URL : http://theusgenweb.net/la/grant.htm 

Town: Creola Louisiana, Grant Parish Louisiana
Source: The Chronicle Oct 12 2000 volume 124 no.38
Submitted to USGENWEB by: M May




**********************************************
Copyright.  All rights reserved.
http://usgwarchives.net/copyright.htm
http://usgwarchives.net/la/lafiles.htm
**********************************************


 





Legend lends name to Grant Parish's newest municipality


By Fran Demers

    Creola. The exotic sounding name has been around Grant Parish for well over 150
years, long before the establishment of the parish, in fact.
   Creola was the name by which Montgomery was known for many years. Even the name
Montgomery has its connections with the original name of Creola, or Creola Bluffs as the
small settlement was known in the early 1800's.
    Creola is the name of, as the story goes, a beautiful Indian princess, beloved of
General Thomas Woodward, founder of what is now Montgomery. After the Indian Wars
in the early 1800's, Woodward  purchased considerable acreage in the area then known as
Rigolette de Bon Dieu, which had been a settlement as early as 1715.  His land
reportedly extended about five miles from the river, and he changed the name to Creola
Bluff.
   The name was chosen in honor of a Cherokee princess whom he had loved as a young
officer.  The young couple were deeply in love, but her father, the chief of the tribe,
refused to allow his daughter to marry the man he considered an enemy of his people.
(After all. Woodward had earned his reputation as a military man by fighting Indians).
   After Woodward left, Creola was bereft, but later met and married a Methodist
missionary from Montgomery, Alabama. A son was born and they named him
Montgomery, after the town in Alabama, but Creola insisted his middle name be
Woodward, after her first love.
   In 1843, upon hearing that. Greola had named her son in honor of him, the general
incorporated the village and changed its name officially to Montgomery in honor of his
beloved and her child.
   Gen. Woodward himself, assured that the loss of his true love was forever, chose to
marry, but the story goes, the marriage was  more  a  marriage  of convenience than true
love.
    Both married to others, their love continued throughout their olives, until Creola died a
few years after the birth of her son,  still longing for Woodward.
  The general continued to grieve over her loss, and as the legend goes, would ride down
to the bluffs overlooking the river each New Years Eve, riding a big white horse, and
stand waiting. At midnight, as Cherokee drums pounded, Creola and her warriors would
come down the river and greet her beloved on a sandbar. They embraced and walked
hand in hand, and after an hour she would vanish, and Woodward would return home.
   The meetings continued as long as Woodward lived, and then, on his deathbed.
Woodward ordered his Indian servant to bring him his army uniform and dress him in
full regalia.   As he died, near midnight, his spirit mounted his horse and went to the
bluff one last time, and once again, as the drums beat, his beautiful Creola appeared one
last time.   A churning sidewheel paddle boat arrived at the sandbar,  and welcomed by
the roaring cheers of those on board, the couple walked the gangplank, together at last,
never again to be torn apart.
    As the mists closed about the steaming vessel, the two appeared on an upper deck,
raising their hands in farewell and vanishing forever.
   The legend lives on in the retelling of the beautiful romance over and over again, often
embellished but always reveling in the love between the two starcrossed lovers.
   Even today, there are those who believe that if you go down to the bluffs of Creola on
New Years Eve, you can see the lovers reunited and then departing into the mists and
moonlight.
   The town of Montgomery has the distinction of having been a part of three different
parishes since it was First established; Natchitoches, Winn and Grant. It is also the oldest
community in the parish and at one time, had the distinction of having the first woman
mayor anywhere in the  country as well as the world's smallest jail, as recounted in
Riples's Beleive it or Not.
   If you want to know  more about Montgomery, and Grant Parish history, check out
these references in the Grant Parish Library: Grant Parish, Louisiana. A History, written
by Mabel Fletcher Harrises and Lavinia McGuire McNeely; Briley's Cenia Guide, The
Montgomery Story, by Richard Briley III, and George Avery's Louisiana Lore article,
"Montgomery Was First Named for a Cherokee Indian Princess".