German Culture

Roberts Cove Germanfest

Germans were among the first Europeans to settle in the region that would eventually become known as Acadiana.

The first ethnic Germans, Swiss and Alsatians, arrived in 1721, just three years following the founding of the French colonial city of New Orleans. Numbering around 300, this initial group had been recruited by John Law, administrator of the Mississippi Company, the corporation charged with populating France’s Louisiana colony and turning a profit. Stranded in this new country by Law, the Germans rallied under the leadership of Karl Fredrick Darensbourg, a German ethnic born in Stockholm. Bowing to pressure from the group, Bienville, the French governor of Louisiana, granted them fertile plots of land twenty-five miles upriver from New Orleans.

Along what would be called the Côté des Allemands, or German Coast, Darensbourg and the surviving settlers built four agricultural communities on the west bank of the Mississippi River  — Mariental, Augsburg, Hoffen, and Karlstein — where they worked the soil, soon growing enough dairy products, meat, and garden crops to sell their surplus to New Orleans. The original Germans and their descendants intermarried with French colonists and eventually Acadian exiles, who began arriving in the 1760s. Still commonly called the German Coast today, the area resides within the present-day Acadiana parishes of St. Charles, St. John the Baptist, and St. James.

Throughout the 19th century, German immigrants poured into Louisiana, fleeing famine, poverty, and war. In the early 1870s, Joseph Fabacher, his family, and a handful of their ethnic German compatriots moved from New Orleans to settle prairie land northwest of Crowley, near Iota, in today’s Acadia Parish. By 1880, their small farming community, named Fabacher, was producing sizable rice crops, establishing the rice industry that would develop in the western part of Acadiana.

Joseph Fabacher’s successes encouraged Father Peter Leonhard Thevis, a German priest living in New Orleans who envisioned a Catholic German refuge in rural Louisiana. In 1881, the Thevis-led group of thirteen families from the Geilenkirchen-Heinsberg region of Germany paid $967.50 to purchase 387 acres just north of Rayne, an area known as Roberts Cove, named for Benjamin Roberts, the original holder of the colonial Spanish land grant. The Roberts Cove families adopted Fabacher’s rice-production methods, expanding their fields and yield with canal irrigation. More German families followed, with upwards of 175 last names settling in surrounding Acadia Parish.

Besides their contributions to rice farming, German immigrants are credited with introducing, or at least helping along, sausage making and smoked meat traditions in the area. LaPlace, in St. John the Baptist Parish, bills itself as the “Andouille Capital of the World” for the smoked sausage that, despite its French name, was locally popularized by German butchers.

In Roberts Cove, St. Leo IV Church was established in 1885 and remains the heart of the community today. At the church’s Christmas Eve midnight mass, parishioners sing carols in German and English and wish each other greetings of Fröhliche Weihnachten.

The annual Oktoberfest in Roberts Cove attracts attendees from throughout Acadiana. The festival’s roots began in the 1960s, with yearly family reunions called feierleckkeiten. In 1995, the celebration opened to the public and was renamed the Roberts Cove Germanfest. Communal tables welcome eaters with bratwurst and sauerkraut and potato stew. Dancers perform in traditional lederhosen and dirndl skirts. There is accordion music. First manufactured in 1820s Germany and long a central instrument to Cajun and zydeco music, the accordion was likely introduced to Louisiana by early German immigrants. And there is, of course, plenty of German beer.

But it’s the Roberts Cove German Heritage Museum that provides Germanfest’s symbolic soul. Each year, the museum exhibits substantial genealogical displays honoring the founding families of the area, complete with lineages and photographs.

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