Present-day St. John the Baptist Parish includes the third permanent settlement in what is now the state of Louisiana, after Natchitoches (1714) and New Orleans (1718).

[4] Many families established settlements close to the Mississippi River in the areas now known as Lucy, Garyville, and Reserve.

At the beginning of the Spanish colonial period, many Acadians, people of French descent, began arriving in south Louisiana due to being expelled by the British from what is now Nova Scotia and eastern Canada.

[5][6] The early settlers in the area received land grants from the Spanish or French royal governments, depending upon which country ruled the territory at the time of application.

The French style of property allotments was made up of narrow frontage on the river so that each plantation had access for transportation of goods to and from New Orleans and world markets.

The remaining property extended away from the river deeply into the wetlands, where land was cleared for cultivation of sugar cane.

St. John, with its fertile land being nine feet above sea level, proved to be an excellent settlement for farming and agriculture.

In the late 18th century, planters began to invest more in labor-intensive sugar cane cultivation and processing, increasing their demand for slave labor.

The slaves killed two whites, but suffered 96 deaths among their forces at the hands of the militia and in executions after quick trials afterward.

A major leader was Charles Deslondes, a mulatto (mixed-race) slave brought by a planter from Saint-Domingue in the late 18th century.

Slaves and free people of color rebelled, gaining independence after huge losses among French regular forces sent by Napoleon to retake the island.

[7] Deslondes gathered more than 200 slaves from plantations along the way, marching downriver into St. Charles Parish toward New Orleans before meeting much resistance.

In 1869, following the Civil War, families wanting French instruction founded private schools to continue their culture.

The Reconstruction legislature, with both African American and white representatives, established the first public schools in the state during this period.

The New Orleans/River Region contains a good supply of raw materials, which has helped Louisiana maintain a high rank in the United States in the production of natural gas, petroleum, sulfur, salt, and fur pelts.

High silica sands, lime, clays, timber, seafood, and various agricultural products are also produced in abundance.

This section of the state, also consisting of St. James, Ascension, and St. Charles Parishes, makes up the area along the Mississippi River between New Orleans and Baton Rouge.

Since the mid-20th century, when the oil industry developed from resources found here, all of these parishes are home to at least one major chemical- and/or petroleum-processing facility.

St. John the Baptist parish has the highest rate of environmental cancer of any census tract in the United States.

Higher ground in the parish is found in an alluvial plain which generally borders the Mississippi River on both sides.

Soil deposits from the Mississippi's annual flooding created a rich and fertile area which has historically been intensively farmed (sugar cane, soybeans, feed corn, and occasional cotton).

This fact, and the natural transportation corridor supplied by the river, resulted in the creation of numerous plantations and farms along the lower Mississippi Valley.

Many of these plantations were large tracts of land with modest or average-sized homes and outbuildings found on the higher ground.

The higher ground along the banks was used to grow crops, while the wetlands were valued for their abundant timber, hunting and fishing.

For years development in the River Parishes was limited to those areas that were naturally higher and less prone to flooding.

It has not voted for a Republican presidential candidate since Ronald Reagan in 1984, and before that voted Republican only three other times in the 20th century: for Warren G. Harding in 1920, when Acadian voters broke with President Woodrow Wilson over various issues,[24] for Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1956, when he flipped the state as a whole, and for Richard Nixon in 1972, when he won all but one parish in Louisiana.

Prior to passage of the 1898 constitution, which almost completely disenfranchised black voters and made Louisiana an effective one-party state, St. John the Baptist Parish generally voted Republican.

Though it is still heavily traveled, much of the New Orleans-Baton Rouge traffic has been diverted to Interstate 10, located in the northern part of the parish.

The foot of the bridge on the west bank is in St. John Parish near Wallace, with a tie-in to Louisiana Highway 3127 that opened June 18, 2008.