Louisiana's Cajun Architecture

As the Acadians began to arrive in Louisiana, although now a Spanish colony, the territory was still being governed by a French caretaker government. It provided each family with land grants, seed grain for six months, a gun and crude land clearing implements, and sent them to settlements along the banks of the Mississippi River (called the Acadian Coast), Opelousas Post and the country of the Attakapas. They also afforded them a military engineer to supervise the establishment of their settlements. The authorities also issued 6 head of cattle to each family that settled in the Attakapas and continued to furnish them with supplies for 6 years, until they could establish herds of cattle to furnish meat for the colony in New Orleans and Mobile.

The Acadians began to clear the land, and like their forefathers before them in Acadia, sought the help of the native Amerindians to assist them in constructing temporary shelters referred to as 'cabannes' to keep them out of the rain. Their first structures often took the form of palmetto huts that were made with a pole frame covered with palmetto leaves, similar to those made by Amerindians of the region.

Although these shelters were temporary, they sometimes were the only shelter or home that the Acadians had for months. The shelters proved to be quite good for the Indians had lived in them on a more permanent basis even into the 20^th century.

As the Acadians became more experienced with Louisiana conditions, the design of their homes continued to change. "The Acadian's first attempt at building a more permanent wooden house was probably sometime prior to 1773. Because of the architectural simplicity of the "Poteaux-en-terre" type house, a technique they brought with them from Acadia and were familiar with, it was the first type of home built by the Acadians along the banks of the Mississippi River, Bayou Teche and LaFourche valley.

These houses were erected "on ground level" and of a "pieux debout" or "Pateau-en-terre" type construction, where the walls were planks or posts embedded vertically in the ground, and featured bousillage walls and earthen floors. But because of Louisiana's high water table, and Gulf coast termites, the posts either rotted or deteriorated, making the walls structurally unsound. Frequent inundations from floodwaters made the "post-in-ground", or houses built flush with the ground vulnerable. In addition, the traditional Acadian house, with its insulated walls and thick thatch roof, designed to shield against the frigid climate of Canada, proved unbearably hot in Louisiana's sweltering summer months.

They soon learned, with Louisiana's moist climate, that this was not the way to go and these types of homes didn't last long. Therefore the homes were quickly modified to meet the Gulf Coast's environmental demands. In the 1790s, the design changed to the Louisiana Acadian, or Cajun, house that can still be found throughout south Louisiana.

The Acadian immigrants built their houses with the help of their neighbors. The principal material used was cypress, which is a straight grained wood relatively free of knots, easily worked, affected very little by moisture, insect resistant, and readily available in Louisiana's swamplands. The seasoned logs were rived (split) and sawed by hand into long planks of varying widths. Joists, posts, beams were adzed into shape. They were sized, tenoned (ends were cut so they would fit into the mortise) and mortised and assembled to form a frame that was fastened by wooden pegs in a way similar to the method they used in Acadia.

The houses were built 'poteaux sur solle', where the house was placed on blocks (usually cypress) and raised off the ground two feet high because of flooding and termite problems. This also helped offset summertime heat in the house by creating a cooling breeze under the house. The floor was constructed using massive cypress beams. The frames were constructed of cypress and the walls were lightened by removal of most of the vertical beams. Support timbers were braced with large diagonal posts bound by peg-and-mortise joints.

Instead of using stone like in Acadia, a mixture of clay and Spanish moss (bousillage) was used in the walls, which was an excellent insulating material. The mixture was packed between horizontal slats know as 'Barreaux' (short sticks) and were "let into" the centers or placed every few inches between the vertical posts and angular braces (frame members) to hold the bousillage (mixture of mud and moss) for insulation. The outside walls were then covered with cypress planks, usually horizontally to protect them from the rain. The front wall was sometimes left without planks and simply whitewashed, as it protected by the roof.

Openings for the front and rear doors were centered and the double doors were made of solid boards held together with dovetailed planks. The doors were mounted on double homemade strap hinges of iron and swung outward to conserve inside space.

Each wall had one or two windows filled with solid wood casements constructed similar to the doors. Use of hard-to-get iron was limited to window and door hinges. No glass was used. A chimney and fireplace was placed inside or outside of the frame and made of sticks, clay and moss constructed against one of the side walls and used for heating and sometimes cooking.

A high steep pitched gable roof was constructed to cover almost a square frame in addition to the added porch. The effect was that the porch served as an open living area, with 4 posts to support the outer overhanging. The tall roof, with high beams connecting the rafters, provided unencumbered space for storage and/or sleeping.

Hand split cypress shingles replaced the thatched roofs. These cypress shingles were pegged to the purlins (horizontal support of the common roof rafters) which allowed upward radiation of the heat to escape from the attic. No nails were used in these early structures, and because cypress weathered a natural gray, it did not need to be painted.

The first homes were one room in size. As mentioned above, the attic was used as storage and also as a sleeping area for the boys. Stairs, often very steep and ladder-like, were located on one end of the front porch (western Acadiana) or in one of the rooms (eastern Acadiana). A fireplace and chimney (made up of wood and bousillage at first) was at one side of the house. A good example of this type of home is at the Evangeline Park in St. Martinville, LA.

The next architectural phase was the multi-room house. It may have taken the form of adding an extra room to the back of the home, usually for the kitchen, or took several other forms. A common type had 2 front doors and a chimney in the middle of the house. Each door opened up to a larger room (kitchen or bedroom) while there may have been three smaller rooms at the back (kitchen, bedroom, etc.).

And since below ground cellars were not possible due to a high water table, above ground cellars, usually about sixteen by twenty feet, were constructed for storage space. This humble Acadian cottage has perhaps become as symbolic of Southwest Louisiana as the Eiffel Tower is to Paris!

The metamorphosis of Acadian housing proceeded slowly through the 18th century. Relying on training by Norman carpenters while in France and Acadian tradition, the Louisiana Acadian house, as we know it today, is a blending of the maritime Canadian, simple lines of the Norman country house, and later the west Indian house that were raised on piers.

Other West Indian innovations, such as galleries, were incorporated into the cooling mechanism to shade the walls from the sun. This was in contrast to their Canadian houses where walls were exposed to the sun for purposes of helping heat the house.

They also borrowed from Louisiana's Creole population the use of parallel and matched doors and windows to promote cross ventilation and cooling of the central living areas.

Refrences:
Center of Louisiana Studies USL - USL History Series #11 "THE CAJUNS - Essays on their history and culture' - Edited by Glenn R. Conrad Carl Brasseau - "Founding of New Acadia"

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