Until the 1940s, Lafayette was a Cajun market town built around sugarcane and cotton. Then offshore drilling arrived in the Gulf of Mexico, and everything changed. The first offshore oil well in history was drilled out of sight of land on November 14, 1947 — near Morgan City, 60 miles south. Lafayette sat at the intersection of I-10 and I-49, close enough to the Gulf to serve the industry, big enough to house it. Maurice Heymann built the Oil Center in 1952, and within seven years had 250 oil and gas companies under one roof. The city that had been defined by Cajun French, Catholic tradition, and the agricultural calendar was remade by roughnecks, engineers, and geologists from Houston and Oklahoma. The oil money built hospitals, universities, and arenas. The oil bust of the 1980s emptied office buildings and sent families to Houston. The boom-bust cycle has repeated. Through all of it, the Cajun culture that predates oil has proven more durable than the industry that tried to replace it.