(French) Dweller at, or near; a sorb tree.

Most of the Cormiers now living in southwestern Louisiana descend from three Acadian families of that name who were among the first groups of exiles to arrive in New Orleans ca. 1765.* After settling first in St. James Parish along the Mississippi, by the 1770s members of all three families had migrated to the Opelousas area and thence to the Attakapas, where they established small farms along Bayou Teche and engaged in raising cattle on the nearby prairies around Carencro and Grand Coteau.

This area became the center of the Cormier clan of Louisiana, and still today about a third of the Cormier households of the state are concentrated in the Bayou Teche-Lafayette region.

Among the more successful of the Cormier pioneers in the Opelousas-Attakapas area was Acadian-born Joseph and his sons Michel, Anaclet, and Joseph, Jr., the latter two by his second wife, Anne Michel. In 1777 Joseph, Sr., had a herd of 150 cattle, which by 1788 had increased to nearly 700 head, together with 60 horses.

The cattle grazed on holdings of several hundred acres in the Bellevue prairies south of Opelousas Post and on the Bayou Plaquemine Brulée near Church Point.

Son Anaclet and his family remained in the southern Opelousas area, whereas Michel and Joseph, Jr., later settled along the Teche.

Somewhat less wealthy, a second Cormier pioneer family, headed by Michel and his second wife, Catherine Stelly, also ran cattle and farmed in the Bellevue and Carencro districts; Michel's three sons and seven grandsons eventually became small farmers along the Teche and Vermilion bayous in the vicinity of present Lafayette.

The third pioneer family, headed by Jean-Baptiste and his wife Marguerite Bourque, remained in St. James Parish until the late 1770s.

After his wife's death Jean-Baptiste remarried (to Anne Blanchard of Opelousas, 1779) and moved his family near St. Martinville in the Attakapas, where his only son, Jean-Baptiste, Jr., began an important line of the Cormier name.

Before 1800 Jean-Baptiste, Sr., apparently had acquired a sizable holding (350 acres) on Bayou Vermilion near Lafayette and another (560 acres) as far west as the Bayou Nezpique in Calcasieu country.

However, substantial westward migration of Cormier families out of the Teche-Lafayette area probably did not occur until after the Civil War. In the mid-1860s several households of that surname lived near Abbeville and in the western part of present Acadia Parish around Rayne, or Queue Tortue, as the area was then called.

The 1880s saw other Cormier families settle along the Mermentau River near Lake Arthur and Jennings, and by the 1890s, after the beginning of large scale rice cultivation in Calcasieu Parish, many Cormiers joined other French-speaking families in the communities of Welsh and Lacassine west of Jennings.

As the rice industry spread westward into the Lake Charles area and southeastern Texas during the early 1900s, many Cormiers and their compatriots followed. Today about 10 percent of all Cormier households of Louisiana origin live in southeastern Texas (more than 100 in Houston alone), engaged in industry, services, and farming