Union Parish  Louisiana

Timothy D. Hudson researched, wrote, and submitted each of the articles below on the
history of Union Parish to the Union Parish Louisiana USGenWeb Project.

I am greatful to Marc Hollingsworth for all of his suggestions and proofreading,
and to Shawn Martin for her assistance.

Union Parish Louisiana lies in the upland hills region between the Red and Ouachita Rivers in north Louisiana. It is located on the Arkansas border, in the exact center of the state, as the north/south Louisiana Meridian bisects the parish. Union Parish consists primarily of gently rolling hills, originally covered with towering pine trees. In fact, the earliest settlers called the southern portion of the parish Pine Hills. Numerous cypress swamps dot the parish, especially along the various bayous and creeks that crisscross the countryside. This region has remained a rural area since the earliest European settlement, with a population that has never exceeded 25,000.

Since the Ouachita River forms the eastern border of the parish, Union lies to the immediate west of the Mississippi Alluvial Plain, otherwise known as the Mississippi Delta. Whereas the rich, black grounds of the delta region contains some of the most fertile soils on earth, most of Union Parish consists of sandy soil peppered with deposits of red, sticky clay. This distinct soil type led to the development of a culture quite different than that found in many of the adjacent parishes. The wealthy planters who settled in the alluvial lands between the Mississippi and Ouachita Rivers in the early 1800s primarily ignored the hill country to the west of the Ouachita, as it did not lend itself to their plantation culture. As a result, Union Parish did not experience significant settlement until the latter 1830s, when the government finally completed the process of surveying the region. At that point, thousands of middle-class farmers flocked to Union Parish from Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Tennessee. These small farmers had extensive experience in cultivating soils similar to that in Union Parish, and they primarily cultivated their lands by themselves, without the assistance slaves [1]. Even the minority of Union Parish farmers who owned slaves only owned a few, as the parish never had any large slaveowners [2].

The table below contains links to various chapters on the early history of the region that we now call Union Parish Louisiana.

History of Union Parish Louisiana
Time Period	Article
pre-1830	Union Parish Indians
1519 – 1803	The Spanish & French Period
1540 - 1850	Brief History of European Settlement
1804 – 1838	Early Formation of Union Parish
1839 – 1861	Union Parish Creation & Early Development
1790s – 1870	Religion
1819 – 1900s	The Steamboat Era
1790s – 1880s	Slaves, Freedmen, & Sharecroppers
1861 – 1865	War for Southern Independence
1865 – 1877	Reconstruction Turmoil
1840s – 1900	Early Newspapers
1887	Shootout at Stein's Store!
1880s – 1900	Agrarian Protest & the Populist Movement
1896 – 1897	Severe Drought & Famine
latter 1800s	Other Tragedies of the Latter 1800s
1898 – 1906	Shiloh's Doom
1890s – 1904	Arrival of the Railroads!
c1790 – 1830	Earliest European Settlers
1821 – 1870s	Earliest Churches & Ministers
1839 – 1900	Earliest Public Officials

References

1. Owsley, Frank Lawrence. Plain Folk of the Old South. Baton Rouge, Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press, Reprint edition, 1982.
2. The Slave Schedule portions of the 1850 and 1860 Federal Census Returns prove that Union Parish did not contain any large plantations, and the majority of white residents owned no slaves. Of the Union Parish farmers who did own slaves, virtually all of them owned one or two slave families. Only a handful of farmers owned more than twenty slaves.

This page was last updated on 25 December 2020.

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