The Gazette
October 5, 1939

First Settler Came to This Section in 1790

In 1790, the first settler fought his was across the wilds of Alabama, Mississippi and northern Louisiana to reach what is now Union Parish. He was John Honeycutt.

He started the trail-blazing into this  country that was to draw hundreds, then thousands, of settlers, into virgin territory. From the sparsely settled Alabama, Georgia and the Carolinas came the adventurers. Soon there were homesites along the Bayous D’Arbonne, Cornie and DeLoutre, in the “Ouachita settlements” section, as the Union Parish territory was designated in 1807. In that year, the Territory of New Orleans was divided into 19 parishes.

To get back to Honeycutt, he settled in this land that was full of wild life and a veritable paradise for a trapper. He received a land grant from the Spanish government and began to eke out his living here with only Indians as his neighbors.

Then, one day a few years after he first entered this section, he met a roving band of Indians. They told him of another family that had settled in this territory. Putting his coonskin cap on his head, and with his flintlock in the crook of his arm. Honeycutt set out to follow the Indians’ direction to their cabin.

He found an old settler with a “house full of girls”. The sotry goes that he asked the old father for the hand of one. Obligingly, the old man lined the daughters up for Honeycutt’s inspection.

‘I’ll take this ‘un” the trapper said. And he did.