Paincourtville, LA

Paincourtville is an Assumption Parish census-designated community along Bayou Lafourche, in a stretch of South Louisiana first settled permanently by French, Spanish, and Acadian families in the mid-eighteenth century. The 2020 census counted 857 people. The name is usually rendered as “short of bread town,” a story about an early traveler finding no loaf to buy. The bayou shaped the settlement pattern, with homes, churches, and sugar-country roads following its banks between Donaldsonville and Napoleonville.

St. Elizabeth Catholic Church has been the clearest local institution since upper-parish Catholics broke from Plattenville in 1839. A wooden church opened in 1840, a larger building followed after an 1854 fire, and the Gothic church standing today was blessed in 1902. The parish school grew through the Sisters of Mount Carmel, who opened a girls’ boarding and day school in 1876 and a boys’ school in 1912. Paincourtville remains tied to the bayou corridor, parish life, and the sugar landscape around Belle Rose and Napoleonville.