Are You Proud to be From Louisiana?

Football season is here, and thousands of Louisianans will soon gather under the beautiful live oaks on the LSU Campus for the annual fall rite of tailgating and football.

It always brings to mind those 1970’s paintings George Rodrigue did of nostalgic scenes of life in Louisiana. The big black oak tree is always there in the background representing the strong spirit of the people of our state.

In a wonderful (and frightening) article in this month’s National Geographic, we are told that Bienville had to wait for the water to recede before he could even plant the French flag in New Orleans in 1718. The village he established was destroyed by a flood the next year and hurricanes in 1722 and 1723 wiped it off the map. Hurricanes and/or floods have put New Orleans under water about once every 11 years in its 289-year history, but each time the French, Spanish, blacks, Creoles and Cajuns raised the levees and rebuilt.

Louisiana has the tallest state capitol building in the nation at 450 feet and the Louisiana Superdome is the largest enclosed stadium in the world. The Lake Pontchartrain Causeway is the longest over-water bridge in the world at 23.87 miles and Louisiana’s 6.5 million acres of wetlands are the greatest wetland area in America.

Did you know that the oldest city in the Louisiana Purchase Territory is Natchitoches which was founded in 1714? And the first bottler of Coca-Cola, Joseph Biedenharn, lived in Monroe. He was also one of the founders of Delta Airlines which got its start in Monroe when Parish Agent C.E. Woolman decided to try dusting from an airplane the boll weevils that were destroying the cotton crops in the delta. Delta Air Service was the world’s first crop dusting service.

Right here in river city is Southern University, the largest predominantly black university in America. Baton Rouge was also the site of the only American Revolution battle fought outside the original 13 colonies, and the formal transfer of the Louisiana Purchase was made at the Cabildo in New Orleans on December 20, 1803.

In military science class at LSU we learned that the force of less than 5,000 mostly Louisiana citizens who fought and won The Battle of New Orleans in 1814 against a British army of more than 24,000 highly trained professional soldiers (many of whom were fresh from victories over Napoleon) won the most important land battle ever fought on American soil. (Forget what your ninth grade teacher said about the war being over before the battle was fought. She was wrong. You and everyone else in the U.S. would be speaking with a Canadian accent and singing God Save the Queen if the citizens of our proud state had done anything except achieve total and complete victory in those days.)

Today, Louisiana is the No. 1 producer of crawfish, alligators and shallots in America. We produce 24 percent of the nation’s salt, the most in America. Much of the world’s food, coffee and oil pass through the Port of New Orleans. Tabasco, a Louisiana product, holds the second oldest food trademark in the U.S. Patent Office, and Steen’s Syrup Mill in Abbeville, is the world’s largest syrup plant producing sugar cane syrup. America’s oldest rice mill is in New Iberia at Konriko Co.

LSU (The Ole War Skule) has the distinction of contributing the largest number of officers to World War II after the U.S. military academies. The term Uncle Sam was coined on the wharfs of New Orleans before Louisiana was a U.S. territory because goods labeled U.S. were from “Uncle Sam.” And in 1813 the game of craps was invented on the wharfs in New Orleans.

The only truly American contribution to the world of music is jazz, and it was born in New Orleans. In turn, jazz gave birth to blues and rock and roll. The Louisiana Hayride radio show helped Hank Williams, Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash become stars. The show was broadcast from KWKH Radio in Shreveport from 1948 to 1960.

When states had their own currency, the Bank of Louisiana in New Orleans issued the Louisiana Dix (French for ten) and it became a favored currency for trade in the southeastern U.S., or “in the Land of Dixie” or Dixieland (home of the Dixie Chicks). New Orleans is also the home of the oldest pharmacy in America at 514 Chartres Street in the French Quarter. The early medical mixtures they dispensed were known as cocktails.

From the thousands of Higgins Boats made in New Orleans that General Eisenhower said won World War II to the International Joke Telling Contest held each year in Opelousas, all four-and-one-half million citizens of the Pelican State have every right to be proud of Louisiana.

We have our problems, and every other state has their problems. The only thing we know for sure is that we will never solve all of ours, and they will never solve all of theirs. But that does not mean we cannot do great things if we continue to stand strong and reach for the stars like the beautiful live oaks that grace our state.

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