Today nearly two-thirds of Louisiana's Vidrine households are clustered in St. Landry and Evangeline parishes, where their ancestors settled two centuries ago; about 200 families of that surname live in and around Ville Platte alone. The progenitor of probably all the Vidrines of St. Landry and Evangeline parishes was an officer in the French Navy (marine), Jean-Baptiste Lapaise de Vedrine (of lesser nobility), who from 1753 to 1763 was stationed in Fort Chartres, Illinois, as an ensign assigned to the local commandant.* There, in 1758 he married Élizabeth Tisserand de Moncharvaux, daughter of the commandant, and the couple might have made a permanent home in Illinois, save for the cession of French territory east of the Mississippi River to England in 1763.

Unwilling to live under British rule, the de Vedrines, like many of their compatriots, moved to Lower Louisiana sometime before 1765, settling temporarily in Pointe Coupee.

Their five children included two sons, Pierre-Jean-Baptiste, born ca. 1762 in Illinois, and Étienne, born 1770 in Pointe Coupee.

By 1776 Jean Baptiste, Sr., had moved his family into the Opelousas area, where he apparently settled near the Opelousas Church (present Washington) on Bayou Courtableau and may have obtained land in the Grande Prairie-Plaisance area a few miles northwest of the church.

After Jean-Baptiste's death in 1788 his widow and son Pierre-Jean-Baptiste (m. 1788 Marie-Joseph Brignac) continued to live near the church, but son Étienne (m. 1795 Victorine Soileau) moved into the prairies near present Ville Platte.

Sometime after 1810 all of Pierre-Jean-Baptiste's five sons (Pierre, Jean-Baptiste, Florentine, Denis, and André) joined their uncle Étienne and six of the latter's eight sons in the Ville Platte-Mamou-Eunice area, there establishing the main center of the Vidrines in Louisiana.

Apparently, during the nineteenth century most of the Vidrines of that area were small farmers, cultivating cotton and subsistence crops; in antebellum days few had slaves.

Some family heads, however, such as Éloy (m.

1837 Félonise Fontenot), grandson of Pierre-Jean-Baptiste, acquired land holdings larger than those of his relatives and operated the first cotton gin in the Ville Platte area.

Some of his grandsons (e.g., Jean E. Vidrine and Dr. Arthur Vidrine, founder of the LSU Medical School) during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries entered business and the professions.

Only after 1900 did Vidrines leave their Ville Platte homeland in any numbers to settle elsewhere in southwest Louisiana, some taking up rice cultivation in Calcasieu Parish, others migrating to Texas to engage in farming and industry.

Two sons of Étienne Vidrine, Antoine (m. 1824 Louise Fontenot, 1828 Josephine Ortego) and Augustin (m. 1834 Eugénie Gaudeau), and many of their descendants remained in the Grande Prairie-Plaisance area of St. Landry Parish, forming a secondary center of the family.

By 1900 the seven sons and nine grandsons of Antoine had greatly augmented the Vidrine population of the parish.

After the Civil War one of Antoine's sons, Alcin (m. 1867 Estelle Andrepont), became a prosperous planter and merchant in Washington, operating a 500- acre farm cultivated by tenants.

During the 1840s a distant relative of progenitor Jean-Baptiste de Vedrine, named Henri Vidrine, migrated from the Bordeaux area of France to Louisiana.

Settling in New Iberia in 1847, he married Marie-Justine Olivier de Vezin, member of a prominent local family, and entered the mercantile business of the small town.

Probably many of the Vidrines who now live in Iberia and Lafayette parishes are his descendants