had emigrated from Quebec with Iberville in 1699 to settle the Louisiana wilderness. Before coming to French Canada, Nanette's great-grandfather Prudhomme had been court physician to the French King Louis XV. Such a noble connection ensured the Prudhomme family a firm social standing in Louisiana under both French and Spanish rule.

"Pierre Rousseau, Guillaume Duparc's comrade-in-arms, was the Spanish Commandante At Natchitoches when he introduced his cousin-by-marriage, Nanette, to the bachelor Duparc, at a military ball. Guillaume was 32 and Nanette, delicate, but strong in character, was 20. Courship ensued and they were married in Natchitoches in 1788. Nanette's Creole family was one of Louisiana's oldest and Duparc was a highly decorated and richly rewarded military hero. It was a marriage intended to be of social equals.

"The couple's first years together were quiet, spent in the cotton farming region, not far from the Prudhomme relatives' plantations and townhouses in Natchitoches. This is where their first child, Louis, was born. Nanette left Natchitoches when King Carlos IV of Spain appointed Duparc as Commandante of the Post of Pointe Coujpee in central Louisiana. Here, where their next two children, Flagy and Elisabeth, were born, the life of a Spanish Commandante was one crisis after another; French and Spanish feuds, Indian and slave uprisings.

"Abrupt change came with the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. Aided with land grants, the couple moved to their new plantation on the Mississippi River. Thirty months later, at age 41, Nanette was a widowed mother with 3 children and a sugar plantation with 17 slaves to operate.

"Louisiana's legal code gave Nanette rights of inheritance as well as property rights. With these privileges, Nanette took control of the fledging sugarcane enterprise, becoming the first of four generations of women to manage this plantation. In a period of 21 years, she had established the Duparc Plantation as a major producer of sugar, all the while diversifying the business into other crops, lumber and livestock, with great success. In 1829, at 61 years of age, Nanette retired, handing the plantation businesses to her three children.

"Being a country girl at heart, and no longer a member of the plantation household, Nanette resisted the Creole imperitive to leave the farm and live in New Orleans, a city she believed to be full of 'clumsy, gauche and socially inferior Americans.' So, she built her own retirement home, a 6,900 sq. ft. retreat house, just 500 ft. away from the plantation manor house, where she could live, albeit independently from the family business. Nanette called the place her 'maison de reprise,' her house where she could start life all over again.

"While residing 'right next door,' Nanette shrewdly negotiated with her children a unique settlement in which she would receive a payment of 1,000 piastres per year, which amounted to a sort of retirement or consultant stipend. In today's money, the amount equates to approximately $75,000 per year. Nanette resided for 33 years at her maison, living off her annual payment and attended by the same two female slaves, Henriette and Nina.

"In April of 1862, the Civil War came to the very gates of the sugar plantation. After capturing New Orleans, the Union Navy sailed upriver, shelling 40 plantation manor houses in St. James Parish, all whose owners had not signed the Oath of Allegiance to the United States. When the flotilla neared the Duparc property, the rest of the family fled, leaving the lame and senile Nanette with the slaves. The USS Essex bombarded the manor house, hitting the place four times. When the smoke had cleared, Nanette had disappeared, 94 years of age."