Bonfouca

Bonfouca.Org
Dedicated to the History, Past, Present and Future of Bonfouca La.

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A memorial to Susan Girior, ex-harbor Master of Bonfouca Marina, award winning Ball Room dancer, loving mother, sister, friend and brave Captain. She led an exceptional life, fearless yet caring. We will miss you Susan. The world could use more people like her.

We have a new Mobile webpages for cell phone users! Besides being re-written to a smaller format, it has a new feature, our Mobile Tour of Bonfouca, La. This tour is designed for the sightseer, from either car or boat.

New! The Conrad Collections of 60's Bayou Liberty Photos

Another new feature is the Pichon Pirogue Museum. Thanks to the efforts of Michael Pichon, son of Armand Pichon Jr., many family heirloom tools and documents were rescued from the ravages of Katrina.
Mike's efforts included a heroic dive into rising water to save a dugout canoe from floating off, at the height of Katrina's maelstrom. The family's collection of pirogues is extensive. Many are in pristine condition.
While recording these piroges the idea for the Pichon Pirogue Museum took root.

Bonfouca.Org supports the restoration of the Bayou Liberty Civic Center.
Read about the NEW BLCC pages, including lots of pictures from the past including a whole section on The Annual BLCC Pirogue Races.

Bonfouca is located across Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans. Situated on Bayou Liberty, Bonfouca (bon foo ka, rimes with America) was one of the first Creole settlements after the founding of New Orleans. Bonfouca is a Creole French Choctaw word meaning 'Good People'.
However, Indian shell middens dating over 2000 years old are found up and down the bayous of Bonfouca. Acolapissa were living in Bonfouca when the first Frenchmen arrived, but the Choctaw moved to the area and absorbed them.

The Chacta, as the Choctaw called themselves, lived peacefully with the Whitemen, taking food, tobacco and woven baskets of every description across the lake on schooners, to the Indian Market in New Orleans .

Along with Bayou Lacombe to the west, these two settlements provide building material for the new city. First with tar and lumber, then with bricks. Later dozens of shipyards sprang up to build the schooners that transported goods across the lake. Early Bonfouca was a potpourri of peoples: French, Spanish and Choctaw Indians, as well as freemen and slaves of African descent. Together they created a major industrial complex on the North Shore.

       Bonfouca was a strong Confederate stronghold and was repeatedly invaded by Union gunboats. The plantation owners that pledged their fortunes to the South ended up with little more than their land. Many gave land to their freed slaves, who continued to work for them and took their family name.
        Bonfouca has been very fortunate that on of its citizens, Sidoine Pichon kept a diary from 1848 to 1886. Sidoine was a ships caulker by trade, but his diary shows he was forced to farm and hunt to put food on the table for his large family and slaves.
        Month by month, Sidoine lists his jobs, the places he travelled and the ships that he worked on. Every month he stoically listed those friends, neighbors and relatives that died due mostly to mosquito borne disease.
It is very interesting and available in Slidell, La from Dudley Smith Printers.

    Until the end of WW I, Bonfouca served as a summer haven for people from New Orleans escaping from the mosquito borne plagues. Before the Civil War they would flee in schooners and steam ferries, crossing the lake to the Ozone Woods. After the railroad bridge was built across the lake, Bonfouca lost its economic competitiveness.
Bonfouca dwindled as the years past, becoming the sleepy little fishing village that I grew up in.
        After WWII Bonfouca grew because of the Baby Boomer families and an increase of commuters who liked the tranquility and beauty of Bonfouca, but worked in New Orleans.
Katrina changed everything, but the story of Bonfouca continues.

       It was back in the Great Depression when my grandfather brought home food from Bonfouca. There were the fish he caught and fresh vegetables from his friends' gardens. A farmboy, after he moved to Bonfouca, my grandfather raised chickens and a big garden. He taught me the art of "truck" farming. I had a horse to ride all over the bayou.
       But when I was growing up here, the Creoles hunted, trapped, fished, planted gardens and farmed animals. Like Sidoine, they were always looking for ways to put food on the table for their large Catholic families.
       And they went anywhere they needed by boat or pirogue. I marveled at their self-sufficiency.
       Bonfouca.Org is very proud to display the tools that made their lives possible, living here on the bayou.
       In the future, Bonfouca.Org will sponsor several initives for neighborhood independence through farming and energy self-reliance. Some will be low tech, like a chicken house. A bit more complicated is the solar powered catfish tank. Maybe even turning nuisince plants into ethanol to power small engines. These projects alone won't change the world, but they move in the right directions.