Poste des Attakapas — The First Settlement

Joseph Broussard — Beausoleil — fought the British in Nova Scotia for a decade after the Acadian expulsion. When he finally accepted exile in 1765, he led the first Acadian families to a French colonial post on Bayou Teche: Poste des Attakapas, built on Attakapas territory in the mid-1700s. The French colonial official Jean-Jacques Blaise d'Abbadie assigned them to this stretch of water. Broussard died within months of arriving in Louisiana. The post became St. Martinville. Broussard's descendants still live in the area — the surname is one of the most common in Acadiana, the twenty-two-parish region the Louisiana State Legislature officially recognized in 1971 for its Acadian cultural roots. Most Acadians trace their ancestry to approximately fifty families who lived in Port Royal, now Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia. They intermarried with other settlers and formed what became Cajun culture. The original colonial post site is not precisely marked. The town it seeded is still here. You're standing in the place where the exiles stopped running.