Julien Poydras: the merchant who shaped Pointe Coupee

Julien de Lalande Poydras began as a traveling seller of household goods and became a major planter, banker and political leader in early Louisiana. He built his fortune in Pointe Coupee Parish, led the territory’s first bank, and presided over the bodies that helped steer Louisiana to statehood. Any account of early business in this part of the state has to deal with him, and with the labor that paid for his success.

From peddler to banker

According to the Encyclopedia of Louisiana, Poydras was born on April 3, 1740, in Rezé, France. He joined the French navy, was captured by the British in 1760 during the Seven Years’ War, and spent several years in prison before escaping to Saint-Domingue. He reached Louisiana sometime between 1768 and 1774.

He started by peddling household goods across a thinly settled region. The money he saved bought land and enslaved workers at Pointe Coupée, a settlement upriver from Baton Rouge. Over time he added three more plantations in the parish, near False River, and two in West Baton Rouge Parish. A Library of Congress survey record of Alma, one of his properties, says he owned six plantations. Most of the land grew cotton. Only one Pointe Coupée property, Alma, grew sugarcane.

He also owned real estate in New Orleans. Poydras Street takes its name from land he bought there in 1788. He was also the original president of the Banque de la Louisiane, chartered in 1804 as the Louisiana Territory’s first financial institution.

The wealth and who produced it

Poydras’s fortune rested on slavery. At his death he enslaved more than 1,000 people on his plantations. Contemporaries said he treated them “humanely and mildly,” but the Encyclopedia of Louisiana notes that a 1795 conspiracy at Pointe Coupée implicated about a dozen of his enslaved workers. A University of California, Berkeley database of Louisiana slave conspiracies lists him as an enslaver tied to that case.

His will instructed that enslaved workers were not to be sold apart from their plantations, and that each property’s workers were to be freed and given pensions after 25 years. After later owners failed to honor those terms, his nephew Benjamin Poydras de la Lande brought suits that won the workers annuities, which are annual court-ordered payments.

Public office and bequests

Poydras presided over the First Legislative Council of the Territory of Orleans, created in 1804. The encyclopedia entry says its legislature passed an act setting up a public school system, the first in any U.S. territory. He served as the territory’s second and last delegate to the U.S. House, presented the petition for Louisiana statehood in 1810, led the constitutional convention, and became the first president of the state senate after Louisiana joined the Union in 1812.

He died on June 23, 1824, at 78, unmarried, at his Pointe Coupée plantation home. He left most of his estate to institutions. New Orleans’s Charity Hospital and the Female Orphan Society, now the senior-living provider Poydras Home, received properties to lease or sell for income. He gave funds for an endowed college at New Roads, named for him and founded in 1829, which closed during the Civil War. He also set up a dowry fund for brides in Pointe Coupée and West Baton Rouge parishes.

His remains were first buried at St. Francis Church and moved in 1891, as the Mississippi River eroded the old burial ground, to the grounds of Poydras Academy at New Roads. The school later became Poydras High School. Its 1924 building is now the Julien Poydras Museum and Arts Center.