A colorful, spirited, curious, serious, frivolous and endlessly fascinating fellow: Those multiple descriptions fairly accurately capture the essence of the New Orleans born Frenchman known as Bernard Phillipe Xavier de Marigy de Mandeville.
Who he was and what he meant to the City of Mandeville (well, essentially everything) will be the focus of a talk Sunday (FYI, Dec. 6) at Maxein's Coffee House, 105 Girod St., featuring historian, archivist and conservator Robin Perkins.
The 4-6 pm event will feature an hour-long presentation on Bernard Marigy by Perkins followed by nearly an hour of traditional jazz by Chris Burke and His New Orleans Music group.
Admission is $10 for the event being sponsored by Friends of the Dew Drop and funded by a state Decentralized Arts Grant though the Louisiana Division of the Arts administered by the St. Tammany Parish Commission on Cultural Affairs.
This is one of four lectures and music concerts hosted by the Friends of the Dew Drop funded by the state. Previously was a lecture on pre-white settlers in St. Tammany Parish by Native American educator Gray Hawk Perkins, husband of Robin Perkins, and New Orleans historian Sally Reeves who talked on the unique architecture of Old Mandeville including the Dew Drop Social and Benevolent Jazz Hall on Lamarque Street built in 1895 and on the National Register of Historic Places. The final event in the series will feature a talk by John McCuster of New Orleans, an authority on jazz legend Kid Ory who often played at the Dew Drop in Mandeville in the early 1900s.
Perkins has conducted considerable original research into the life and time of City of Mandeville founder Bernard Marigny. An acutely skilled entrepreneur and land developer, Marigny was a millionaire in this teens and subsequently made and lost large fortunes. He eventually discovered the north shore and made a fortune harvesting cypress and boating it to a railroad line he built on the south shore (now called Elysian Fields Avenue) in order to reach the port of New Orleans where his harvested cypress had a huge European market.
He lived for a time on a north shore plantation he purchased now known as Fontainebleau State Park, built the first north shore brick works on that site, and built one of the first homes on the Mandeville lakefront that for generations has been owned by the Bechac family. That building is currently the Lakehouse Restaurant.
In 1836 Bernard Marigny created blocks, lots and outlined streets and held two public auctions that year on land he had purchased which were both highly successful and evolved into what was chartered in 1840 by the state of Louisiana as the village of Mandeville. This section of the current City of Mandeville is not commonly called Old Mandeville. And Girod, where Maxein's is located, is one of those streets laid out by Bernard Marigny himself.
Perkins, chief archivist and conservator for the St. Tammany Parish Clerk of Court's office since 2002, will show how Marigny's life and political ambitions paralleled the new statehood of Louisiana.
She holds a degree in information studies from Northern Illinois University and has done post graduate work in administering historic documents at Loyola University of Chicago.
Perkins, supervising a staff of four, oversees the preservation of some 4,000 linear feet of official parish documents dating to 1786 with maps from 1783 and historically vital documents since the incorporation of St. Tammany Parish in 1810. It is considered the most comprehensive set of protected maintained historic documents in the state.
She has been president of the St. Tammany Parish Historical Society since 2006 and was a featured presenter in May during the city's 175th anniversary celebration of the auctioning of the lots that became the foundation of the City of Mandeville.
The final event of the fall season of Friends of the Dew Drop will be the annual candlelight Christmas concert on Dec. 13 featuring performances by gospel groups.