Jim Bradshaw: Veteran of Napoleon's army helped found a Louisiana town

After Napoleon Bonaparte was forced from power in 1815, many of his soldiers had to leave France for political and economic reasons.
A good number of them found their way to French Louisiana, including an officer who is called the founder of Ville Platte.
Napoleon fell out of favor with the French people after his defeat at Waterloo and, facing an army of allies outside of France and citizen unrest inside, was forced to abdicate. King Louis XVIII, back on the French throne, at first refused to pardon any of the men who fought under Napoleon, even common soldiers.
He finally pardoned the soldiers, but not the high-ranking officers or any of Napoleon’s relatives, most of whom decided it would be a prudent thing to leave France.
Their problem was finding a place to go. They’d fought against practically every country in Europe, and weren’t welcome in any of them.
Many of them came to the United States simply because they had no other choice.
One of those veterans was Marcellin Garand, a native of Savoy, France, who had been an adjutant major during Napoleon’s reign, and who’d lost most of his eyesight to snow blindness during the army’s disastrous invasion of Russia in 1812.
Garand reached New Orleans in 1817, and was in the Ville Platte area at least by 1821, when he married Brigette Soileau, daughter of Noel Soileau and Angelique Fontenot.
She died in 1825, and Garand married Hyacinthe Vidrine, daughter of Pierre Vidrine and Marie Josephe Brignac.
In April 1824, he and two others negotiated with an earlier settler, Samuel Laughlin, for the right to gather wood on his property. Laughlin died shortly after that deal was made, and Garand bought half of Laughlin’s land from the estate.
Some histories credit Garand with founding the town and naming it Ville Platte (Flat Town), but the name was probably used well before he got there.
The first settlers stopped there in the 1780s because it was on the main trail between Natchitoches and Los Adaes in central Louisiana and San Antonio, and it was where the Louisiana hill country began to flatten into prairie land good for raising cattle or cultivation.
As for his founding the town, one historian explains, “he was the first to think in terms of incorporating the area into a legal village. Prior to this time, it had just been a stopover on the road.
Under his leadership, with other gentlemen of the period serving as a committee, Ville Platte was established as a town, and he became known as its founder.”
He is also credited in some histories with originating the Tournoi, the jousting tournament that remains a regular part of the annual Cotton Festival in Ville Platte.
Despite his poor eyesight, Garand became a man of substance and influence.
He owned a hotel, store and tavern and was the town’s first postmaster.
When he died on June 14, 1852, at the age of 71, his estate included “a Plantation House and its dependences, containing one hundred and eighty-five arpents of land, a part in culti
vation, a part in wood, and a part in prairie,” another tract of “wood and prairie land, situated in Flat Town, containing about one hundred arpents,” another smaller piece of land, “one buggy, one wagon, a lot of gentle horned cattle, one lot of wild vacherie cattle, one flock of sheep, two yolk of oxen, work and carriage horses, farming implements, household furniture, kitchen utensils, &c,. &c., &c.”
The inventory for his store included shoes and clothing and other expected items, as well as seven 30-gallon barrels of whiskey, 306 bottles of red wine, and eight bottles of champagne.
In all. his estate was valued at a little more than $30,000, the equivalent of roughly a million dollars today.
The old soldier is buried in the Old Ville Platte Cemetery.
His refurbished grave was listed near the west end of Chatagnier Street when the graveyard was cleaned up in 1938 as a WPA project.
There are no descendants in the area who bear the Garand name. He had one son, but there’s some question about what happened to him.
Some people think he moved to Texas in the 1860s. Others say he died during the Civil War. There are no reliable records.
Garand daughters married into the Dardeau, Tate, Reed, and other families with deep roots in the area.
A collection of Jim Bradshaw’s columns, "Cajuns and Other Characters," is available from Pelican Publishing. You can contact him at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.