Place:Versailles, St. Bernard, Louisiana, United States

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Versailles is an unincorporated community in St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana, United States. It is located along the East Bank of the Mississippi River, approximately 3.5 miles below the lower limit of New Orleans. The community, for governmental and postal address purposes, is considered part of Chalmette and by some designations, part of neighboring Meraux. As a place designation, the name "Versailles" continues in local use.

History

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

Versailles was founded by Major-General Pierre Denis de la Ronde (1762–1824), one of Louisiana's wealthiest plantation owners and a descendant of French Canadian judge and poet, René-Louis Chartier de Lotbinière, of Maison Lotbinière, poet Alain Chartier and, traditionally, the explorer , though this is unproven and is likely entirely the confabulation of Frederick Gilman Forsyth, the self-styled, so-called "Forsyth de Fronsac," who published falsified lineages.

In 1802, Denis de La Ronde was appointed to Louisiana (New Spain)'s governing authority, the Cabildo, at the behest of his late brother-in-law, Andrés Almonaster y Rojas, to succeed him as Regidor Perpetuo, Councilman for Life. (Spanish bureaucratic offices were a form of property, purchased from the Crown, and could be inherited.) In 1805, during the U.S. territorial period, along with other local investors, he made plans to build Versailles along the Mississippi River and to then cut a barge canal through some dozen miles of swamp to the shore of Lake Pontchartrain, where they planned to build another town, to be called "Paris." The intended communities were named after Paris and Versailles in France and were meant to recreate the French style. Denis de La Ronde envisioned that this Versailles would overtake New Orleans in size and popularity.

However, development was waylaid by political unrest, culminating in the War of 1812. In 1814–15, then-Colonel de La Ronde commanded the Louisiana militia's Third Regiment at the Battle of New Orleans, which was fought both at his plantation (December 23, 1814, Night Battle) and at the neighboring Chalmette plantation, belonging to his maternal half-brother, Ignace Martin de Lino de Chalmette (1755–1815).

Like de La Ronde, de Lino was a descendant of the Chartier family, through his paternal grandmother. Their mutual niece, Micaela Almonester, Baroness de Pontalba, later constructed the Pontalba Buildings in New Orleans, during the 1840s, then, in 1855, completed the Hôtel de Pontalba in Paris. All three are descendants of the famed French architect Ignace François Broutin.

Versailles remained a small town for the rest of the 19th century, with no navigable canal linking the River and the Lake until the Industrial Canal was built in New Orleans during the 20th century. Denis de La Ronde's path through the swamps fared better, eventually developing into a major artery. Paris Road remains the farthest downriver route connecting the River to the Lake in Greater New Orleans.

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