I was asked a few weeks back if I knew of any larger-than-life female figures of bygone eras who played a major role in the history of the local area. An organization was looking for such a person to serve as an icon for a planned recognition and awards program. Let me go on record as saying that despite rumors spread by my ageist critics, I didn’t personally know, or date, any women during the early years of Mandeville. However, a possible candidate did come to mind fairly quickly. And, I’ll get to that name in a minute, following my traditional random, nonlinear reasoning and writing process.
It’s not an easy question however. It’s certainly not difficult today to come up with countless names of women who have made great contributions in government, science, business, and every other facet of national and community life. Our parish and municipalities have many female officials in high positions, and many of our local businesses have women in charge. It also seems like almost all of our not-for-profit and community service organizations are led by women. I sometimes feel like the drone I always aspired to be.
But this was obviously not always the case. There were notable exceptions, but before the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified around 1920, women were generally treated as chattel around most of the country. In the 1800s, they couldn’t vote, or be elected, or be doctors, lawyers, or other professionals. Married women also had it particularly bad with respect to the ownership of property. What this meant was that unless they were actresses or ax murderers, their names didn’t appear much in newspapers, books, business transactions, etc., and most were rather anonymous, known to history only through family Bibles, letters and other personal papers, or their relationship to famous men.
It was a little different in Louisiana, where the tradition of French and Spanish Civil Law could give women control over significant assets while they were married. As a result, a great deal can be learned about particularly influential ladies of earlier days from property transactions and other legal proceedings they were involved in. These acts were passed before notaries, who at the time were very important individuals under Louisiana’s civil law system, not the part timers with little signs on their mailboxes that hold the title today. These earlier notaries also served as the custodians and archivists of these official records. When they died, they passed the records on to successors they had trained. If you wanted to look up a property transaction, you didn’t go to the courthouse, you went to the notary involved, or to whoever succeeded him, to look at his (certainly not her) records. The problem with this system was that you’d have to know who that notary was to begin your search, and there was no centralized system that would help you locate this individual. And during the boom years of the early 1800s in the Queen City of the South, there were millions of transactions filed somewhere and a whole bunch of notaries who might have them.
To solve this growing problem, shortly after the Civil War, the New Orleans Notarial Archives was created to act as a central repository for the city’s notarial records. Initially, only old records were stored there and notaries continued to keep their most recent ones, but for the last forty years, all notarial records have been sent there. Currently, the Archives store over 40 million pages of notarial acts dating back to the early French Colonial Period of the 1700s. Since New Orleans notaries handled St. Tammany transactions during its early history, many of the original documents relating to these acts are also stored there.
Despite the centralization, researching history through these records is still a daunting task that involves having a good knowledge of local families, their general history, and the names of their favorite notaries. To do this, there is none better than Sally Reeves, a retired archivist from the Archives, who I understand is doing special projects for them as a consultant again. Sally has done a great deal of research on property transactions in Mandeville involving its historically important Old Town homes, and it is from her reports that I select my candidate for Heaviest Hitter and Most Interesting Historical Figure (Female Division) in Mandeville before the Civil War.
And the winner is … Sophronie Claiborne Marigny. Ah, there’s that name again, and she was indeed related to Bernard Marigny, Mandeville’s founding father. Sophronie was the beautiful, bright, well-educated, witty, pampered, etc., etc. daughter of William C.C. Claiborne, the first Governor of the State of Louisiana. When her father died, her mother remarried, and her stepfather was a lawyer for Jean Lafitte. So, she had an interesting life from the outset, and it became more interesting when in 1834 she married Mandeville Marigny, a good looking, dashing soldier, duelist, and oldest surviving son of Bernard. Two of Bernard’s sons by his first marriage had died previously – one in a duel and the other under mysterious circumstances in Natchez shortly after Mandeville and Sophronie’s wedding.
Sophronie and Mandeville were very active in land transactions in the local area until the early 1850s, when the couple seems to have gone their separate ways. These transactions were all done solely in Sophronie’s name, because the couple, not wanting to be involved in Bernard’s messy financial affairs, had requested and received from the court a separation of their assets.
The ownership of the properties purchased was always for a short period of time, because she and Mandeville were basically speculators at heart. Bernard, in fact, is rumored to have encouraged his daughter-in-law to get involved in property auctions and bid up prices when land sales were flagging in the area.
The couple operated a large brick making operation on the Tchefuncte River, and owned among others, two of the most historic and interesting properties in Old Mandeville. One was the historic Morel-Nott-Hanisee house, which was moved to the 2600 block of Lakeshore Drive and restored in the mid-1960s.
The other was the property at the corner of Lakeshore Drive and Lafitte Street where condominiums now sit. The entire two blocks between Lakeshore Drive and Jefferson Street and between Girod and Lafitte Streets comprised the site of the original Mandeville Hotel and casino buildings from 1835 until 1850, when it was razed, re-subdivided and auctioned off. Sophronie bought three of the ten deep lots facing the lake nearest Lafitte. She and Mandeville built a fine home on two of the lots, and soon sold the third to Pierre Poutz, who combined it with four adjacent lots he had bought and built what became Bechac’s Restaurant and is now the Lake House. The Marignys lived in their home briefly before selling it also. This building was then operated as a small hotel for a while, and then was resold to the Mugnier family who expanded the buildings on the site and created the famous St. Tammany Hotel, a local attraction and haven for tourists well into the 20th Century.
So Sophronie is my choice, and it wasn’t even close, although the runnerup is an interesting footnote to our history. She was the notorious Madame Louis Lalaurie, who fled to Mandeville from New Orleans after firefighters battling a fire in her Royal Street home found slaves chained in the attic and tried to kill her. She was a guest here briefly in what is known as the Coquillon home at the corner of Marigny and Lakeshore drive before permanently departing the country for France. She was therefore disqualified from consideration for conduct unbecoming an icon.