Place:Houma, Terrebonne, Louisiana, United States

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Houma is the largest city in, and the parish seat of, Terrebonne Parish in the U.S. state of Louisiana. It is also the largest principal city of the Houma–Bayou Cane–Thibodaux metropolitan statistical area. The city's government was absorbed by the parish in 1984, which currently operates as the Terrebonne Parish Consolidated Government.

The population was 33,727 at the 2010 census, an increase of 1,334 over the 2000 census tabulation of 32,393. In 2020, the population estimates program determined 32,467 people lived in the city. At the 2020 census, its population rebounded to 33,406. Many unincorporated areas are adjacent to the city of Houma. The largest, Bayou Cane, is an urbanized area commonly referred to by locals as being part of Houma, but it is not included in the city's census counts, and is a separate census-designated place. If the populations of the urbanized census-designated places were included with that of the city of Houma, the total would exceed 60,000 residents.

Houma was rated as an "affordable" city by Demographia's 2013 International Housing Survey.

History

the text in this section is copied from an article in Wikipedia

Settled by the Chitimacha and then the Houma Indians prior to European colonization, Houma was soon named for the Houma Indians who were at Ouiski Point. Land claimed for the Houma Indians by the Spanish was not recognized by the United States after the Louisiana Purchase.

Present-day Houma was formed in 1832; the city was incorporated in 1848. The area was developed for sugar cane plantations in the antebellum years. Plantations were sited along the rivers and bayous in order to have access to water transportation.

Civil War

In 1862, four Union soldiers traveling by wagon from New Orleans to Houma were ambushed by several armed citizens. Two of the Union men were killed, and the other two were seriously wounded. In retaliation, Union officers brought 400 troops into Houma, and began a wholesale arrest of residents. In his 1963 book The Civil War in Louisiana, historian John D. Winters describes the following events:

The investigation of the murders lasted several days but failed to reveal the guilty parties. To frighten the citizens, the home of a Doctor Jennings was burned, two other houses were torn down, and the home and slave quarters of an outlying plantation were burned. The soldiers next began to seize sheep, cattle, mules, wagons, and saddle horses. Negroes began to desert their masters and to flock to the protection of the troops. The frightened citizens had no means of resistance, and many found it hard to stand by and see their country despoiled by a few hundred troops.

Reconstruction to present

Sugar cane continued to be important after the war and into the 20th century.

On January 24, 1970, an accidental gas explosion killed three people and caused extensive damage downtown. Latour's Jewelry Store was destroyed.

In 1984, the city and parish consolidated their governments.^[1] In 2008 Bill Ellzey, a columnist at Houma Today, wrote that area residents were often unaware of the Houma city boundaries as the city and parish governments had consolidated.

In late August 2021 Houma was struck by the intense eye-wall of category 4 Hurricane Ida causing widespread damage.

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