150 years ago, we became Morgan City

Morgan City marked its 150th birthday Tuesday.
It was on Feb. 24, 1876, that the town of Brashear’s mayor and councilmen acquiesced to the will of Brashear’s citizens. They voted to change the name of the town to honor steamship and railroad magnate Charles Morgan.
Another Charles, Charles St. Clair, was the man who was Brashear’s mayor when the vote was taken. St. Clair had been nominated by local citizens at a mass meeting held at Town Hall on Dec. 31, 1875.
This was the first mass meeting held by Brashear’s citizens since the close of the Civil War, 10 years earlier.
A local newspaper, The Brashear News, names some of those present at the mass gathering. These men were said to be a substantial part of the citizenship of the city.
They included a diverse group with names such as Gougenheim, Loeb, Kahn, Lehman, Bourdier, Stansbury, Ditch, Bass, and Shannon, as well as Joshua Thomas, a Black former mayor of the town.
Nominated along with St. Clair at this mass meeting of Brashear residents were two Black men, John Van Slyke and Alfred Crumpton. Along with J. Wildenstein, W.B. Merchant, and John Macready, these five men were voted into office as town councilmen.
The Brashear News also commented that between the years of 1865 and 1875, the offices of councilmen and other city officials had “frequently been held by colored men.”
Recognizing that their small rural community had been transformed by the bustling activity of the businesses owned by Charles Morgan, the mayor and council agreed with their constituency that a name change was in order.
Morgan’s story begins with his birth in Connecticut in 1795. Although not a member of an affluent family, he moved to New York at the age of 14 working as a clerk in a grocery store.
That led to ownership of an import business as well as a supplier of goods and equipment for the shipping industry.
As early as 1819, he was investing in sailing vessels, and his success multiplied with investments in Morgan’s Ironworks and a line of trading vessels operating between Charleston and New York.
Morgan’s interests moved further South as early as 1837 when he began operating the first scheduled steamship line between Galveston and New Orleans with his vessel, the Columbia.
By the 1850s, Morgan was running his steamships out of Brashear and Berwick Bay.
Although the Civil War brought some setbacks for Morgan’s business with vessels seized by both sides, he managed to profit by operating blockade runners for the Confederacy, while his Iron Works in New York built engines for the U.S. Navy.
Following the war, in 1869, Morgan bought his first railroad, adding two more in the 1870s.
He integrated his rail and shipping routes offering travel to Texas that combined riding steamboats and ferries over rivers with riding the rails on land.
In order to travel from New Orleans to Texas, one took a railroad ferryboat from Elysian Fields Street to Morgan City and there connected with steamers in connection with the Morgan railroad.
By 1876, his fleet consisted of 25 iron steamers that traveled between ports in Texas, Brashear, New Orleans, and New York. He believed that Brashear would one day be in competition with New Orleans and even with New York as one of country’s greatest ports.
Located in the Morgan City Archives are the minutes of the City Council going back to the early 1870s.
The entry at the top of the January 24, 1876 minutes reads:
Brashear, January 24, 1876
Several pages later, on Feb. 24, 1876, the entry says:
"Morgan City, February 24, 1876"
This is the first time our city is officially called Morgan City.
Charles Morgan had no knowledge beforehand of the honor that was being bestowed on him. He was grateful to the newly named city, however, by all accounts, he never set foot in Morgan City.