Welsh, Louisiana

Welsh started because of rheumatism. Miles Welsh, a Pennsylvania cattleman, came south in the eighteen seventies looking for a mild climate to ease his joints and ended up in southwest Louisiana, where the tall-grass prairies seemed made for raising cattle. In eighteen eighty he donated a right-of-way to the Louisiana Western Railroad, which built a station and named the stop after him.

The town's first mayor, elected in eighteen eighty-eight, was Henry Welsh, who died just months after taking office. When Jefferson Davis Parish was carved out of old Calcasieu Parish in nineteen thirteen, Welsh found itself inside the new boundaries. Today the town of around three thousand three hundred anchors the western end of a parish still named for the president of the Confederacy.