Migration

Nearly 3000 years ago, the Bayou Teche was part of the main course of the Mississippi River, bringing the earliest migrants to settle the region. A natural process of switching course, however, rerouted the Mississippi, making the Bayou Teche a separate waterway. For centuries after, American Indian nations—the Atakapas-Ishak and Chitimacha—settled along the waterfront to fish in its waters, plant crops in the nutrient-rich soil along its banks, and engage in a complex trading system that stretched up and down the waterfront.  

By the 18th century, European colonial settlers and their descendants were rapidly moving into the region and began developing an agricultural society. Prior to the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, French, Acadian (French Speakers from today’s Maritime provinces of Canada), and Spanish settlers populated the Bayou Teche, growing indigo, cotton, and sugar for market. Anglo-American settlers, though a minority among the migrants, also began to make their way to southern Louisiana as the United States expanded westward.  The region’s soil and climate made it so that sugar production thrived, but with it, so too did a brutal system of enslavement. American Indians, Africans primarily from the Bight of Benin, Senegambia, and West- Central Africa, and their descendants who were born in America’s upper South and arrived via these water routes in the 19th century were forced to labor under the harsh conditions of a sugar plantation economy. This enslaved population and their descendants would shape the culture and communities of the Bayou.

The People of the Shadows

Mary Conrad Weeks:

Mary Conrad’s family was among the earliest Anglo migrants who moved to the Attakapas region after the Louisiana Purchase. As early as 1805 the Conrad family had left Virginia and were living in the Natchez, Mississippi area.  By 1808, they had traveled on to Louisiana to live with Mary’s maternal grandmother, Ann Thruston, on a plantation on the Bayou Teche between Jeanerette and New Iberia.

In 1818, at age 21, Mary met, was courted by, and married the son of another migrant family—the 32-year-old David Weeks.

David Weeks

The Weeks family was one of the few Anglo-American families to make their way to Louisiana before 1803. William Weeks, David’s father, was already settled in the Felicianas near St. Francisville, Louisiana when David was born in 1786. Ten years later, William Weeks paid for a survey of Grand Côte Island—soon to be renamed Weeks Island. By 1818, the family owned nearly 2000 acres in the Felicianas and Attakapas regions, growing cotton on the Felicianas property and sugarcane in the Attakapas.