How Breaux Bridge became the crawfish town
Breaux Bridge grew up on both banks of Bayou Teche around a footbridge Firmin Breaux built in the late 1700s. Agricole Breaux put up the first bridge for wagons in 1817, and Scholastique Picou Breaux laid out the town in 1829. St. Martin Parish tourism says it is the only town on the Teche that grew from both sides at once. Henderson, the gateway to the Atchafalaya Basin, is just to the east.
The Louisiana Legislature named Breaux Bridge the Crawfish Capital of the World in 1959, the year of the town's centennial, and the Crawfish Festival grew out of that celebration in 1960. It has run every spring since, with an étouffée cook-off, a crawfish eating contest and crawfish races, plus Cajun, zydeco and swamp pop on three stages.
The étouffée story starts here too. According to 64 Parishes, in the 1920s Yolie and Marie Hébert, whose parents owned the Hébert Hotel in Breaux Bridge, served a crawfish dish they called a courtbouillon. They passed the recipe to Aline Guidry Champagne, whose family ran the Rendezvous Club in Henderson. She simplified it in the late 1940s, and crawfish étouffée went on the Rendezvous menu in 1950. The story rests largely on oral history, but it is the one the region tells.
Wild crawfish and the Atchafalaya
Most crawfish come from ponds, many of them rice fields flooded after the harvest. Wild crawfish come from the swamp, and about 90 percent of Louisiana's wild catch has historically come from the Atchafalaya Basin. The wild season follows the river: a high river in late fall means a better catch in February, and high water in January and February helps the spring.
The basin feeds the town in other ways. Anglers there take bass, the crappie locals call sac-a-lait, bream and blue, channel and flathead catfish, and falling water after the spring floods concentrates the fish. On the land side, sugarcane is St. Martin Parish's biggest field crop, around 31,000 acres, ground from mid September into January.
