Eyes of an Eagle: Jean-Pierre Cenac, Patriarch: An Illustrated History of Early Houma-Terrebonne

16. Progress and Heartbreak

From the time they were married until the early 1880s, Pierre and Victorine with their ever-growing brood lived a boom time of family well-being and business growth. Of their 11 children born by the beginning of that decade, their daughter Josephine was the youngest, born in 1880. That year, the population of Terrebonne Parish was 17,957 and the City of Houma’s was 1,084. However, Pierre and Victorine were bringing children into a world that had no medical answers to many sicknesses and diseases. They must have heard with fear, for example, about the fièvre jaune (yellow fever) epidemic that began in July 1878 in Morgan City some 30 miles west of Houma. During the following four months, 600 persons contracted the disease and 109 died.1 Statewide in 1878, yellow fever killed more than 5,000 people, and a total of 13,000 in the lower Mississippi Valley. Other medical scourges of the time were typhoid fever (fièvre typhoïde, pronounced tee-foe-EED), scarlet fever, measles, diphtheria, smallpox, tetanus, and cholera. Epidemics took their toll on local populations at many different periods in the parish’s history. Livestock, which played an important role in most households of the day, likewise did not escape the perils of disease. Anthrax felled many cattle, beasts of burden, and other animals in periodic outbreaks during this historical period. After 17 years of childrearing that went undisturbed except by the common childhood health issues, Pierre and Victorine were abruptly, and grievously, reminded about the fragile nature of surviving to adulthood during the time in which they lived. Their tenth child, Marie Anne Celestine, lived only to the age of three years. She died of an unknown sickness in 1882. Pierre and Victorine laid her to rest in the cemetery of Sacred Heart Church in Montegut, in a burial site which can no longer be identified. Some local residents say that the original cemetery lies under the current roadbed of the highway that parallels Bayou Terrebonne at Montegut. Two years after Marie Anne Celestine died, Victorine gave birth to their twelfth child, William Jean Pierre, in 1884. Another son, Dennis, was born in 1887, and in 1891 Marie Azelie Ademise became the Cenacs’ fourteenth child. (Later in life, she legally changed her name to Adenise Marie, probably because she had always been known by that name rather than her official one.) CHAPTER 16 Progress and Heartbreak Opposite, St. Eloi Catholic Church, Bayou Dularge, built in 1875. The founding pastor, Fr. Jean Goffry, celebrated Mass there for the first time that year during Lent. Last Mass before demolition was November 13, 1971 Baptismal certificate of William Jean Pierre Cenac, dated March 17, 1884 r B ti l tifi t f 147 Chapter 16 Sandwiched among all these personal events was another type of milestone for Pierre in the year 1880. On July 12, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States. This entailed renunciation of his native country’s citizenship and oath of allegiance to American citizenship. The brief ceremony took place at the Terrebonne Parish Courthouse in Houma. Two witnesses to his becoming a citizen of the country he had adopted 20 years before were Peter Berger and Andrew Zeringer, both of whose families were prominent Houma residents at the time.2 Becoming a U.S. citizen was another step in Pierre’s cementing his place in the community. However, family was always the first line of concern in the busy household, and seven years after their youngest child entered the world, Pierre and Victorine’s family suffered a heartbreak that was perhaps even more tragic for them than the loss of Marie Anne Celestine. Josephine was 18 years old in 1898, a young woman looking forward to her marriage to fiancé Charles Barthelemy “Bahya” Carlos. He was the brother of her sister Marie’s deceased husband Salvador Carlos, Jr., and also brother to her sister Marguerite’s husband Eugene Prosper Bertrand Carlos. Above, Charles Barthelemy “Bahya” Carlos, betrothed to (below) Josephine Cenac at the time of her death. Right, an oath of the type Pierre would have had to declare at his naturalization Pierre’s1880naturalizationcertificate 148 EYES OF AN EAGLE On February 5, 1898, Josephine’s brother Theophile, 11 years her senior, and his wife Sylvia Bourque Cenac became parents of a daughter, Marie Isare. They asked Josephine to be marraine (nainaine) of the...