Isle Brevelle

[3] The island is a narrow strip of land some thirty miles in length with three- to four-mile breadth located south of Natchitoches, Louisiana.

[9] He is the son of Jean Baptiste Brevelle, a Parisian-born trader and explorer, and his Adai Caddo (French: Natao) Native American wife, Anne Marie des Cadeaux.

[10] Jean Baptiste Brevelle II was granted the island by David Pain, the subdelegate at Natchitoches in 1765 for his service to the French and Spanish crowns as a Caddo translator and explorer of Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico.

[11] Nicolas Augustin Metoyer (1768–1856), was the son of Marie Thérèse Coincoin and Claude Thomas Pierre Métoyer, and he has been considered the "grandfather" of the community of Isle Brevelle.

[12] Around this same time his mother, Marie Thérèse Coincoin was also freed from enslavement and they, as a family started collecting local land, which eventually amassed to 6,000 acres.

[12] During this era and in this location, mulatto people lived similarly to white Southern planters, in large mansions with expensive furniture, and in some cases they held their own slaves.

[15][16] Tradition also describes the role of Augustin's brother Louis (founder of the nearby Melrose Plantation, a National Historic Landmark), as the chapel's designer and builder.

[17] As a means of collecting money for the church in earlier times, families of the parish were required to rent pews for their personal use and to donate religious items.

Mother Superior Hyacinthe LeConniat wrote to her brother of the Isle Brevelle Creoles, “These are people of leisure and many of wealth and means.

The Bishop bought us a house with sixty acres of land there.” The Daughters of the Cross expanded to operate 5 schools in Louisiana and relied heavily on donations from wealthy Creole families such as the Prud’homme, Metoyer, and Brevelle's.

The school flourished through 1862, until the effects of the Civil War resulted in a plummeting enrollment; in December 1863, the convent was closed, and the nuns were called home to the Avoyelles.

Oral tradition by the members of the Prud’homme family states that Alphonse I constructed the wood-frame Brevelle Station depot.

[citation needed] Enslaved persons who died at Bermuda Plantation were buried in a cemetery on Prud’homme property, also near Bayou Brevelle.

[citation needed] Some slave burial markers included wrought iron crosses, such as those attributed to Bermuda’s blacksmith, Solomon Williams.

Magnolia Plantation House
St. Anne Church at Spanish Lake (Robeline). Formerly St. Anne mission of St. Augustine Catholic Church
Badin-Roque House ; National Register of Historic Places listed as an exemplary example of Creole Architecture in Isle Brevelle