St. John the Baptist Parish, Louisiana Plantation House. Present-day St. John the Baptist Parish includes the third permanent settlement in what is now the state of Louisiana, after Natchitoches (1714) and New Orleans (1718). It was considered part of the German Coast http://www.gachgs.com/. The area was settled in the early 1720s by a group of German colonists. Many families established towns close to the Mississippi River in the areas now known as Lucy, Garyville, and Reserve. The area was under the French regime until 1763, when France ceded Louisiana to Spain after the Seven Years' War (the French and Indian War). At the beginning of the
West Florida Controversy bear in mind that in the transfer [of Louisiana to the United States] the identical language was employed that had been used in 1800, so that the government of the United States was subrogated, in express terms, to the rights of France and of Spain. … The United States insisted that by the treaty of 1800 Spain ceded the disputed territory [of West Florida], as part of Louisiana, to France, and that France, in turn, in 1803, ceded it to the United States. Spain, with equal earnestness and persistence, maintained that her cession to France comprehended what was at that