How geography helped shape Jefferson Parish’s growth

JEFFERSON PARISH, La. (WGNO) — On Saturday, June 14, Jefferson Parish will celebrate its bicentennial with a swanky ball at Lakeside Mall.

Moving New Orleans Forward anchor LBJ took a look at how geography shaped the parish’s growth.

“Orleans Parish was very big and it encompassed the City of New Orleans and then all of these outlying areas. Those outlying areas that would soon become Jefferson Parish, were of two geographies. There was the higher natural levees and the ridges, which were fully developed as agricultural and enslaved plantations. And then there were the back swamps that were empty,” said Geography Professor at Tulane’s School of Architecture and Built Environment, Richard Campenella.

As what normally happens is landowners and residents wanted more political control of their destiny.

“They didn’t want all of the power to be the state legislature and so forth to be coming out of urban New Orleans. So, as part of that process to give themselves more representation, they got the state legislature in 1825 to carve out of Orleans Parish a separate parish. Now, they had their own police, jury, now they had their own representation,” said Campenella.

While Jefferson’s size today might suggest a population swell from the 1800s, that is not what happened.

“If you look at the populations of Jefferson Parish in the early years starting with the 1830s census, they do some strange things between 1830 up to 1880. The area is growing but what is happening is that Orleans, that is the City of New Orleans, is the big boy on the block and it is annexing in the most populous cities within Jefferson Parish,” said Campenella,

Those areas would have included many parts of uptown New Orleans. Fast forward 100 years between 1930 and 1980, favorable conditions equal the growth of the parish we had known now.

“There’s a 50-year time where I think the parish population increases 11-fold. It’s the age of automobiles, it’s the age of reclamation and drainage, there’s the oil boom and most importantly there’s access. There’s ingress and egress. There’s the Pontchartrain Expressway, there’s I-10, there’s Airline Hwy, there’s the Causeway. You could get there through there,” said Campenella.

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