The city of Natchitoches was the oldest permanent settlement in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. Natchitoches was established in 1714 by Louis Juchereau de St. Denis. (New Orleans was founded six years later). The French originally founded Natchitoches as an outpost on the Red River to trade with the Spanish in Mexico. It is believed the French first arrived in the area around 1699, by travelling up the Red River from the mouth of the Mississippi River. Successful trading with area Indians prompted leaders to establish a trading post at the head of navigation on the Red River. The site was established near a village of Natchitoches Indians.

The Louisiana Purchase involved the selling of the French province of Louisiana to the United States in 1803. In fact, however, although Louisiana was founded by the French, it had been under Spanish rule until just a few months before it was sold to the United States. Louisiana stretched from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains and from the Gulf of Mexico to Canada. What wasn't clear for some time was the boundary between Louisiana and Texas in the area around Natchitoches. By the time of the Louisiana Purchase, most of the remaining Native Americans had left the Natchitoches area.

Natchitoches Parish was created by the act of April 10, 1805 that divided the Louisiana Territory into 12 parishes, including Orleans, Iberville, Rapides and Natchitoches. Several parishes were subsequently organized out of Natchitoches Parish, including Claiborne, Bossier, Webster and Red River Parishes.

When Louisiana became a state in 1812, Natchitoches was pretty much the northernmost point of European civilization. The reason was plain. The Red River, which now flows from northwest Louisiana until it meets the Mississippi River around Angola, just above Baton Rouge, was blocked from river traffic. Essentially, there was a natural damn that had developed just above Natchitoches--known as "The Great Raft"--and little water could get past the damn. As a result, the water that would otherwise have flowed to the Mississippi backed up throughout northwest Louisiana and the surrounding areas, leaving them either flooded or extremely swampy.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (under Captain Henry Shreve) began removing the raft in the 1820's and much of the area began to drain, leaving land that was very rich in nutrients. The U.S. government was the owner of the new land, and the U.S. Land Office in Natchitoches began making substantial grants of land to veterans of the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, as well as to their descendants.

Bossier Parish, one of the first to drain because of its many areas of relatively high ground, was settled in the 1830's and 1840's by a number of veterans who amassed plantations, who speculated in land (by buying up the rights of other veterans to purchase land), and grew cotton. Bossier Parish was created in 1843. Webster and Red River Parish were created out of it in 1871. If you lived in Koran, you were in Claiborne Parish, until 1843, when you were considered in Bossier Parish. Martin residents were alternately Natchitoches, Claiborne, Bossier, and finally Red River Parish. These changes make census research difficult at best.

Neither mechanical cotton pickers nor human ones can often be seen in the areas around Martin and Koran Louisiana: cotton is no longer king there. Oil and lumber have taken cotton's place. The two towns are located in the extreme northwest corner of Louisiana, both on the east side of the Red River about forty miles from each other. Neither town is dying, particularly, but the population of each town hasn't changed much during the last forty years or so.

The Road from Martin to Koran

Although it has been occupied since the early 1800's, Koran is not an official city, town or village, has no schools, and in fact is little more than a road crossing in the deep piney woods near Haughton. It doesn't even have it's own zip code, town government, schools or more than a handful of residents. Thin blacktop roads cut through the pine forest, oil fields, and swamp land surrounding Lake Bistineau. It doesn't really seem to be a community as much as a string of houses located along on a secondary state road built to provide access from U.S. Highway 71 to Plum Orchard Landing at Lake Bistineau. The various interstate highways have all bypassed the village, and you have to want to go there to find it. Koran today is about 25 miles from Shreveport, but the roads are so winding that the trip can take forty-five minutes or more.

Entrance to Koran Cemetery

Finding the Koran Cemetery is even more of a challenge. A white-painted iron marker off the side of the road is your only clue. A trail leads off the road, but the way is blocked by a locked iron gate across the trail. You climb over the gate, and walk several hundred yards to the cemetery itself. In October, 2001, the weeds were waist high in the graveyard and snakes were a constant concern. But sure enough, there was Titus Kellogg's monument.

About forty miles southeast of Koran, Martin lies in Red River Parish on a similar blacktop road, but one a bit more secondary. The trip between the two takes about an hour because neither is on a main thoroughfare. There is an official town at Martin, however, which is located at the intersection of two secondary state roads, 507 and 155. The population has hovered between 500 and 600 for the last several decades. The most striking feature--the way you know you've reached Martin--is a monument erected by the State of Louisiana to the Reverend John Dupree, located on the grounds on the Martin Baptist Church.

Considerations of separation of church and state aside, the monument seems oddly appropriate. The piney woods of northwest Louisiana have been fertile grounds for fundamentalist Christian religions of every type imaginable. The Town of Martin has at least three Baptist churches, and most everyone is related to the Hunters, the Elliots, the Kelloggs, or the Lindseys. The nearest town of any size is Coushatta, the parish seat of Red River Parish, located ten miles away.

But how did several branches of the Kellogg family end up only a few miles from each other?

As mentioned above, when Louisiana became a state in 1812, Natchitoches was pretty much the northernmost point of civilization. As the Great Raft was removed, and the land drained somewhat, new land was available. By the middle of the first half of the 19th Century, a number of people moved to the area to take advantage of the cheap or free land, even before the Raft had been cleared up to Shreveport. But the area was still very remote and difficult to reach for a number of years. Living conditions were primitive, Yellow Fever was a constant threat (due to the damp conditions and many mosquitoes). And the outbreak of the Civil War brought the Raft Removal to a halt, with much of the area again flooding until several decades after the War.

Travel to New Orleans from anywhere in the world was always relatively easy, because of the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico. Its location is the reason for the early growth of the city. Its strategic importance for defense of the interior of the United States was the reason it was fought over in the War of 1812, and why it was seized by Union forces early in the Civil War (April 1862). But getting up the Red River to the area around Natchitoches and Shreveport was much more of a problem.

There were three main migration routes to the area during the early 1800's.

The first was by far the easiest--from New Orleans, steamboats with a shallow draft could gradually make their way to Natchitoches, and smaller boats could make it to outlying communities. Koran and Martin were two of those type of communities--easily accessible from the flooded Red River via various bayous to Lake Bistineau. That was the route Titus Kellogg took before moving his family to Louisiana.

The second route was much more difficult. Few people took the northern route to the area except for Titus and Lucy when they brought their children to Louisiana. There are more details about Titus and Lucy and their lives at Titus and Lucy. But you particularly want to read Lucy's account of her trip to Louisiana at Lucy Fletcher Kellogg to get a better idea of the hardships of that route. And don't miss the part where she tells of her memory of the day George Washington died.

James Harris Fairchild was Lucy and Titus' future son-in-law when he came to Minden, Louisiana to visit their daughter Mary Fletcher Kellogg. Fairchild's account was written fifty years later from notes he made at the time. On that journey, he meets Professor Lyman Beecher and Professor Beecher's daughter Harriet Beecher Stowe. I have a copy of his typewritten manuscript, and would be glad to send you a copy if you are interested. I regret that space considerations do not allow me to make it available on this website.

Samuel Kellogg brought his family overland, too, from Northeast Mississippi, down to Vicksburg, then across the state. You can read more about Samuel and his family at Alabama to Louisiana: The Details By the time he and his family moved, Titus's daughter and nephew had moved to Vicksburg, so it is probable they were hosts to Samuel and his family for at least awhile. Taking the Mississippi River down to New Orleans, then the Red River to Natchitoches would have tripled the journey, and the overland route had been pretty well established.

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