Le Grand Dérangement — How Acadians Made a Country in the Bayou

They were expelled from Canada after the Seven Years' War. The Acadians who survived the deportation reached Louisiana in waves through the 1760s and after, and the bayou country took them in. They settled along Bayou Teche among the Attakapa-Ishak peoples already living there, and the cultural interplay that followed — Acadian, Creole, enslaved African, free people of color, Native — is what Louisiana's first state park, opened at Maison Olivier in 1934, was built to interpret. In 1821, an Acadian named Jean Mouton donated land for a Catholic chapel along the Vermilion River; the settlement that grew around it became Lafayette. The language survived in the kitchens, the music, the parish lines. It still does.