Evangeline would have to cross Iberia Parish to get to St. Martin Parish's southern boundary. Why? (2024)

The configuration of St. Martin Parish is strange.

That's not saying some of the state's other 63 parishes aren't carved out in strange shapes. Jefferson Parish, alone, is a stretch from the New Orleans area to Grand Isle.

Clay Myers' question wasn't so much about the shape of St. Martin Parish but why it's carved out in two pieces— that don't connect to each other.

While driving through St. Martin, the Central resident noticed that he had to enter Iberia Parish before he could reach the southern portion of St. Martin Parish.

"So, why aren't these two pieces of St. Martin Parish connected as a whole?" Myers asked.

When looking at a Louisiana map, it's clear that Iberia Parish slices through St. Martin Parish, creating a divide. Meanwhile, the St. Martin Parish website's logo, at stmartinparish.net, is "Where Cajun Began." But did it begin in two places?

Louisiana historian Michael Martin, professor of history at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, said the story is one handed down through generations.

"St. Martin Parish was formed in 1811, and Iberia Parish was formed in 1868, and the story is that there was a survey error— although I'm not really finding any definitive evidence of that," he said. "I'm not necessarily saying it's wrong, but I'm just saying it just seems like people have just passed this story off for generations about why it happened."

The parish government's website provides key information about St. Martin, though it doesn't mention its split location.

"The St. Martin Parish Government seat is located in St. Martinville, about 25 minutes southeast of Lafayette in the 'heart of Acadiana,'" the site states. "The Parish has a population of 51,767. Agriculture and aquaculture play a significant role in the economy of the parish, with sugar cane being the major commercial agricultural crop and crawfish being the major aquacultural crop."

As for its motto, "Where Cajun Began," the website offers a concise history of the Acadian people's 1765 settlement in the area.

"It can be said that Acadiana was born when 200 members of the Acadian resistance settled around present-day St. Martinville in 1765," the website states. "They referred to South Louisiana as La Nouvelle Acadie, or New Acadia."

The Acadian resistance is a reference to the French Catholics who were exiled from Acadia, Canada, by the British in the 1700s. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's epic poem, "Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie" tells the story of the Acadians through a fictional girl's experience.

A monument to Longfellow's main character can be found behind St. Martin de Tours Catholic Church, in the parish seat of St. Martinville. The seated Evangeline is located down the street from the Evangeline Oak on the Bayou Teche, where, legend has it, Evangeline waited years for the arrival of her fiancé, Gabriel.

But, again, Longfellow's poem is a fictional account, and if you read the entire piece, you'll learn that Evangeline hit the road in search of Gabriel. Even the statue is actually a likeness of actress Delores Del Rio, who played the character in the 1929 film, "Evangeline."

But even if Evangeline's story was true, it would have happened almost 50 years before St. Martin Parish was formed from parts of Attakapas and St. Mary parishes.

And though Martin did not find a definitive account of its formation, he did discover some information that may dispute the theory of a surveyor's error.

Martin's research led him to Grover Rees' 1975 book, "A Narrative History of Breaux Bridge, Once Called 'La Pointe.'" published by the St. Martinville: Attakapas Historical Association.

Page 15 of that book states, ". . . and, finally, in 1868, parts of St. Martin and St. Mary parishes were cut away to form 'Iberia Parish,' leaving St. Martin Parish cut into two sections, one north of Iberia Parish and the other southeast of it, the area around Stephensville. This isolated part of St. Martin Parish, then considered a 'left over' and not wanted by Iberia Parish, is now very valuable for its mineral resources."

"This passage of 'not wanted by Iberia Parish' is definitely different from a 'surveyor's error,' although Rees provides no further information about why," Martin said.

And though Wikipedia is never a reliable source, it sometimes offers interesting information that can be researched elsewhere for verification. Which is why Martin mentions yet another theory posed by the website.

"Wikipedia's statement about Iberia Parish being part of 'an effort by the Reconstruction-era government to create parishes in which there would be large Republican-majority populations, composed primarily of freedmen in those years' is intriguing, but the citation offered does not actually say that," he said. "If the splitting of St. Martin Parish was really a form a what we would today call racial gerrymandering, that would be pretty significant."

Otherwise, Martin could only find the basic documentation of the Louisiana Legislature's 1868 formation of Iberia Parish outlined in the Nov. 18, 1868, edition of the now gone New Orleans Republican newspaper.

The account doesn't say why Iberia Parish's boundaries infringed on Evangeline's home parish of St. Martin Parish. It simply documents the legislative act that created the parish.

"In a quick Google search, there are a few places that mention the surveyor's error, but there's no real documentation of it," Martin said.

So, in the end, 50 years later, if Evangeline decided to take a break from her vigil beneath the oak to visit relatives in the southernmost part of St. Martin Parish, she'd have to pass through New Iberia to get there.