The Lafayette Gazette (Lafayette, La.)
Historic newspapers carry the language, views and graphic reporting of their time, including racist content. They are shown to teen and adult profiles.
589 issues from 1893 to 1903, published in Lafayette, Louisiana, digitised for Chronicling America.
The Lafayette Gazette was a weekly, four-page Democratic newspaper published in Lafayette, Louisiana, from 1893 to 1921. Located 15 miles west of the Atchafalaya Swamp and 35 miles north of the Gulf of Mexico, Lafayette is at the heart of Acadiana, a region settled in the eighteenth century by French colonists driven out of Nova Scotia during the French and Indian War. In the nineteenth century, most immigrants to the region came directly from France or from other parts of the United States. The population of Lafayette (the seat of Lafayette Parish) was about 3,000 in the 1890s. By 1910, the population had more than doubled, due in part to the opening in 1900 of the Southwestern Louisiana Industrial Institute (now the University of Louisiana at Lafayette). Several sugar factories appeared around the turn of the century, contributing further to the town’s growth. Natural gas was discovered at nearby Breaux Bridge in 1899, followed by oil at Anse La Butte in 1902; these resources, however, were not fully exploited until the mid-twentieth century.
Homer J. Mouton (1870-1903), a son of former Louisiana lieutenant governor Charles Homer Mouton, founded the Lafayette Gazette in 1893 with Charles A. Thomas. Within year, Mouton had purchased Thomas’s share of the business and become its sole proprietor. Like his father (an officer in the White League, a Reconstruction-era paramilitary group formed to intimidate Republicans and black voters), Mouton strongly supported the doctrine…
- Genres
- News
- Published in
- Lafayette, Louisiana, United States
- Language
- English
- Collection
- Chronicling America
- Licence or status
- None stated by the archive
- Rights
- The Library of Congress believes that the newspapers in Chronicling America are in the public domain or have no known copyright restrictions. Newspapers published in the United States more than 95 years ago are in the public domain in their entirety.
- Credit
- Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities
- Who can read it
- Teens profiles and older (placed by Invisible Network from what the archive says; archives give no ratings)
- Archive
- Library of Congress