Rayne, Frog Capital of the World
Near Lafayette, Louisiana
Rayne calls itself the Frog Capital of the World, and it earned the title. The town was incorporated in eighteen eighty-three along the Louisiana Western Railroad line, and by the eighteen nineties a local saloon owner named Donat Pucheu had started selling bullfrogs harvested from the surrounding rice-field marshes to restaurants in New Orleans. Then the Weil family, led by Jacques Weil, built a much bigger frog business, shipping frogs by rail to big cities and, by one account, as far as Paris.
In the nineteen thirties, a Rayne company became the world's largest frog shipper, sending out about half a million frogs in a single year. The frog trade eventually faded, but the legacy stuck: the town is decorated with frog murals, frog statues, and an annual Frog Festival, celebrating the unlikely export that put this small Acadian-prairie city on the map.
