Historic Louisiana

Philip Pittman noted the presence of many
sugarhouses up the Mississippi from New
Orleans. In 1766, Alexandrine de La Chaise,
Charles Pradel’s widow, sought to re-establish
the sugarhouse after she purchased part of the
Jesuit plantation.
In 1769, in St. Charles Parish, a Dutch sugar
maker named Jean Jonas lived between the
plantations of Francois Lemelle and Charles
Brasseaux where the Boggs Bridge now crosses
the Mississippi. In the 1760s, Jean Baptiste
Destrehan operated a large, twenty-arpent
plantation below New Orleans with 170 slaves.
He grew sugar and operated a sugarhouse and
distillery. The latter was to produce rum or the
easier substitute called “tafia.”
When Alexander O’Reilly imposed Spanish
control over Louisiana, he stopped sugar
shipments to French ports. In compensation,
he granted Louisiana the authority to make
sugar boxes for the Cuban sugar industry.
This business utilized the enormous Louisiana
timber stand, but it led to the temporary
withering of sugar planting. In the 1790s the
Spanish loosened up their control, and
markets for sugar began to appear in the new
American nation. Simultaneously numerous
planters began replanting sugar, spurred by
the perception that the revolution in Haiti
would eliminate a major supplier in the world
market. Sugar was replanted in Pointe Coupée
as well as near New Orleans. Evidence
indicates that sugar boilers were in use along
the south bank of False River by the mid-
1790s, when Margaret Farrar employed
Abraham Ellis as a sugar maker.
Yet the man most often credited as the
father of the Louisiana sugar industry is Creole
Etienne Boré. Born December 27, 1741, at
Kaskaskia, Illinois, Boré entered the French
army, where he became a cavalry officer,
eventually reaching the position of captain.
But agriculture was his calling. By 1771, Boré
was thirty years old, well respected in both
military and planting circles. He married a
Creole, a Destrehan daughter, and devoted
himself to his lands and family.
In the 1780s, Boré purchased the twentyarpent
plantation in uptown New Orleans
extending from Joseph Street to near the
lower boundary of Audubon Park. He erected
a large home with a garden about a block
square surrounded by a brick revetment and a
moat of water filled with frogs, fish, and eels.
There in 1794 he began planting sugar cane,
determined to develop a new cash crop in the
face of the failure of the hitherto profitable
indigo crop. He employed sugar makers from
Haiti who had already succeeded in
granulating sugar. His new mill successfully
ground and granulated the crop, and he sold
it for an estimated $12,000. Immediately
planters up and down the river began erecting
new sugarhouses and planting cane.
Boré’s brother-in-law was St. Charles Parish
planter Jean Noel Destrehan. Destrehan’s
✧
Left: Jean Etrienne Boré (1741-1820)
successfully cultivated and granulated sugar
cane on his plantation in uptown New
Orleans during the 1790s. His son-in-law,
historian Charles Gayarre, memorialized
this feat. Boré’s wife was the daughter of
Jean Baptiste Destrehan, the colonial
treasurer. Boré eventually took charge of his
wife’s family affairs. Boré was a military
man and farmer, not a cultured Creole.
COURTESY OF SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, TULANE UNIVERSITY.
Right: Jean Noel Destrehan, a Creole
planter in St. Charles Parish, was an early
convert to sugar growing. His brother-in-law
was Etienne Boré, who produced the first
commercially successful sugar crop.
Destrehan was widely admired for his
probity. During the territorial period (1804-
1812), he was the spokesman for the
Creoles. He employed the Creole system of
planting, a system that offered slaves
considerable personal freedom. This
painting is attributed to Matthew Harris
Jouett, c. 1818.
COURTESY OF THE LOUISIANA STATE MUSEUM.
CHAPTER II
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