The Fleichman Family, Tangipahoa Parish, Louisiana
Submitted to the USGenWeb Archives by Sandra McLellan, Mar. 2007
Special thanks to Jim Perrin for donating it to the archives.

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THE FLEICHMAN FAMILY

BY JIM PERRIN, Local Historian

Among the very earliest settlers who lived in the area that later became the City 
of Ponchatoula was that of the Dirk and Abigail Fleichman family.  Dirk Fleichman 
was born about 1780 in Holland and settled in America certainly by 1810.  Dirk 
married 19 July 1810 in the First Reformed Dutch Church in Albany, New York, to 
Abigail Baldwin.  Abigail was born about 1785 -1790 in Vermont.

By 1820 the Fleishman family had moved to Corinth, Maine.  Corinth is located near 
the Penobscot River in the eastern part of the newly created state of Maine {Maine 
was divided from its parent state of Massachusetts in early 1820}.  According to 
the census taken in 1820, Dirk was engaged in commerce, although the type of 
business was not stated.

For reasons that can not be determined from this distance in time, Dirk and Abigail 
decided to leave New England and move to the South.  When the census was taken in 
1840 they were living in St. Francisville, Louisiana, then a busy Mississippi River 
town.  The family moved again and in 1850 was living in Covington in St. Tammany 
Parish.  Dirk was listed as a shopkeeper and apparently successful as he listed his 
property as worth $3,000, a considerable sum of money in those days.

Dirk and Abigail moved for the last time in the 1850's and came to the area that 
would become soon Ponchatoula.  They sold some of the land they owned in St. 
Tammany Parish in Jan. 1852, but it may have been some time later that they moved 
to this area. 

James Clark, the chief surveyor for the Southern Division of the New Orleans, 
Jackson and Great Northern Railroad had laid out the grid for Ponchatoula in 
Section 18 with the community centered on the site selected for the train depot.  
James Clark's land, the town of Ponchatoula, ended at the southern edge of Section 
18 and Dirk selected a piece of land just south of there in Section 45 as the site 
of a new family home. 

The land Dirk selected fronted the railroad tracks and was on the then main road 
from Madisonville to Springfield.  Dirk's land was in the area where the present 
Piney Woods Road begins at Highway 51 in Ponchatoula.  From the deed records it 
seems that Dirk and Abigail may have erected their home before purchasing the land.  
The land they had selected as a home site was owned by pioneer settler William 
Akers.  William Akers sold Abigail one acre of land for $100 in June 1859.  The 
deed for this land stated that Abigail's house was located on land Akers had 
reserved for a street.  Besides selling Abigail the land, Akers allowed her to live 
in the house at that location for the rest of her life.  The land was sold to 
Abigail and not to Dirk, who was still living in 1859, and one has to wonder if 
this was done because Dirk, being about eighty years old, was then in failing 
health.

When the census was conducted the next summer in 1860, Dirk and Abigail were living 
just outside Ponchatoula's southern corporate limits.  No occupation was listed for 
Dirk, who was now one of the small community's oldest citizens.  He was listed in 
the census as owning $1,500 worth of real estate, which was far more than the 
Ponchatoula property was worth, and another $2,000 in personal property.  Dirk and 
Abigail's closest neighbors were local hotel owner widow Eveline Rheams, and the 
twice widowed Lucinda Akers Patterson Pendarvis.

Dirk Fleichman seems to have died during the period from 1860 to 1870 with a date 
in the early 1860's being most likely.  When the census was again taken in 1870, 
Abigail was a widow, living in her home in Ponchatoula, with a 75 year old servant.  
Abigail told the census taker she was then 85 years of age.  She died a few years 
later.  Taxes on her property were paid through 1874, but were unpaid from 
1875-1878, indicting that she may have died around 1875.  Her house and one acre of 
land were purchased at auction for non-payment of taxes in 1878 by Jacob Prince.

Dirk and Abigail Fleichman were gone and all references to them soon faded from 
memory.  They were however one of Ponchatoula's pioneer families who first made 
this area of piney woods their home.

Anyone with questions, comments, or suggestions for future articles, may contact 
Jim Perrin at 386-4476.