by Dr. Jay Edwards
Between August and October of 1755, approximately fifty-four hundred Acadian peasants, living behind British lines in Nova Scotia, were sent into exile in the American colonies, England and France (Brasseaux 1987: 24-25). Ten years later, after the Seven Years (French and Indian) War, remnants of this wretched population began arriving in Louisiana. Perhaps three thousand Acadians arrived at New Orleans between 1764 and 1786 (Ancelet, Edwards and Pitre 1991: 12-14). The population was quickly dispersed into the bayous, swamps and prairies of southern Louisiana.
Following a brief period of adjustment and complex resettlement movements, the Acadian exiles adopted the pre-existing Creole culture of the area and transformed it into something uniquely their own. Within a generation they had become the dominant ethnic group of Louisiana, outnumbering the French Creoles and the Germans, and acculturating members of other ethnic groups to their distinctive way of life.
In 1755, England had suddenly expelled almost 6,000 of the approximately 16,000 Acadians who resided behind British lines in Nova Scotia (Acadia). A decade later, after the French and Indian (Seven Year's) War was over and transportation was available once again, these unfortunates began emigrating to Louisiana. They were settled mostly along the Mississippi river and on Bayou Lafourche, and further west, along Bayou Têche. In Nova Scotia, they had been hunters and trappers, wheat farmers and cattle ranchers. Their simple, gable-roofed houses had been constructed in pièce-sur-pièce or using earth-fast methods.
In Louisiana, some Acadians established cattle ranches (vacheries ) on the western prairies, but many remained small farmers along the major waterways (Brasseaux 1987; Ancelet, Edwards and Pitre 1991). Like the Germans, they augmented the diet of New Orleans, transporting both cattle and vegetables through the swamps and down the Mississippi to the city. Eventually, about 3,000 Acadians arrived. Unlike the Germans, they maintained their ethnic distinctiveness and persisted in a mistrust of the Creoles well into the twentieth century.
At first the Acadians constructed temporary shelters supported with poles in the ground and thatched with palmetto (Le Page du Pratz 1775). The second generation Cajun house was generally of pieux debout (palisade) construction, consisting of hewn cypress planks set vertically in a trench, the roof framed in the French manner and covered with bark. The floors were of dirt. Beginning in the 1790s, the Cajuns adopted Creole practice, building their frame houses poteaux-sur-solle, with squared posts mortised into a heavy sill. Cypress blocks supported the sill above the damp ground. The Acadians maintained a certain distinctiveness in the form of their folk cottages: they persisted rigidly in their ancient use of the gabled roof, rejecting the hip roofs of the aristocratic Creoles. They employed the attic or grenier as sleeping space, particularly for the young men. This required a roof pitched at 30 degrees or higher. Stairs to the attic were often mounted on the front gallery. While Mississippi Valley Creoles used double-pitch roofs (the roof over the gallery being set at a much lower pitch than that which covered the interior), the Cajuns seldom varied from the single pitch Class III roof. These were covered with wooden shingles until corrugated iron became available in the 1880s.
Form and construction:
After experimenting with various forms of impermanent earth-fast architecture, the Acadians (called Cajuns in Louisiana) adopted a form of Creole house common in the city of New Orleans and the banks of the lower Mississippi River. A gabled roof cottage of either one or two rooms with an in-set gallery across the front, this house form had become the standard of the Cajun countryside by the first decade of the nineteenth century. It was constructed entirely by hand. Hewn timber posts were mounted on a heavy cypress sill. The house was capped with a simple roof truss, rather than the complex Norman truss so loved by the Creoles. Bousillage, a mixture of clay, lime and Spanish moss, was used as infill between the posts and braces. The bousillage was supported on a lattice of split stakes ("bâtons" or "barreaux"), which were hammered between the uprights (Ancelet, Edwards and Pitre 1991: 123). The entire house was raised above the damp soil about two feet on large cypress blocks, later on brick pillars.
Unlike the Creoles, the Cajuns favored a gabled-roof house. This form appears to have taken on symbolic significance in a period of considerable tension between the newly-arrived egalitarian Acadians and the aristocratic Creoles. Very few Acadians adopted the hipped roof of the Creoles. At first, stick-and-mud chimneys were ubiquitous, but as brick became commercially available in the middle of the nineteenth century, the old chimneys with all of their problems were replaced.
The Cajun house falls entirely within the definitions of Creole architecture, provided above. Although they were sometimes raised on a full-story brick foundation, Cajun houses seldom expand past the second stage of evolutionary modular expansion. The geometry of the building remained entirely Creole, but the Cajuns modified Creole architecture to suit their own needs. At least three modifications may be noted. One reason for the adoption of the gabled roof, less popular among the Creoles, was almost certainly the fact that essentially all Acadian houses of Nova Scotia had been gabled roof forms. Thus, for the immigrants, the gabled roof signified and perpetuated something of the lost Acadian heritage. In Nova Scotia, the loft of the tiny cottage (granier ) had been employed for the young men's sleeping room. This practice continued in Louisiana, even though the Creoles never used the space under the roof for living. It was considered too hot. Thus, there was often no stairway to the loft in the Creole house, a ladder and trap-door substituting. To accommodate the loft to social space, the Cajuns placed large windows (or doors) in the gables of each end. These could be opened on hot summer nights, cooling the space within. They retained the use of a particularly steeply-pitched roof to provide headroom within the confines of a small building.
Along the western river and on the prairies, the Cajuns placed the stairway to the attic on the front gallery. In eastern Acadiana it was often placed in the corner of one room or on the rear loggia (Edwards 1988b: 18-21). Cabinet rooms, set at the rear corners of the house, were as popular among Cajuns as they were among Creoles. These curious, tiny rooms were used as offices, storage rooms, servant's bedrooms, and for overflow family sleeping - particularly for children.
With increasing Acadian prosperity in the middle of the nineteenth century, the house was expanded and dressed up with Greek Revival or Victorian trim. Expansions beyond the second stage of evolution more often took the form of appurtenances, added to the rear of the building. Often a tiny two-room pioneer's cottage was retained as a rear kitchen and dining room module, with a completely new and larger Acadian form house placed immediately in front of it (Post 1962: 83-91). After the Civil War, the first economic expansion took the form of a cypress lumber boom beginning in the 1880s. At that time, many new Acadian style houses were built, often from scrap lumber left over from the mills. A popular stylistic adornment of the period 1880 through 1930 was the so-called "false gallery" (abat vent, also called "hood" - "rain porch" in coastal Alabama). These extended roofs, supported by brackets, were to be seen everywhere in southern Louisiana in the early decades of the century. Another distinctive feature of the Acadian house was the common use of multiple doors on the facade. These facilitated through ventilation on hot summer days.
The last recorded new Acadian house was constructed in 1911. Since that time, many have been replaced by single-story brick houses built on a concrete slab, or even by house trailers, offering more modern conveniences. Nevertheless, several thousand of Acadian style cottages survive in southern Louisiana, particularly along the waterways of the state. Approximately one-half of the surviving population of traditional timber-frame cottages was lost between 1960 and 1990.
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