Eunice

By Alma Brunson Reed and Van Rodney Reed

Beginning as a real estate venture on the isolated prairie of southwestern Louisiana in 1894, Eunice is now a progressive small city due to its traditions of volunteerism, community spirit, and resourcefulness. In the late 1980s, the city enjoyed a renaissance when a far-sighted mayor capitalized on the dominant Cajun culture to pull Eunice out of the economic crevasse of the decade's "oil bust." It emerged as a picturesque community with an emphasis on its rich history and its newly recognized heritage tourism. The city's unique Frenchness lures tourists and locals to the live Cajun music shows at the Liberty Center and to experience the joie de vivre at a rural Mardi Gras. The historic images found in Images of America: Eunice feature the day-to-day activities of Eunice's people through good times and lean days from 1894 to the late 1980s.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
• Release date: Sep 18, 2012
• ISBN: 9781439622803

Alma Brunson Reed

Alma Brunson Reed and Van Reed have combined Alma's years of teaching Louisiana history and Van's of photographing the area to compile a pictorial treasury of Eunice. This visual history grew from the extant photographs of Tom and George Bevan, early photographers, and other vintage photographs of generous Eunice families.

Book preview

beaucoup!

INTRODUCTION

Bordered on the south by Bayou Mallet, on the west and north by Bayou des Cannes, and on the east by Bayou Doza, the site chosen for the new town of Eunice was on Louisiana’s Prairie Faquetaique. A few Cajun cattle herders, trappers, homesteaders, and Native Americans were lured to the location before Eunice’s founding by its fertile land and balmy weather. Sporadic desperadoes on the run from the law were attracted by the isolation of the area since the surge of settlers from the Eastern states had bypassed the spot where Eunice would be located.

The town, named by C. C. Duson in honor of his second wife, Mary Eunice Pharr Duson, had its beginning as a well-planned real estate venture that was located at the end of a 20-mile railroad spur in a largely unpopulated area of Prairie Faquetaique. Brothers C. C. Curley Duson and W. W. Duson founded other towns—Crowley, Mamou, Iota, Elton, and Basile—in the area, but none with the pomp and circumstance of the Eunice city lots auction. With a festive atmosphere and an excursion train to transport auction-goers, C. C. Duson, being the quintessential salesman, set out to market the prairie.

Four thousand people arrived the first day of the sale, many on the excursion train that Duson supplied to bring buyers to the city-to-be. People walked over the town site for a few hours before the auction began. They were impressed with the graded streets and the city plan. Roads were laid out with avenues named for Louisiana trees proceeding east to west. Streets were numbered and ran in a north-south direction. All streets except Park Avenue were 70 feet wide; Park Avenue was 124 feet wide with a 24-foot-wide center boulevard. Originally, Duson planned for Park Avenue to be the main commercial street, but when the railroad located its depot to the north, Second Street, which ran northward to the depot, became the main business artery.

Duson hired Charles S. Gerth of New Orleans as auctioneer, a man as famous in his own field as Duson was in his. Gus Fusilier bought the first lot for $80. The sale continued until dark with 150 lots sold at an average price of $100 per lot. Aggregate sales were about $25,000. The auction was deemed a great success. Thus the Duson brothers’ vision of another town became a reality, and the infant town of Eunice swelled with newcomers. The first century of Eunice history since Duson’s auction is the subject of this book.

As Eunice’s population grew, so did agricultural production, surpassing logging as the main economic base of the town. The cattle industry thrived also, with large twice-a-year roundups. A railroad boom in the early 1900s was the result of the Frisco and Rock Island lines building tracks through town. Railroad construction crews boosted the city’s economy.

Because Eunice had a railroad, new markets were opened, and farmers quickly put the land to use. With the pumping of water into fields from waterways and large irrigation canals, rice became a major commercial crop. Lumber production saw a boom as new dwellings, and businesses began construction. Although logging and agriculture saw the early settlers through the town’s fledging years, commerce increased significantly when merchants and service businesses began arriving in town.

A progress-oriented Eunice began looking toward industry as early as 1907. The city council voted then to waive taxation for 10 years for any manufacturer whose enterprise employed 15 or more full-time workers. Being industry-friendly in 1907 seemed to work for the new town, as a brick manufacturer, a spoke factory, and an ironworks located here shortly afterward.

In 1935, the discovery of the Tepetate oil field ushered in a new and lucrative source of income and brought a new era of prosperity after some dismal days during the Great Depression. Being singularly located on the end of a narrow panhandle of St. Landry Parish that juts into both Evangeline and Acadia Parishes, in the 1930s, Eunice began calling itself The Tri-Parish City to emphasize the proximity of its trade area to nearby towns.

The Tri-Parish Fair drew more than 40,000 people from the three-parish area despite the Depression, and the numbers grew over the decades. The city advertised over 100 oil wells within a 25-mile radius of Eunice in 1945. By the 1950s, petro-chemical companies, pipeline plants such as Union Oil, Circle Drilling, and Runnels Corporation’s compressor station, and workers in the oil patch moved into town.

The 1960s saw area payrolls improve as a major university opened its doors for students, and a garment manufacturer, an electrical appliance factory, a drill-bit manufacturer that produced goods for the United States, as well as foreign markets, and Trans-Continental Gas continued to fuel Eunice’s economy. The city was named outstanding municipality in Louisiana in the 1970s under the mayorship of Wilson J. Moosa, a descendant of one of the town’s pioneer families. By the 1980s, Eunice was easily earning its sobriquet of progressive.

Sadly, the 1980s oil bust caused subsequent hardships for oil-related and support businesses such as construction, real estate, banking, trucking, and food services. Eunice suffered but did not fail.

During this lean time, the people of Eunice realized that heritage tourism, particularly Cajun food, music, and culture, could bring in much needed cash. Citizens pulled together to work as volunteers to renovate the Liberty Theater, and its transformation brought about the city’s jewel, the Liberty Center for the Performing Arts. Mayor Curtis Joubert regarded this period in the city’s history as the golden age of volunteerism.

With hard work, marketing, and citizens’ participation, the Jean Lafitte Acadian Culture Center, a national park, was created in one of Eunice’s historic buildings. Tourists have been attracted to the exhibits and to the weekly live Cajun music show, Les Rendez-vous des Cajuns, next door at the Liberty Center, since 1987. The family-oriented, rural Mardi Gras has been an economic anchor for the city’s economy. Through a century of fat years and lean years, the common denominator of Eunice’s success has been the