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Concept
St. Martinville, Louisiana
Summary
St. Martinville (Saint-Martin) is a city in and the parish seat of St. Martin Parish, Louisiana, United States. It lies on Bayou Teche, south of Breaux Bridge, southeast of Lafayette, and north of New Iberia. The population was 6,114 at the 2010 U.S. census, and 5,379 at the 2020 United States census. It is part of the Lafayette metropolitan statistical area.
In the 16th century, the area between the Atchafalaya River, in Louisiana, the Gulf of Mexico and Trinity River, in Texas, was occupied by numerous tribes or subdivisions of the Attakapan people. The territory was not closed to outsiders, and several traders roamed through it on business.
Europeans did not begin to settle there until French explorers claimed and founded the colony of Louisiana in 1699. They referred to the territory between the Atchafalaya River and Bayou Nezpique, where the Eastern Atakapa lived, as the Attakapas Territory, adopting the name from the Choctaw language term for this people. The French colonial government gave land away to French soldiers and settlers.
Poste des Atakapas (Attakapas Post) was founded as a trading post on the banks of the Bayou Teche, and settlers started to arrive. Some came separately from France, such as M. Masse, who came about 1754 from Grenoble. Gabriel Fuselier de la Claire, a Frenchman from Lyon, and some other Frenchmen from Mobile, in present-day Alabama, arrived in late 1763 or early 1764. Fuselier bought land between Vermilion River and Bayou Teche from the Eastern Attakapas chief Kinemo. Shortly after that, the rival Appalousa (Opelousas) invaded the area via the Atchafalaya and Sabine rivers, and exterminated much of the Eastern Atakapan. Gabriel Fuselier's son Agricole Fuselier was prominent in settling what developed as New Iberia, Louisiana.
Gradually groups of more French speakers arrived, such as the first Acadians from Nova Scotia. They were assigned to this area in 1765 by Jean-Jacques Blaise d'Abbadie, the French official who was administering Louisiana for the Spanish.
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