The Francois Cousins House on Liberty Bayou – a short distance down stream from our 4th great grandfather Francis Dubuission’s Cemetery and the Laurent Plantation.
Claude & Genevieve Trepagnier had 7 children:
- of which Barbe Ursule Dubuisson (Trepagnier) is our 5th great grandmother
- Marguerite Carrière (Trepagnier) her sister is important to us…
Marguerite Trepagnier Carriere and Barb Ursula Trepagnier Dubuisson were sisters
Marguerite’ husband – François Cousin was born in 1745 in New Orleans. After reaching adulthood, Liberty Bayou he entered his father’s lumber and brick making business. The source of the lumber and the clay to make the brick was across Lake Pontchartrain in what is now St. Tammany Parish.
Jacques Carriere was the son of Joseph Carriere and Marguerite Trepagnier.
- Father Adrien Rouquette was born in New Orleans in 1813 to a wealthy Creole family.
- When his father died in 1819, his mother returned to her family and place of her birth, Bayou Lacombe.
- Her father, Francois Cousin, was by this time, the largest single land owner in St Tammany with lands that reached from Bayou Bonfouca to Ravinne aux Cannes (Cane Bayou). Young Adrien became a child of the woods, playing with the young Choctaw in the area.
- Over the course of the next 150 years, the community on the bayou became known as “Bonfouca” and the Frenchmen were gradually replaced with native-born Creoles.
During a twenty-year period through the 1840s it is recorded that eleven schooners and other smaller boats were constructed along Bayou Bonfouca.
- Schooners transported the finished materials back across the waterway to New Orleans, where the company’s office was located on Carondelet Walk and St. Claude. The company owned six schooners, one of which was seized by the British in 1779 as retaliation for Spain’s refusal to let the British ship enter Bayou St. John.
- Cousin also engaged in shipbuilding and the trading of naval stores such as tar. The exact date upon which Cousin settled in St. Tammany Parish is uncertain; documents suggest it occurred some time between 1778 and 1789. He owned property on Bayou Lacombe as well as on Bayou Liberty. In the 1811-1812 tax roll he was listed as the largest taxpayer, and he was apparently the largest land owner as well. Cousin died in October 1819.
- The Dubuission, Cousins, Laurent and Galatas families all lived and owned Bayou Liberty and Bayou Bonfocua in Slidell. All the families were all involved in brick manufacturing and ship building.
- When Clementine Galatas marries Dr John Thomas Dale their son Arthur Clement Dale (our grandfather).
- After Dr John Thomas Dale “goes away” – his mother raises him on the bayous of here families. This is where Arthur Dale learned boat building. Which would lead to his patient on as hollow draft boat.