Like so many of the early Louisiana settlers, the Pitres appear to have been entirely of Acadian stock. Today their descendants live mainly in two separate areas of the state: (1) the Opelousas-Ville Platte district of St.

Landry and Evangeline parishes and (2) the Thibodaux-Houma section of Lafourche and Terrebonne parishes.

This modern distribution clearly reflects the two areas of initial Pitre settlement in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Although both were Acadian, two different groups of Pitres settled each of the areas at different times.

The Louisiana census of 1766 listed an Acadian called Pierre Pitre living with his two children (a son and daughter, unnamed) near Opelousas Post.* This probably was the Pierre Pitre of Chipoudy, Acadia, whose wife was Agathe Doucet and whose son was named François, according to Bona Arsenault, an authority on Acadian families.

If that supposition is true, Pierre Pitre was among the earliest Acadians to arrive in Louisiana, and, as church records indicate, he and his son François were the progenitors of most of the Pitre families that now reside in the Opelousas-Ville Platte area.

In 1777 François, his wife Marguerite Thibodeaux, and his growing family were living in the Plaisance district, a few miles northwest of present Opelousas, where by 1788 he was running 130 cattle and 35 horses on about 400 acres of prairie.

His five sons, Pierre, François, Jr. ("Pouponne"), Charles-François, Louis, and Joseph, reared large families in the same area, which has been a main center of Pitres for the past 200 years.

Church records suggest that there was little movement of Pitre families from the Plaisance-Opelousas area until after the Civil War; in the late 1860s some fifth generation members of the clan began to settle near present Ville Platte and Eunice, a migration that culminated in the 1880s.

About the same time a few families moved southward along Bayou Plaquemine Brulée to the vicinity of Church Point, to the Carencro prairies, and along the Teche to Breaux Bridge.

Although the 1850 Federal Census reported a Pitre family in Calcasieu Parish,8 it was not until the 1890s that others reached as far west as Jennings.

Most of the Pitres who now live in Lafourche and Terrebonne parishes (36 percent of the state's total households of that name) probably descend from several Acadian refugee families that came from France in 1785.

Aboard the ships of that expedition were ten Pitre families; half were sent to the Lafourche, the others scattered along the Mississippi River from Ascension Parish to Bayou des Écores north of Baton Rouge.

Little is known of the latter group, but those who settled on Bayou Lafourche flourished, many members migrating southward to the vicinity of Thibodeauxville and along the upper Bayou Terrebonne in the early 1800s.

Among the Lafourche settlers were Martin Pitre and wife Jeanne Dantin, whose five sons (Louis-Achille, Louis-Auguste, François, Hippolyte, and Mathurin) had settled along the bayou below Thibodeauxville by the 1820s and early 1830s.

Again, Jean-Marie Pitre (son of Ambroise Pitre and Élizabeth Dugas, one of the refugee families that had been assigned to Ascension Parish) and wife Rose Lirette were also early settlers in the Thibodaux area; their sons and grandsons took up land along Bayou Terrebonne near Houma, and by the 1850s some had reached as far as Montegut.

Other Pitre families of the Lafourche, such as the sons of Louis-Constant and Marie-Rose Guidry, by the 1850s had moved down-bayou to Raceland and Lockport and by the time of the Civil War probably had reached the Larose-Golden Meadow area, where many of their descendants now live.

Aside from the two major areas of Pitres in Louisiana, a third less prominent concentration today occurs in and around New Orleans, perhaps the result mainly of recent country-to-city migrations, but probably with some older antecedents. In 1850, for example, there were two Pitre families in New Orleans and four in the community of Barataria, Jefferson Parish;15 the origin of those families is uncertain