I n the heart of Houston’s Fifth Ward, Frenchtown was once a world of its own.
Creole families who had lost everything in the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 rebuilt their lives here, carrying with them the food, music and language of Louisiana. They built houses from discarded boxcar lumber, planted fig trees and raised chickens in their yards.
Nearly a century later, little remains of the tight-knit enclave, but Frenchtown’s story lives on through the families who built it and the church they raised with their own hands…