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Please add profiles of those who were born, lived or died in St. John the Baptist Parish, Louisiana.
Official Website
St. John the Baptist Parish was established in 1807 as one of the original 19 parishes of the Territory of Orleans, which became the state of Louisiana.
This was considered part of the German Coast in the 18th and 19th centuries, named for numerous German immigrants who settled along the Mississippi River here in the 1720s.
At the beginning of the Spanish colonial period, many Acadians, people of French descent, began arriving in south Louisiana due to being expelled by the British from what is now Nova Scotia. The British took over French territory in Canada and in North America east of the Mississippi river. The first Acadian village was established in what is now Wallace, Louisiana. The German and French cultures thrived alongside one another, but French came to be the dominant language. They developed a culture known as Cajun
On January 8, 1811, the largest slave insurrection in US history, known as the German Coast Uprising, started here. It was short-lived, but more than 200 slaves gathered from plantations along the river and marched through St. Charles Parish toward New Orleans. This is part of the Sugarland or sugar parishes, which were devoted to sugar cane cultivation. Planters used large numbers of slaves before the war, and numerous freedmen stayed in the area to work on these plantations afterward.
Adjacent Parishes
- St. Charles Parish
- Lafourche Parish
- St. James Parish
- Ascension Parish
- Livingston Parish
- Tangipahoa Parish
Communities
- Cornland
- Dutch Bayou
- Edgard (Parish Seat)
- Frenier
- Garyville
- LaPlace
- Lions
- Mount Airy
- Pleasure Bend
- Reserve
- Ruddock
- Wallace
- Welcome
Cemeteries
Links
National Register of Historic Places
Slaveholders & Surname Matches - 1860 & 1870 censuses
German-Acadian Coast Historical & Genealogical Society
St. John the Baptist Parish Gen Web
Abstracts of the Civil War Records of St. John the Baptist Parish
