Before great-grandpa Gerard died in 1935 at the age of 65¹ , he had already allocated his property to his six children. He must have owned over 600 acres when he died. When I asked how he came to own so much land, a relative said she heard talk that he would lend people money with their land as collateral, then acquire the land when they couldn’t repay the loan. She said she never heard this from the family. I imagine he acquired quite a bit after the Great Depression hit in 1929.  

Gerard gave 120 acres in six dispersed parcels to his youngest son Edgar, my grandfather Pop-pop. Along with five properties in the cities of  Lafayette and Abbeville and rural Vermilion Parish, Pop-pop acquired the 80-acre homestead that included the family homestead that the Baudoin Prairie was once part of. A credit deed in 1936 states that Pop-pop purchased this land from his siblings for $4000: $1500 in cash and a promissory note to pay them $100 per year for 25 years. We don’t know whether money actually changed hands since this was probably just a transaction on paper to buy out his mother. I’m told that back then this was a common, if sexist, way to get the estate into the hands of the children, with the understanding that they would care for their mother. It also reduced her personal assets so that she would qualify for public services.  

Family lore about what has happened on that land only goes back as far as my great-grandfather, Gerard. Deeper digging in courthouse records showed that Gerard bought these 80 acres from Alexis Baudoin, his cousin, in 1911 for $3648.80. Alexis acquired the land from Alfred Baudoin, his brother, in a land swap in 1900, presumably to consolidate pieces into larger tracts. Alfred was the first Baudoin to own this land, which he acquired from Luc Broussard in 1898. Luc had sold it to Alfred for $428 in cash in 1895. The deed states that “the vendor reserves the right to redeem the property presently sold”, and that Broussard reserved the right to cultivate the land. The land changed hands between them in 1895, it went back to Luc in 1897 and finally back to Alfred in 1898. It seems that the land was used as collateral for a cash loan in 1895, which Luc repaid back 1987, but eventually lost to Alfred again in 1898. The land has been in Baudoin hands since. 

We don’t know how many other loans were made that were repaid and never were recorded in the courthouse records. It is possible that Gerard and his cousins provided moneylending services that may not have been available to higher risk applicants that formal banks would not lend to. So it may be that the Baudoin land wealth may have been acquired through usury. I doubt we will ever have enough information to judge, so I choose to leave the question open. 

We assume that Gerard Baudoin was the first Baudoin to make a homestead on this property in Maurice. We believe the house was built as a simple two-story house in the 1910s, and the family remembers that sections were added on over the years as the family grew. I remember the old house. It was a two-story, raised house with a front porch, a screened-in back porch, and steep steps to a large upper bedroom.  My father was born in this house and lived in it until he convinced his father to let him live in the college dormitory at SLI.² The house was heated by burning coal or wood but was never warm enough. My grandmother carried that chill in her bones until she died in 1998. Daddy remembers carbide lamps and the conversion to incandescent lighting when the rural electrification program finally brought electricity to the road. He also remembers the outhouse, of course, but the house had indoor plumbing by the time I was born.  We have old 8 mm family movies of Christmas there in the mid-1960s when I was three or four years old. My grandparents moved from the old house into a brick ranch they built in the yard around 1965, but the old house stayed standing until 2000 when it was purchased, torn down and hauled away by someone who repurposed its cypress siding and pine flooring for their new home in Lafayette.

In our teens (1970s), my cousins and I would go exploring in the old creepy house. We found odd things that got left behind, like a cabinet full of Levi’s jeans, a chiffarobe with scarves, an old Victrola, and a first-generation washing machine in the kitchen. These folks were rich for the day. Upstairs we found old college notebooks for my great aunt Rhea, who studied in the 1930s at SLI. We also found my father’s Industrial Arts project when he was a student there in the 1950s. I was mortified that my father had earned a grade of C on his design of a very cool desk until I learned that C was a typical grade before the Vietnam War, when high but often inflated grades protected men from the draft. My parents still have that Mid-Century Modern desk, now falling apart in the shed.

If I’d have asked any of my ancestors about the land they lived on, they’d likely call it the pasture or the field, not a prairie. But we have only been on it a little over a century. It was prairie for thousands of years before that. And I’m trying to understand what it was like and how it changed over time.

¹purportedly from typhoid from the cistern

² Southeastern Louisiana Institute, now University of Louisiana at Lafayette