Lacombe and Père Rouquette

Lacombe sits on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain between Mandeville and Slidell, in the dense pines and bayous where the Acolapissa and Choctaw peoples lived for centuries before European contact. The name is thought to derive from a French settler named Rousseau de La Combe who came by schooner from the lake, trading charcoal and other goods to the new colony of New Orleans. The most singular figure associated with this place is Père Adrien Rouquette, a New Orleans-born Creole poet and Catholic priest known to the Choctaw as Chahta-Ima, meaning like a Choctaw.

In eighteen fifty-nine he established a mission among the Choctaw living in the forests near the bayou and spent the rest of his life here, dying in eighteen eighty-seven. The Creole families who settled Lacombe maintained traditions including Les Lumieres du Morte, an All Saints Day candlelit cemetery gathering still observed today.