E Pluribus Unum -- Even in Minden

E pluribus unum – out of many, one – for many years was considered our national motto and for most people is the basis of how we view our society. In addition, Turner’s Frontier Thesis, the idea that the merging of people from disparate backgrounds led to the emergence of a distinctly American culture, is a major tenet of American Historiography. However, as a child growing up in Minden during the 1960s, those concepts seemed foreign to the place I lived. Although we were clearly divided along racial lines into two separate communities due to the American apartheid of segregation, it seemed each of those two communities were largely homogenous in their makeup. We seemed to be a very insular and perhaps even xenophobic place, not open or understanding to outsiders and their ideas. The odd thing is that little more than a century before we in Minden were on the frontier and more than perhaps any other community in North Louisiana were the “poster child” for the American “melting pot.”
I began thinking about this because of a suggestion from Thad Andress for a project for the Dorcheat Historical Association Museum (if you look back on this blog you’ll see that Thad often nudges me toward ideas.) On a visit to Nova Scotia, Thad had seen a map showing the eventual “landing spot” of those Acadians dispersed from Canada by the British after 1755. Of course we know that many of them ended up in South Louisiana where they became the Cajuns, but most followed a winding path before reaching that destination. Since the goal of the British in creating a diaspora of Acadian culture was to prevent them coalescing once again, the settlers were scattered across North America. That so many did eventually land in Louisiana was a tribute to the determination of the Acadians.

Thad’s idea was that we needed to create such a map for Minden, showing the points of origin and the path taken by the early settlers of our community. This is a project in its infancy, as he only mentioned this to me last week, but today I pulled out an old newspaper column to get me started on research. I wrote this column for the Press-Herald in 2003 and based it on information in the 1850 Census of Minden. The data reveals that Minden was truly a cosmopolitan settlement in 1850 (I’m not sure many have ever seen those two words – Minden and cosmopolitan – used in such close proximity before.)

I’m still working with the data but some of the facts are pretty surprising. In 1850, Minden was home to natives of 25 of the then 30 states of the United States, plus one resident born in the District of Columbia. Foreign-born citizens listed birthplaces in the following locales: Austria, Bavaria, England, Germany, Ireland, Norway, Poland, Prussia, Russia, Scotland and Sweden. As I mentioned in my post about the Ghost Walk, it was likely one could hear three or four languages spoken on one trip down Main Street in those days. Missing from this data is the place of origin of the African-Americans in Minden. We were home to only one free person of color in 1850, but local slaves came from many different places. It seems possible, since it was only 42 years since the end of legal slave importation to the United States, we might have had some slaves who had been born in Africa. But clearly a sizable portion of the local populace had African heritage.

The really fascinating part of such a map will be the path taken to come to Minden. We know of the traditional routes up the Red River and Bayou Dorcheat, across the “Redneck Trail” after the Indian Removal Act and down the Mississippi and across Arkansas and Northern Louisiana. However, there seem to be many other interesting and varied paths to Minden. I’m looking forward to learning more about how out little town became the home of our first residents as this project moves forward.