Our area

Bayou Lafourche is geographically and culturally at the center of the communities served by the Daily Comet.

Until the early part of the 20th century, the entire length of the bayou was an active artery of commerce for steamboats traveling from the river to the communities which stretched down to the Gulf of Mexico, with Thibodaux serving as the queen city of the bayou.

It was that steady stream of traffic that earned the bayou its nickname "the longest street in the world" with houses lining its banks like those along any street. It is said that at one time, residents along the bayou were able to pass along news from neighbor to neighbor for a stretch of 40 miles, without anyone ever leaving their front porch.

Now we hope those neighbors get their news delivered to their front porches on the pages of the Daily Comet.

The communities along the bayou have evolved from those early days. But the Boudreauxs and Heberts, the Daigles and Melancons who live along the bayou today still rely heavily on their Cajun French culture and rich natural resources of the swamps and marshes of the area for their livelihoods and their quality of life.

While Cajuns dominate the culture, the area has a diverse cultural background with influence from the Spanish settlements that date back to colonial times, African, Italian, German and Eastern European communities that settled here around the turn of the century, and even Chinese and Philippine settlements of the late 1800s. They and many others left their mark on their descendents who still live here.

The oil industry changed the the area forever in the mid 1900s, and remains the driving force of the economy. But the natural resources of the bayou still provide an economic base for many bayou country residents. The rich delta built by the bayou provides fertile ground for the important sugarcane crop. The marshes still teem with shrimp and fish and trappers still ply the swamps for alligators and nutria.

A resurgence in interest in the Cajun culture has remained strong over the years, and a new generation of French speakers are growing up, trying to recapture the dialect that was all but lost when the "Tex-yians" moved in with their oil rigs. There is even a move by several South Lafourche residents to begin a French immersion school to help younger Cajuns keep the language from dying. Cajun music, Cajun food and the Cajun spirit have all been rekindled and have developed into a thriving economic concern as well as a cultural one.

The area along Bayou Lafourche is a unique blend of cultures which spice up the rich Cajun gumbo that forms its base. We even like our politics spicey, but everybody knows about that.

Our background

The Daily Comet began publishing in 1889 as the weekly Lafourche Comet. A Democratic-affiliated newspaper, its publisher selected the name Comet because the Republican newspaper was named the Star. His reasoning, a comet is brighter than a star. It is the only paper currently published in America named Comet.

The paper publishes Monday through Friday, covering Lafourche, Assumption, the west bank of St. James and the northern part of Terrebonne parishes. A Saturday edition is also printed in conjunction with The (Houma) Courier.

In 1997, the newspaper kicked off its new Web site to provide news and information to an ever-growing younger generation of Daily Comet readers.