Minden and Mt. Lebanon -- The Ties that Bind

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to speak about stagecoach travel on the Old Wire Road across North Louisiana at the Jonquil Jubilee in Gibsland/Mt. Lebanon. My program was one of several held at the old Stagecoach Inn in Mt. Lebanon. While there I was reminded again of an old axiom I have found to be true over the years, "you never learn anything while your mouth is open." So, while I enjoyed making the presentation, I learned some very interesting information from one of the later speakers, Mary Claire Kettler of Gibsland. Her topic was a history of the Stagecoach Inn itself and the Mt. Lebanon community in general. For years I have been aware of the many ties between Mt. Lebanon and Minden, including many common families and the fact that the Rehoboth Baptist Church is not only the founding church of the Louisiana Baptist Convention, but also the mother church of the Minden (later First Baptist) Baptist Church.

But it was only yesterday I learned a tidbit that is going to drive me back to the research files. Two of the key founders of Mt. Lebanon were Martin Canfield, who came to Louisiana from South Carolina to pick the site for the community, and his brother-in-law, Reuben Drake, who actually made the first land purchase to facilitate that mass migration of an entire community from the Edgefield District of South Carolina to Claiborne Parish, Louisiana. As mentioned, I already knew about the family ties. Drake's brother Abner settled in Minden and became one of the most prominent citizens of our town. That branch of the Drake family provided the land for the Methodist and Presbyterian churches in Minden, along with the Minden Male Academy. In addition, Reuben Drake also owned land in what is today's Minden and was part of the "land squabble" between our founder Charles Veeder and Adam Stewart. On the Canfield side, a brother of Martin Canfield, was a prominent member of the Minden Baptist Church and provided the material and supervised the construction of the first church home of the Minden Baptist Church, located on the present corner of Broadway and Miller Streets where the Christian Church at Minden's building is today. So, the ties were clear.

However, during Ms Kettler's program she produced a map of the original settlement of Mt. Lebanon and discussed how the town was planned and laid out along a parallelogram, which served as a central greenspace for the community. Immediately I recognized that Minden was also founded along the same pattern, a central parallelogram that served as a greenspace and was unoccupied by structures for many years. Today that parallelogram is the area between Main and Broadway (Front and Back Street for oldtimers like me). From Minden's founding until 1872 when the first Webster Parish Courthouse was constructed, the only part of that greenspace that contained structures was the area between today's Fogle and Union Streets. This pattern is not common in the South, as most towns are like Homer and have a traditional town square as the center.

Finding this commonality between Minden and Mt. Lebanon has raised some questions in my mind. Traditionally we have given credit to Veeder for Minden's layout, but now I want to explore a bit more. It seems entirely plausible to me that the parallelogram layout came not from Veeder but from the Drakes. I want to study a bit about community patterns in the Edgefield District and also in New York and Indiana were Veeder lived before coming South. But we may need to update out town history a bit and shift some credit away from Veeder to the place it truly belongs.