♂Pierre Firmin Breaux

Pierre Firmin Breaux (about 1749 – 1808) was an Acadian settler of the Attakapas District^W of Spanish Louisiana, a landholder on Bayou Teche who gave his land to his twelve children. He was the fifth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his daughter Scholastique Breaux.

Life

Two compiled genealogies, Bona Arsenault’s history of the Acadians and Steven A. Cormier’s work on the Acadian families of Louisiana, name his parents as Alexis Brault and Marguerite Bariault, who lived at Rivière-aux-Canards, near Grand-Pré. A compiled Acadian genealogy places his own birth about 1749 at Rivière-aux-Canards in Acadia. The family was deported to Massachusetts in 1755, and in 1767 his parents and most of his brothers and sisters went to the Province of Quebec. Firmin did not go with them. Cormier writes that he came to Louisiana in February 1765, still in his teens, with his uncle Sylvain Breau and the Broussard party from Halifax. Arsenault gives his marriage as 13 April 1769 at Donaldsonville, to Marguerite Breaux, daughter of Jean-Baptiste Breaux and Marie-Rose Landry; no record of the marriage act is known. The census of 1769 taken at St. James on 14 September lists him, aged twenty, with his wife Marguerite, aged twenty-two.

The fullest account of him is a history of the village of Breaux Bridge by Gertrude C. Taylor, published in the Attakapas Gazette in 1984, which calls him Firmin Breaux and notes the spellings Brau, Braux, Brot and Braud. It finds him on the Côte Gelée in 1766, listed as a bachelor aged 19. A history of Breaux Bridge published in the Attakapas Gazette in 1984 says that Firmin Breaux was in the Cabahanoce District, the present St. James Parish, in 1769, and was then married to Marguerite Braud. By 1777 he was back in the Attakapas, listed as a member of the militia. A 1987 article in the same journal calls him a “patriot of the American Revolution”.

A Thibodeaux genealogy published in the Attakapas Gazette in 1985, citing the St. Martin church registers, names Pierre Firmin Breaux and Marguerite Breaux as the parents of Scholastique Breaux, who married Cyrille Thibodeaux at St. Martin on 10 November 1799.

The 1984 history gives his death as 2 October 1808, citing Donald J. Hebert’s Southwest Louisiana Records, where his age is given as 60. That age and the age of 19 in 1766 point to a birth about 1747 or 1748; a 1987 newspaper article on him by Claude Kenneson gives his years in its title as 1749–1808. His life has an entry by Jeanette M. Guidry in A Dictionary of Louisiana Biography, published in 1988.

The land on Bayou Teche

On 14 January 1786, the 1984 history records, he bought from the estate of Francois Ledee ten arpents^W of frontage on both sides of Bayou Teche, forty arpents deep on the east side and running back to Bayou Vermilion on the west, and the article finds that by then he was already occupying the land on both sides of the Teche where the village of Breaux Bridge later grew up. In 1792 he bought a tract of four by forty arpents on Bayou Vermilion, which he seems to have parted with before his death, and on 24 July 1796 he bought ten by forty arpents on the east bank of the Teche from Pierre Broussard, bringing his frontage on that side to twenty arpents.

The gift to his children

Probably not long before his death, according to the 1984 history, Firmin Breaux gave his land to his six sons and six daughters: Baptiste, Agricole, Joseph, Donat, Pierre and Francois, and Marie, the wife of Jean B. Guidry, Modeste, the wife of Benjamin Bonin, Adelaide, later the wife of Sylvestre Broussard, Scholastique, the wife of Cyrille Thibodeaux, Felicite, the wife of Athanase Hebert, and Isabel, the wife of Louis Bonin. The twenty arpents on the east bank were cut into four-arpent tracts for Marie, Baptiste, Agricole, Joseph and Modeste, beginning at the lower end; five arpents on the west bank below his house went to Adelaide; and the other six shared the land from Grand Prairie to Bayou Vermilion equally. The article cites the gift from St. Martin Parish Succession No. 38, dated 30 January 1809, notes that he made the gifts to his daughters in the names of their husbands, and describes the document as in poor condition.

The town of Breaux Bridge

In 1813 his son Agricole bought the four-arpent tract given to his brother Joseph, and the 1984 history places the beginning of the village of Breaux Bridge on the lower part of that land; after Agricole’s death in 1828 his widow, Scholastique Picou, had a plan of the village drawn up in 1829. A 1983 review in the Attakapas Gazette, also by Gertrude C. Taylor, faulted a compiled Breaux genealogy for repeating the belief that the town was named for Firmin; by all the evidence, she wrote, the town was named for his son Agricole Breaux, who owned the land and built the bridge.