Before the Christmas Eve bonfires, here's how Lutcher and Gramercy got their names

On Christmas Eve, thousands of people will enjoy the annual spectacle of bonfires on the levee in the St. James Parish towns of Lutcher and Gramercy.

These River Road communities exude a sense of history, one in which colonists from France and Germany, as well as enslaved West Africans and French Acadian refugees, settled over the course of the 1700s and created a plantation economy still discernible today.

But agriculture development and town formation are two different processes, and historically along the River Road, the latter was rather scarce. Only two sizable towns emerged between Baton Rouge and greater New Orleans before the Civil War: Plaquemine and Donaldsonville, both of which formed at bayous (Plaquemine and Lafourche) forking off from the Mississippi River. Most other anteb