La Salette Memorial Hospital in Loreauville, Louisiana

Editor: The history of La Salettes in Louisiana began in 1918 and lingers still in the hearts and minds of the Catholics in “Cajun country.”

Loreauville is a little town hidden in the Evangeline country of Louisiana. Ancient live oaks, dripping with festoons of Spanish Moss, line the quiet streets, and the inhabitants of the town go serenely about their daily task of cultivating the sugar cane and the other farm products which grow lavishly in the rich, black soil.

 This is Evangeline territory

Monument in St. Martinville, Louisiana to Acadians based on H.W. Longfellow’s poem, Evangeline, A Tale of AcadieThey are undisturbed by the hundreds of tourists who flock to nearby St. Martinville, Louisiana to visit the grave of Evangeline , and they are sufficiently distant from the noise of the busy traffic of Highway 90 which skirts the Gulf of Mexico. Like their ancestors before them, they are thrifty, hard-working people who wrest a living from the good earth.

Most of the inhabitants of the area can trace their ancestry back to forefathers banished by the English from their homes in Acadia . And like their sturdy forefathers, they are fervent members of the Church. In the center of the town, the Church and Rectory occupy the choicest ground and nearby a most modern school provides the best in education.

A lasting La Salette Memorial Hospital

In 1948 the people of Loreauville decided to erect a memorial honoring their dead in World War I and II. This was not to be a temporary affair which in time would become weather-beaten and neglected. Too many such shabby memorials are rotting away in cities and towns throughout our country, the long list of honorable names now illegible and the horrors of war apparently forgotten.

George Lallande, a young businessman in his early thirties, former army officer and member of the school board, was put in charge of the project of choosing the war memorial. It was to be a living, growing thing, useful to everyone and a fitting tribute to those who had fought for their country. The result? A new, modern, thirty-room hospital complete with full medical service.

This hospital would be a credit to a much larger community than one the size of Loreauville, and shows what can be accomplished when a community works in complete sympathy and understanding. Until recently the sick and infirm had been ministered to by Doctor C. DeGravelles, who gave unstintingly of himself. But after the doctor's untimely death, the people of the community were virtually isolated as far as the services of a physician were concerned.

Our Lady of La Salette Memorial, at the newer St. Joseph's Catholic Church, Loreauville, Louisiana, USAGeorge Lallande made a mental inventory of the community’s medical and hospital needs and he decided that something had to be done about it. There was indeed room for a doctor’s service and a hospital too. “Why can’t we have them?” said Lallande to himself and to the people of Loreauville. Other communities, he reasoned, no larger and far less prosperous, have adequate medical and hospital facilities.

A gift of land from the Diocese for a new hospital

Lallande talked to the people and to the priests and they agreed that he was right. A hospital would not only fill a need of the town but would be a sensible and practical memorial to honor the war dead.

With the permission of the Bishop of Lafayette, the Most Reverend Jules B. Jeanmard, D.D., a tract of land next to the rectory was donated as the site of the future hospital. A building at the Naval Station, Gulfport, Mississippi, was purchased through the War Surplus Administration and dismantled and hauled to Loreauville by farmers of the area in their trucks. Gulfport is over two hundred miles away.

The hospital goes up

When all the lumber was in neat but large piles on the grounds where the hospital now stands, the workers, realizing that building a hospital necessitated more planning and many more details than goes into the building of a residence or a commercial building, consulted with the doctors and nurses of nearby New Iberia.

La Salette Memorial Hospital, Loreauville, LouisianaThe ground broken at a special ceremony, it wasn’t long before hammer on nail sounded a paean to the vision and the faith of an ingenious population. In the words of Mr. Lallande the credit for the completed building belongs to everyone in Loreauville. “It belongs to the men who left their fields and their jobs to dismantle and haul the building back to Loreauville, to the men and women, and even the ’teen-agers, white and colored, who pitched in to saw and nail, to paint and make and repair parts needed to complete the hospital building.”

The structure now completed, has thirty rooms and is prepared to accommodate twelve patients. Although the dedication ceremonies did not take place until September 11, 1949, the hospital was pressed into service a month earlier, on August 13, when three prospective black mothers asked for admittance. In this community “civil rights” is a hazy subject and of no immediate concern to either whites or blacks, so the women of the town quickly gathered the necessary linens, clothing and whatever else is needed for new arrivals. Three healthy, gurgling babies were born that same day, and now the hospital is an integral part of Loreauville.

With Our Lady of La Salette as its Patroness it is bound to succeed.

YOU CAN SEE OUR FULL GALLERY HERE!

(Originally published in the La Salette publication, Our Lady’s Missionary, November, 1949, pgs. 6-7)