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St. Mary's Parish

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Southern Louisiana had its distinctiveness; complete with the French and Spanish legacy, an Anglo-American territory, its Roman Catholic bastion; present was evangelical Protestantism, the slave society, its sugar society and historic plantations. But more important it had Centerville, Louisiana, the hometown of William J. Seymour, the son of former slaves.

Centerville lays one-hundred miles southwest of New Orleans, on current US 90. Here one experiences a small rural area along the Bayou Tech, part of St. Mary’s Parish, “Hoodoo country,” Louisiana! Even today’s National Register of Historic Places testifies to St. Mary Parish’s former glory as it has twenty-seven historic plantation homes and other buildings listed on the 2011 list.1 But …show more content…

The institution was throughout Louisiana including St. Mary’s Parish. Historical statistics reveal that the slave population in the sugar parishes (excluding New Orleans) mushroomed from under 10,000 in 1810 to more than 42,000 by 1830. 8 There were fourteen sugar parishes in Louisiana; St. Mary’s had more large slaveholders than any other sugar parish. It was number five out of forty-seven parishes when lumped together with sugar, cotton and piney woods parishes.9 In 1860 St. Mary’s Parish was rated first of all of the sugar parishes in the number of slaves, being 13, 057 and less than 3,500 whites.10 Also it was first in the number of acres of improved acreage and upper echelon of the number of slaveholders and the number of landholders.11
Catholic slave masters ruled the majority of the slave plantations in Louisiana, but there was a noticeable disconnect between the nominal Catholic preference of slave masters and their actual practice of Catholicism. This being the case in St. Mary’s Parish, Louisiana, which had four Catholic churches in 1860 capable of seating fourteen hundred persons, church attendance was low. Catholic planters put plantation duties before religious ones. The Catholic Church was not sufficiently appealing or necessary to them to warrant a trip to …show more content…

Nationally, in 1787, blacks broke away from the Methodist Church and in 1815 the African Methodist Episcopal (A. M. E.) Church was founded. By 1846, the A. M. E. Church, had grown to about 300 churches with over 17,000 members. They had 176 clergy.14

Methodism operated in both the state-at-large and in New Orleans. By 1847 there were thirteen Methodist appointments with 1,328 white and 1,280 Negro members in New Orleans alone.20 In Louisiana, the circuit system was at work and by 1850 there were more Methodist churches in Louisiana than any other church denomination. The Methodist conference that met at Mansfield in 1854 reported 5,085 white and 5,459 black members – a gain of 1,000 over the previous year.15 Data shows that in William J. Seymour’s St. Mary’s Parish, the Methodist were present in the 1800’s.21

Not to be outdone were the Louisiana Baptist which were evangelizing whites and Negroes all over the

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