Like many other patronyms of Acadian origin in Louisiana, that of Dugas is widespread in the southern part of the state, reflecting a complex and often confusing settlement history by people of that surname. Today nearly 40 percent of the Dugas families within the state are concentrated in the Teche country, with smaller numbers along the lower Mississippi and along Bayous Lafourche and Terrebonne, where their ancestors settled 200 or more years ago.

Several Dugas were among the early Acadian refugees who entered Louisiana, some five or more households arriving (probably from Halifax) in 1765.* Twenty years later eleven more Dugas families came from France, where they had been exiled since 1763.

Among the 1765 arrivals were several who settled along the Mississippi in the Acadian Coast; others went to the Attakapas.

The Acadian Coast settlers included the household of unmarried François Dugas (age 25) and four younger brothers (or nephews?): Charles (15), Michel (13), Athanase (12), Théodore (7), and a sister, Rose (16).

In 1768 François married Marguerite Babin, and as they became of age his brothers also took wives, each rearing large families, whose descendants formed the bulk of the Dugases in Ascension Parish during the early nineteenth century.

Several, such as Paul (m. 1808 Clémence Blanc) and his older brother Grégoire (m. 1796 Élizabeth Landry), both sons of Charles and Rose Babin, became well-known antebellum sugar planters with plantations just below Donaldsonville.

Today most of the descendants of the old Dugas families of Ascension and St. James parishes have left their ancestral farms along the river, probably migrating to Baton Rouge or New Orleans.

It was the Teche country in the Attakapas, however, that evolved as the main stronghold of the Dugas clan in Louisiana. Three Dugas brothers-Charles, Jean, and Pierre, sons of Charles and Anne Robichaud of Acadia — were the earliest members of the clan to settle in the Attakapas.

In 1766 Charles (m. ca. 1760 Cécile Landry, ca. 1770 Marguerite Broussard) and Pierre (m. 1772 Marie Thibodeau) were living along Bayou Tortue west of Attakapas Post;8 by 1774 they had been joined by Jean (m. ca. 1765 Marguerite Dupuis).

A few years later a distant relative, Amant Dugas (m. 1779 Geneviève Robichaux) son of Charles and Anne Hébert of Acadia, had also settled in the Attakapas,10 and in 1785 he was joined by his brother Charles (m. ca. 1766 Marguerite Granger) who had been exiled to France.

By the turn of the century most of these families had established homes along the west bank of Bayou Vermilion, near present Lafayette, in the area then called Grande Prairie, probably the most important historical center of the Dugas clan in the state.

There, the Dugases became stockmen-farmers; in 1803 Pierre owned 800 cattle; Jean, 200; Amant, 100.

By mid-century some of their descendants had carried the tradition of stock raising into the Calcasieu, where later many Dugases were to engage in rice cultivation.

Of the three Dugas brothers, sons of Charles and Anne Robichaud, Charles, Jr., chose farming over stock raising by settling along the Teche at Fausse Pointe (near present Loreauville).

There, some of his descendants became antebellum planters.

Six of the eleven Dugas families who arrived in 1785 from France as part of the Acadian refugee groups were sent to Bayou Lafourche, where they formed a secondary center of the clan.

Settling mainly along the upper Lafourche, all were small farmers, but some of their descendants became prominent sugar planters and state officials during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Sons of Joseph Dugas (m. Anastasie Barrillot) and Ambroise Dugas (m. Marie-Victoire Pitre) eventually settled near Thibodeauxville, and by mid-century, or before, some members of those families had established farms or worked as sharecroppers along Bayou Terrebonne as far as Montegut and along Bayou Chacahoula west of Houma