Today about 45 percent of the La Fleur families of Louisiana live in St. Landry and Evangeline parishes, in areas where the name was implanted in the mid-eighteenth century. Common in France and Canada, the name La Fleur occurs in some of the earliest records pertaining to French settlement along the Gulf Coast, especially in Mobile and New Orleans.* Meaning "flower," it was frequently used as a dit name, or nickname, among both soldiers and civilians in the colony.

The nickname sometimes supplanted the surname, as in the case of members of the André dit La Fleur family, the main forebears of the La Fleurs of Louisiana.

During the mid-eighteenth century Jean-Baptist André dit La Fleur (m. Marguerite Brignac) and his probable sons Jacques and Pierre were soldiers serving at Fort Toulouse in Alabama.

After the territory of West Florida was ceded to England in 1763, many of that area's French inhabitants chose to migrate to Louisiana rather than to live under British rule. Thus in 1764 the three Andrés dit La Fleur-Jean-Baptiste, Pierre, and Jacques-together with other "Alibamons" such as the Fontenots and Brignacs, settled in the Opelousas country along Bayou Courtableau near present Washington.

On arrival in Louisiana Jean-Baptiste, the father, had two daughters under his care; his supposed sons were apparently single at the time, and all three were listed under the surname La Fleur.

Little is known of Pierre, but the story of Jacques's line is fairly clear. Available church records suggest that Jacques was the main progenitor of most of the present-day La Fleur families in Louisiana.

Sometime after his marriage to Marie-Anne Fontenot ca. 1767, Jacques La Fleur moved to the Grande Prairie area north of Opelousas Post. There, by 1777, he had acquired a herd of 60 cattle.

The Grande Prairie district remained the main center of the La Fleur clan for the remainder of the eighteenth and most of the nineteenth centuries, Jacques and his four sons acquiring land along Bayou Boeuf, Bayou Cocodrie, and Petit Pass Bayou and adjacent prairies, in what is now the northwestern part of St. Landry and the west-central section of Evangeline parishes.

The four sons, Jean-Baptiste (m. 1788 Marguerite Berzac), Don Diegue (m. 1795 Adrienne Deshotels), Jean (m. 1792 Eulalie Deshotels), and Césaire (m. 1811 Marie-Anne Deshotels)10 became stockmen and farmers as did most of their sons. One of Jacques's grandsons, Marcellin (son of Jean with Eulalie Deshotels) developed two antebellum plantations, one near the present community of Grand Prairie, the other along Bayou Boeuf, near present Whiteville, where he cultivated cotton and corn with 53 slaves. His succession papers of 1868 listed 650 wild cattle, 100 wild horses, and 150 tame horses and cattle, most of which probably ran unattended in the open prairies near his plantations.

Church records suggest that by the 1870s many La Fleur families had settled in the vicinity of Chataignier, southeastern Evangeline Parish, and around present Eunice in westernmost St. Landry.

But not until the beginning of this century did some Lafleurs move southward to Lafayette14 and westward to Lake Charles and southeastern Texas. Today nearly 200 La Fleur families live in Ville Platte and vicinity, not far from the area of initial settlement in the 1760s