Hope Villa
While no landmarks remain today of Hope Villa, Louisiana, this small town was important because the present Gonzales church sprang from these roots (Babin, 2009). Hope Villa lay on the main mail route between Donaldsonville and New Orleans. On March 1, 1866, Andrew Bradford Booth opened a country general store and established the first business there. A post office was established in Hope Villa, on March 17, 1873. Andrew sold his store in 1881 and went into the real estate and insurance business until 1886, when he moved to New Orleans (Kendall, 1922).
Gonzales
Gonzales is a small city in Ascension Parish, Louisiana. Amidst swamps and bayous, connected to their neighboring settlements only by footpaths and waterways, Spanish and French descendants lived among the Houma Indians in the area of Ascension Parish now known as Gonzales. In 1887 Joseph “Tee Joe” Gonzales opened a general store and post office in this small settlement. Because of the arrival of the Louisiana Railway and Navigation Company the once isolated community began to grow. When the railroad built a depot there, they named it after the settlement’s post office. As a result, the village became known as Gonzales (Lawrence, 2018).
Citations
Babin, Ira. (2009, Mar. 20). Days Gone By: Program Chronicles Communities. Retrieved from weeklycitizen.com.
Kendall, John Smith. (1922). History of New Orleans. Chicago: Lewis Publishing Company, pp. 1135, 1136.
Lawrence, Keith. (2018, Jul. 11). History of Gonzales Louisiana. Retrieved from ascensionparishnewsnetwork.com.
How it all Began 