Cameron Parish, Louisiana

About Cameron Parish, Louisiana

”Cameron Parish is a parish in the southwestern section of the U.S. state of Louisiana. As of the 2010 census, the population was 6,839. The parish seat is Cameron. Although it is the largest parish by land area in Louisiana, it has the second-smallest population in the state.Cameron Parish is part of the Lake Charles, Metropolitan Statistical Area.HistoryThis was part of La Louisiane, colonized by the French beginning in the 17th and early 18th century. They encountered the Atakapa and Choctaw indigenous peoples, who had occupied this area for thousands of years.In the late 1700s, after France had ceded New France (Canada) and other holdings east of the Mississippi River to Great Britain following its defeat in 1763 in the Seven Years' War, a number of French-speaking refugee families from Acadia settled in this part of coastal Louisiana. Some had fought against the British with Indian allies during the war in Acadia. Among them were Joseph "Beausoleil" Broussard, his brothers Alexander and Pierre, and their wives and families, who first went to Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) before settling in Louisiana. The British expelled many Acadians for their resistance, particularly their refusal to make loyalty oaths to Great Britain. Numerous other French-speaking families settled here and their descendants populate the smaller towns. Read more

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