Jim Bradshaw: Searching for Acadia's Fabacher

Sometime ago, I wrote about an all but forgotten Acadia Parish community called Fabacher, noting that little remains to mark just where it was.

I speculated that “Fabacher Road, which runs west for several miles from La. 91 near Iota, is one of the few reminders of the settlement founded in 1871 by the man some claim to be the pioneer of the modern rice industry.”

That was based on the assumption that the Fabacher community was very likely on or near the road that was named for the family.

That caught the eye of Dennis Sensat, whose family lived on the road from early times, and who has records from its earliest German settlers.

He noted in an email that Fabacher Road is less than two miles long and that most of it is bordered by timberland, not by prairie suitable for settlement.

“I have all the documents [from] that time period until now, and for much adjoining land, and the descriptions mention Millers, Heberts, Sonniers, and others, but no Fabachers. … The one mile of woodland has always been known as Reed Woods,” he wrote.

Dennis says the Leger family has been on the north side of the road for generations, and that his great-grandfather, Theodore Flash, a German immigrant, homesteaded the biggest part of the southern side.

He wrote that the area south of it was once known as Flash Cove for his family, and that no Fabacher headstones are among the ones still standing in what is sometimes called the Flash Cove Cemetery there.

(The graveyard’s formal name is the Old Pointe aux Loups Cemetery.)

The mystery led Dennis to call 92-year-old C. A. Fabacher, patriarch of the Fabachers still living in Acadia Parish.

He said the road was named for his father, Albert Fabacher, who lived about a mile north of Fabacher Road, near the intersection of present-day Connie and Nickel roads, but that his earlier  ancestors settled near the Ritchie community, just west of Frey and north of Iota between Bayou des Cannes and Bayou Mallet.

That jibes with a history by Reinhart Kondert of German settlement in southwest Louisiana (A History of the Germans of Roberts Cove, Center for Louisiana Studies, 2008) who said the Fabacher settlement was founded in 1870, but is not precise about where it was.

Kondert said Joseph Fabacher and another early German settler, Zeno Huber, “together toured the prospective settlement area and had determined the location for the new community on the basis of its promise as a flourishing agricultural area.”

He says they decided on a place “about ten miles northwest of Crowley between two bayous, … [that] had the added attraction of lying on or near a projected railroad line which would connect Vermilionville [Lafayette today] with Orange, Texas.”

Joseph Fabacher was C. A. Fabacher’s grandfather, and Kondert’s account agrees with the family history C. A. remembers.

He told Dennis that there were high hopes for the area’s growth because of the belief that a railroad would be built there, but that the German settlement dwindled away after the trains went elsewhere.

That also agrees with an account written in 1891 by William Henry Perrin in Southwest Louisiana Biographical and Historical (Gulf Publishing Company) that Joseph Fabacher “built a large saw-mill … and spent a great deal of money [developing his lands] with the expectation of getting the projected railroad through them.

"Finally, when the road was built, it missed his lands some distance, which very materially upset his plans.”

Perrin says Joseph Fabacher was postmaster in 1890 at Canal, which was an early name for Frey.

In those days the postmaster was usually the proprietor of the general store and authorities named the post office after the postmaster.

Postal records show a Fabacher post office established on June 11, 1873, that was closed about 1890.

Was Fabacher an early name for Canal/Frey?

It may be instructive that when the first large group of German emigres settled here and began to grow rice, newspapers of the time referred to their community as “The German Colony,” not by a place name, and that Kondert’s history refers to Fabacher as a “settlement” not a named community.

You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.