The small town of isn't a Ghost Town by any measure, there are some 600 residents, but, like many towns in Louisiana, it's heyday is far in the rearview mirror. The town is littered with abandoned houses and stores that show evidence that the area was once very vibrant and prosperous.
The fate of towns like Cheneyville was written on the wall when the new Interstate Highway 49 was built just to the west. Just like when Interstate 40 was built in the west, the towns along the famous Route 66 simply dried up due to the lack of traffic. Cheneyville sits along the old highway 71, which used to be the main route between Shreveport and Baton Rouge. The once busy road is now just for locals and nearby farmers.
Check out some of the sites:
The town was named for settler William Cheney.
Cheneyville is significant in the history of the Restoration Movement associated with Alexander Campbell. In 1843 most of the membership of a Baptist congregation, under the leadership of William Prince Ford, who had been influenced by Campbell's writings, became a Church of Christ. The Cheneyville Christian Church is the oldest congregation associated with the Restoration Movement in Louisiana. In 1857, Campbell visited the congregation and was favorably impressed by its fellowship between the races. - Wiki
Here on the bayou, at this point, you are in the midst of Old Cheneyville, founded in 1813. Here the keelboats and barges floated downstream to the Inland Port of Washington, or were pulled, usually by oxen, along the bayou upstream with supplies sent from New Orleans via Washington. Cheneyville was originally settled by a man named William Fendon Cheney from South Carolina in 1811; two years later friends and probably relatives from the same South Carolina area came into the site from Woodville, Miss. where they had originally marked out their plantations. These were followed by wave after wave of migrants from the same location in South Carolina. - Source
No comments:
Post a Comment