The French authorities were not oblivious to the natural liabilities of the site, and the subsequent centuries since the town was mapped out have witnessed continuous efforts to protect the precarious human landscape. The city expanded outward from the French Quarter by slow accretion: drainage canals were engineered to dry out additional lands; pumps were installed to remove storm water and flood flows from the reclaimed land; the natural levees of the Mississippi were augmented to protect the growing city and its commercial activity. French military engineers constructed the first levees on the Mississippi River by 1723. For the next 150 years, property owners in the city and on surrounding lands, where huge plantations were established to take advantage of the rich soils of the Mississippi, were required to construct and maintain their own levees or risk losing their property. Coastal priorities of the decision making class were focused on levee building for both protection from river flooding and for draining wetlands for agricultural production. Following the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, levee districts were established to protect and extend emerging sugarcane plantations.

The human landscape of the city has been as dynamic as its natural and engineered ones. When the fledgling United States acquired the territory in 1803, the population of the city stood at about 10,000. Most of these were descendants of the original French and Spanish colonists, but a growing number of American, English, and Irish immigrants settled on land along the river outside the French Quarter, across what is now Canal Street. As further land was reclaimed in the 19th century, this "American" section of New Orleans would grow upstream - "uptown." The Garden District developed as the Anglo-American business elite's answer to the aristocratic French Quarter. The swampy lands downstream were devoted to truck farms and pasture lands, then residential and industrial locations as additional lands were reclaimed. A substantial portion of the city's population were free African Americans and slaves, typically residing in "backyard" quarters close to, and under the watchful eyes of, their masters or employers. By 1810, there were some 10,800 slaves, 5,700 free Blacks, and 8,000 whites living in New Orleans' environs.

Sociologist Daphne Spain argues that this residential integration of whites and blacks broke down in the early 20th century due to two technological developments. [link to Spain in bib] First, a more efficient screw pump was invented in 1917, which could effectively drain additional lands for new housing. Under Jim Crow legislation, this new housing was available only to whites, and many moved out of the original city area. Second, the streetcar system was expanded. The availability of public transportation allowed whites to move further out, but within a reasonable commuting distance, of the central business district. Simultaneously, the streetcar network enabled blacks to live in formerly swampy areas near the central city, no longer having to live in the "backyards" of their employers.

In the second half of the 20th century, additional factors stimulated racial segregation in the city. The Ninth Ward, downstream from the French Quarter and extending up toward Lake Pontchartain as land was reclaimed, had historically been a racially mixed but lower income and working-class area, with many employed at the shipyards that were established along the Industrial Canal (now the "Inner Harbor Navigation Canal") during World War II. The Housing Authority of New Orleans, created in 1937 as the first recipient of federal funds for low slum clearance and subsidized housing, built projects in the ward, housing predominantly black families (one, the Desire/Florida Project, necessitated the removal of the Desire streetcar line, playwright Tennessee Williams' prop). Subsequent urban development and renewal efforts, such as the construction of the Superdome and the building of Interstate 10 through town (one segment obliterated blocks of the tree-lined Clairborne Avenue, a central artery and public space of the black community) further concentrated displaced and low-income blacks in the Ninth Ward. The Interstate route, ironically, ended up along Clairborne because of successful efforts by community activists and preservationists to reject the proposed cross-town route along the river, next to Jackson Square in the French Quarter.

The Industrial Canal cuts through the Ninth Ward, and a portion of its east bank floodwall failed during Hurricane Katrina. The canal's engineered banks had failed before, during Flossy in 1956 and again during Hilda in 1964 and Betsy in 1965. The ward also got floodwater when the London Avenue Canal was breeched; the 17th Street Canal was ruptured during Katrina as well, sending water down towards the Superdome, where former residents of Ward Nine had sought shelter.

The whole country affords great facility to new settlers, for providing fish, oysters, and game, all at hand; even large droves of buffaloes are often met with in the great cane brakes of that fine country, which has remained so long unsettled, only on account of the difficulty of penetrating through them.

Along Louisiana watercourses, Acadians organized their communities according to the French arpent or long-lot system, whereby an owner would typically acquire a rectangular piece of land with the narrow portion, 8 or 10 arpents wide, fronting the water for access and the longer portion extending back to the marsh or backlands some 40 arpents (an arpent is 192 feet). Upon reaching adulthood, children would build their homes on the family land, with successive generations dividing up these tracts and some having to move farther from the bayou and toward the marsh. The Acadians lived and practiced small-scale cultivation on their land; many families also had their own small cattle herds to provide meat for their families, and the cattle ran free. Those who did not want the cattle on their property had to fence them out.

Sugar cane developed as a major crop only after 1795, when a new method of crystallizing sugar was discovered. When the United States negotiated the Louisiana Purchase from Napoleon in 1803, the new territory it acquired was gradually opened up to public land settlement. Much of the arable land along the Mississippi was already under the control of French planters, and the territory west of Bayou Teche which was not included in the Purchase remained under Spain's control. Between 1812 and 1850 land speculators and would-be sugar planters entered southern Louisiana by water, traveling on the Mississippi and on the western bayous. New plantations were established on rich, arable land along the waterways. Sugar requires tropical conditions, and its growth is limited by the length of the growing season to the north and the extent of drainable land on the natural levees of the bayous to the south. The area from Houma north to Schriever in Terrebonne Parish, then from Thibodaux south to Mathews and Larose in Lafourche Parish, is an agricultural landscape, and sugar is preeminent.

In 1849 and 1850, Louisiana acquired title to millions of acres of seemingly useless "swamp lands" from the United States. Around mid-century high floods prompted the U.S. government passed the Swamp and Overflowed Lands Act of 1849 and 1850, which granted states large areas of land subject to flooding on the condition that the land be sold for the purpose of building levees and drainage to promote economic development. The goal of the Act was to protect people and property from the worst-case water level by constructing levees and shifting water in low-lying areas of the Atchafalaya River and delta. Twelve years later, Louisiana's government was reorganized and the Department of Public Works was created to construct and maintain levees, spillways, and canal systems; drain wetlands; and provide engineering services and the Stream Control Commission to handle water pollution problems. By 1950, the Mississippi was leveed along virtually its entire length -- approximately half of the sediment reaches the Gulf today that did prior to 1950. Marsh conversion continued, totaling 8.5 million acres in Louisiana, until passage of Section 404 of the Clean Water Act in 1972. The state sold off some of this to speculators and schemers who attempted with little success to drain and reclaim land for agriculture, following the Dutch model in the Zuyder Zee. More land was turned over to local levee boards to serve as collateral for the construction of flood-control structures along the Mississippi and its tributaries and distributaries. By the early 20th century, much of this acreage was in the hands of large land companies, trapping enterprises, private settlers, and school and levee boards. By the 1920s, the levee system on the main river had been largely completed, stretching some 50 miles below New Orleans, past the future site of the Caernarvon diversion project, into Plaquemines Parish [Popup: In 1845, the State was divided into four levee districts to improve water control management. While levees were being constructed to hold back water, canals were being dredged to open access through swamps and marshes of southern Louisiana. Certain canals provided passage to the barrier islands, where resort communities were established by wealthy plantation owners.] When oil and gas resources were discovered in the wetlands in the 1920s, the acreage took on immense value. Much of it ended up in the hands of government officials, from the notorious Leander Perez of Plaquemines Parish, to Governor Huey Long himself.

Throughout much of southern Louisiana, Acadian farmers were largely displaced by Euroamerican settlers during the mid-19th century. The stereotypical "Cajun" lifestyle was born in the economic hard times following the Civil War when bayou residents survived by lumberjacking, trapping, and fishing. In reaction to the enclosure and privatization of resources in British and European history, early American law defined certain resources such as navigable waters, wild game, fish, and shellfish as common property. Like the open waters of the Gulf, the marshes and swamps that separate the land from the sea were considered as such, and residents had access to them for food, fuel, and recreation. Outsiders considered the marshes and swamps to be mostly wasteland, and their concern focused on the resources, such as timber, furs, and minerals, that could be extracted from them. Southern Louisiana residents were encouraged to expand their seasonal harvests of these resources and sell the excess to generate cash income. In the 1930s, with the discovery of jumbo shrimp off the coast of southern Louisiana, many fishermen added shrimp to their seasonal harvest cycles.

During the flood control era of the 1920s and 1930s, attempts to control flooding on the Mississippi and promote drainage began to have a noticeable effect on bayou communities. Prior to the construction of levees and jetties, sediment from the river had counteracted the natural processes of wave erosion, and the compaction of fine deltaic sediments that caused the land to subside. Loss of sediment was particularly dramatic in areas such as lower Plaquemines Parish and Isle de Jean Charles where residents' fields became completely submerged. As the fields disappeared, residents turned to the commercial marine fishing industries, the sugar plantations, and later to oil. They remained reluctant to interact with outsiders.

Hurricane Katrina moved ashore over southeast Louisiana and southern Mississippi early on August 29, 2005. [link to "Hurricane Katrina image"] The loss of hundreds of square miles of wetlands and barrier islands has made southern Louisiana far more vulnerable to severe storms. Plaquemines and St. Bernard parishes, which were in the direct path of the storm, experienced a 20 foot wall of water as a storm surge pushed up the Mississippi River and forced water over the levees to be trapped there for days.

Communities and Livelihoods
Southern Louisiana's economy was historically locally-specific, with oysters and oranges dominating Plaquemines Parish and trapping and lumber playing a major role in St Mary. In 1921, oil was discovered in inshore Louisiana. Commercial exploitation of oil and gas changed both the value of coastal lands and ownership patterns. By the 21st century, though communities and parishes retained unique local enterprises, many of the major employers throughout the region were tied to the industry. Industry influence is reflected in parish profiles distributed by the Louisiana Economic Development office.

Mirroring the South's timber boom of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and circumstances in places such as the coal mining areas of Appalachia, the benefits to the local communities and their residents were limited as local and outside elites captured most of the profits from extractive industries. Digging of canals, drilling of wells, and contamination from well fields created long-term environmental changes that prevented a return to pre-oil patterns.

For more information:

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Bowman, Greg and Janel Curry Roper
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Brasseaux, Carl A.
1989 Four hundred years of Acadian life in North America. Journal of Popular Culture 23:3-22.

Colton, Craig E.
2005 An Unnatural Metropolis: Wresting New Orleans from Nature. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.

Conner 1977
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Daniel, Pete
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Davis, Allison

Davis, Donald W.
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Dominguez, Virginia R.
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Harrison, Robert W.
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Harrison, Robert W., and Walter M. Kollmorgen
1947 Drainage Reclamation in the Coastal Marsh-lands of the Mississippi River Delta. The Louisiana Historical Quarterly 30:654-709.

Jeansonne, Glen
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Kelman, Ari
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Landphair, Juliette
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McKenzie, Lawrence S., III, Xander, Pamela J., Johnson, Mary T.C., Baldwin, Beatrice, Davis, Donald W.
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Rehder, John B.
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Williams, T. Harry
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