Stop #7. (Rapides) Historic Cheneyville, locale of William Prince Ford, Mary McCoy, and Ralph Smith, Smith buried here; house remaining of Mary McCoy's slave.

(pg 14 cont'd) Here on the bayou, at this point, you are in the midst of Old Cheneyville, founded in 1813. Here the keelboats and barges floated downstream to the Inland Port of Washington, or were pulled, usually by oxen, along the bayou upstream with supplies sent from New Orleans via Washington. Cheneyville was originally settled by a man named William Fendon Cheney from South Carolina in 1811; two years later friends and probably relatives from the same South Carolina area came into the site from Woodville, Miss. where they had originally marked out their plantations. These were followed by wave after wave of migrants from the same location in South Carolina.

(pg. 15) Crossing the bridge, turning left along the bayou, you come to the Trinity Episcopal Church constructed in 1860. To the left 30 years is the grave of Mary Dunwoody McCoy Burgess(nic.) Rhodes Cooper. Mary McCoy married three times, not an unusual circumstance in the period due to the mortality rate. All three of Mary's husbands died. She had three children, two of whom survived until adulthood.

Ralph Smith's grave will be found to the rear of the church.

As you walk or ride along the bayou road bordering the cemetery, you will see four columns which are what remains of the Campbellite Church erected here in the 1840's. A schism developed in Beulah Baptist, and William Prince Ford was "churched" from his Baptist Church because he officiated at the induction of officers for the Campbellite Church. Thomas Campbell himself visited this church from his home in Kentucky.