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St. Augustine Catholic Church and Cemetery, or the Isle Brevelle church, is a historic Roman Catholic church and cemetery located in Melrose, Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana. It is the cultural center of Cane River's historic Créole community.
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Established as a mission church in 1829, by the freed slave Nicolas Augustin Metoyer, St. Augustine is celebrated as the first church built by and for free people of color in Louisiana, and apparently, the second oldest in the United States.
The church and cemetery are within the Cane River National Heritage Area, and is on the National Register of Historic Places. Because of its significance to Catholic and Créole history, St. Augustine also is listed on the Louisiana African American Heritage Trail.
19th century
Tradition holds that the church was established by Nicolas Augustin Metoyer in 1803 and that services have been held continuously since then. Historical records challenge the local lore. Parish records document the founding of the Chapel of St. Augustine "as a mission of the church of St. François of Natchitoches" in July 1829, shortly after the church was constructed. The mission would become a parish in its own right, with a resident priest, in 1856.
When Father Jean Baptiste Blanc consecrated the chapel for religious use (19 July 1829), he reported that it had been "erected on Isle Brevelle on the plantation of Sieur Augustin Metoyer through the care and generosity of the above-named Augustin Metoyer, aided by Louis Metoyer, his brother. ... The said chapel ... having been dedicated to St. Augustine, shall be considered as under the protection of this great doctor." Tradition also describes the role of Augustin's brother Louis (founder of the nearby National Historic Landmark, Melrose Plantation), as the chapel's designer and builder.
The Church of St. Augustine is distinctive among Southern churches of all denominations for its racial role reversals. Surviving pew records show that the front seats were occupied by the Créole de couleur Metoyer family who built the chapel. Seated behind them were the families of prominent white planters within the community. Post-Civil War, St. Augustine chalked up another apparent first in U.S. racial history. Its own congregation by this time was almost exclusively non-white; however, it was the mother church for the predominantly white congregation of Mission Ste. Anne on Old River.
The original structure has not survived. Union forces during the Red River Campaign of May 1864 were said to have torched the first church.
20th century
A second church burned in the early 1900s. It was replaced by the present day church building, which was completed in 1917. Tradition holds that early furnishings included paintings of patron saints Augustine and Louis in honor of the Metoyer brothers, as well as an altar brought from Europe by other family members. The original bell that hung in the belfry above the vestibule is said to be the one still in use. An image of the original church survives as a backdrop in the contemporary oil portrait of its founder that hangs in the church today.
Créole community
The Metoyer brothers were two of ten children of the French merchant Claude Thomas Pierre Metoyer and the former slave Marie Thérèse Coincoin, sometimes (albeit erroneously) called Marie Thérèse Metoyer, whose services he had initially rented. When the parish priest filed charges against the black Coincoin for bearing half-white children while living in the residence of a white man and threatened to sell her away to New Orleans, Metoyer bought her from her owner and privately manumitted her. Across the next thirty-seven years he manumitted their offspring.
Coincoin, as a médecine, planter, and businesswoman, worked to buy the freedom of her five older black children from an earlier union with another slave and secured that freedom for three of them. Together, her offspring created a large Créole community in Natchitoches Parish that spread the length of Cane River Lake.
Its core would be, and still is, St. Augustine Parish on Isle Brevelle. Both the creation of St. Augustine and the religious leadership of the Isle Brevelle community in Creole Louisiana are explored in the historical novel Isle of Canes, which draws upon both family tradition and primary-source research.