Kaplan — The Dutch Town on the Prairie

Abrom Kaplan, a Jewish merchant from the Midwest, bought a section of Cajun Prairie in 1902 and began selling plots. The flat, wet land drew Dutch immigrants who recognized the terrain — they built a Reformed church and established dairy farms. In a region shaped by Acadian expulsion and resettlement, where French-speaking Catholic families had made the land their own after being driven from Canada, Kaplan became something else entirely: a Dutch Reformed settlement on Louisiana prairie. Dutch and Cajun Catholic families have worked the same fields in Vermilion Parish for over a century. Rice paddies and crawfish ponds now cover the land their ancestors first broke. The Reformed church still stands. It is an ethnic pairing no other town in the parish shares, a cultural footnote that exists because one merchant saw farmland and others saw home. Nobody outside Acadiana knows it happened.