American Friends of Lafayette - Louisiana

09/21/2026

Detailed accounts of the Battle of New Orleans. Considered by many war historians as the most lobsided upset in the history of war.

The history books often portray the Battle of New Orleans as a clea...

09/18/2026

This is interesting because it is true about the "Acadian" home and architectural style. In the comments below I have my home, which is an Acadian, minus the exterior stairs. 😉

That bare staircase running up the outside of an old Acadian house was not decoration. It was a bedroom door. 🌿

The Acadian house is one of the most intelligent buildings ever put up in North America, and it was made by people who arrived here with nothing. Exiles out of Nova Scotia, set down on a prairie and a swamp they did not know, in a climate that would take a Canadian building apart in a decade. What they built in answer is a small masterpiece of adaptation.

They raised it off the ground on brick or cypress blocks, because the water comes. They gave it a steep roof with a deep overhang, because the rain comes sideways. They ran a full porch across the front, which is not a porch at all but an outdoor room where the family lived nine months of the year. They packed the walls with bousillage, a mixture of mud, Spanish moss and animal hair pressed between cypress posts, which insulates, breathes, and can be patched by anyone with a bucket.

And they put the staircase outside.

Up under that steep roof was the garconniere, the loft where the unmarried sons of the house slept. The stair to it did not pass through the house. The boys came and went by the outside, which meant they could come in late without waking anybody, and it meant nobody crossed the girls' room or the parents' room to get there. A whole set of rules about privacy, courtship and family honor, solved with lumber.

Almost none of this was written down. There were no architects. A man built his house the way his father's house was built, with help from neighbors who would need the same favor back, and the knowledge moved from hand to hand.

Thousands of them are gone, pulled down as old and embarrassing in the decades when people wanted a brick ranch instead. The ones that survived usually survived because somebody moved them, board by numbered board, to a village or a park.

Your great great grandfather designed a building perfectly suited to this place without ever drawing a line on paper. We have spent seventy years air conditioning our way around what he already knew. ⚜️

09/18/2026

Mostly correct but still interesting history.

09/18/2026

A little New Orleans history where cafe au lait and beignets began. Many AFL members got to enjoy Cafe du Monde during their visits to our 2025 Lafayette Bicentennial and 2026 Annual Meeting. Cafe du Monde today is still in its original location since 1862. Morning Call is also still around and going strong, but moved out of the French Quarter decades ago over a lease issue.

08/24/2026

SHOW YOUR PRIDE with an AFL250/Vive Lafayette! license plate frame - AND help promote the AFL. The frame is made of metal and comes in different colors, as well as the color of the print. Only $12.95 with free shipping. You can order it here (give instructions on your choice of colors and what you want printed on the frame): https://www.ebay.com/itm/254127332028

08/18/2026

Spain never agreed to the Louisiana Purchase. Spain said so out loud, repeatedly, to anyone who would listen. ⚜️

The version everybody learns ends with Napoleon selling and Jefferson buying. What tends to get left out is that the territory Napoleon sold had been in French hands for barely three years, and he had gotten it from Spain on a specific promise.

That promise sat inside the secret Treaty of San Ildefonso of 1800 and the agreements that followed it. Spain handed Louisiana back to France in exchange for a kingdom in Italy for the Spanish king's son in law, and with the clear understanding that France meant to keep the place. France would not turn around and sell it to a third party. Spain was not about to give up a continental buffer just so that buffer could be handed to the Americans.

Three years later Napoleon did exactly that. Without asking. In about three weeks. For money he needed for a war.

Madrid was furious. The Spanish government formally protested the sale as a violation of the agreement. And in New Orleans the Marques de Casa Calvo, one of the Spanish commissioners who had overseen the handover of the colony back to France, simply stayed on in the city long after Spain had any business being there, watching, corresponding, and maintaining to whoever would listen that the entire transaction was illegitimate.

He had a practical worry as well. Nobody had ever fixed where Louisiana ended. Spain still held Texas and the Floridas, and the western boundary of the Purchase was a genuinely open question that would trouble both countries for years. Casa Calvo went out toward the Texas frontier to survey and assert Spanish claims.

Governor Claiborne eventually ran out of patience and ordered him out of the territory in 1806.

Spain's protest went nowhere, the way protests without an army usually do. But it is worth remembering that the greatest land deal in American history was, in the view of one of the three countries involved, a broken promise. 🌙