In the late 18th century goods such as animal pelts,
indigo, and cotton were transported on the Mississippi River by people commonly known as longboat men, named for the type of craft that carried the goods. These were eventually replaced by steamboats. Thieves and pirates raided the longboats, killing the crew and selling the goods. Bunch's Bend is named for a pirate who would raid the boats at this place, where they had to maneuver the bend in the river. If the longboat men made it past Bunch's Bend without being robbed, they would say they, "made it to Providence." The trading town of Providence developed at the bend. It later was renamed as Lake Providence when the town was moved to its current location surrounding a natural
oxbow lake. The Lake Providence area first opened for European-American settlement in the late 1830s, after the federal government enforced
Indian Removal to Indian Territory further west of the Mississippi River, and extinguished their land titles. Settlers drained the
cypress swamps along the Mississippi River and used enslaved African Americans to clear the land for cultivation.
Civil War By the start of the
American Civil War in 1861, the region consisted mostly of large
cotton plantations along the river, which were worked by thousands of
slave laborers. The town of Lake Providence developed after the arrival of the
Union Army in the spring of 1862. Under the direction of General
Ulysses S. Grant, the area by Lake Providence was established as a supply depot and base of operations for the
Vicksburg Campaign. The soldiers dug a canal between the Mississippi River and Lake Providence. The area was called "Soldiers' Rest". Grant subsequently moved his troops south for temporary residence at
Winter Quarters south of
Newellton in
Tensas Parish. As slaves crowded into the camp at Lake Providence to gain freedom from surrounding plantations, the population quickly soared from a few hundred to several thousand. What began as a simple military supply camp quickly transformed into a city with a large population of African-American refugees. By the time
Vicksburg, Mississippi fell to the
Union in 1863, most
planters in the Lake Providence area had fled, and their plantations lay empty. The Union Army determined that they should be productive again.
20th century beside the
Mississippi River levee near Lake Providence (June 1940) After the
Reconstruction Era, many black people worked as
sharecroppers or
tenant farmers in the region. In 1898, Louisiana, like other southern states, enacted a new constitution, designed to maintain Democratic Party dominance and forestall any alliances such as the Populist-Republican alliance that had won seats in the 1890s. They included provisions that raised barriers to voter registration and elections, effectively
disenfranchising most blacks despite their constitutional
15th Amendment right to vote. Their exclusion from the political system made them second-class citizens. The civil rights movement of the post-World War II period from the 1940s through the 1960s brought efforts of a new generation to make constitutional rights more equitable. Until 1962, no African Americans had been allowed to register to vote in Lake Providence or
East Carroll Parish in forty years when
U.S. District Judge Edwin Ford Hunter Jr., based in
Lake Charles in the far southwestern corner of the state, personally registered twenty-eight African Americans in Lake Providence under a provision of the
Civil Rights Act of 1960, which had been signed into law by
U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Hunter was challenged by Louisiana 6th Judicial District Judge Frank Voelker Sr., who was based in Lake Providence, in a dispute over the powers of the national government. The case attracted national attention, as the civil rights movement highlighted the constitutional infringement of the rights of African Americans in the South. Following national Democratic support for the passage of civil rights legislation in the mid-1960s, most African Americans allied with that party. With a majority African-American electorate, Lake Providence voters in the 21st century continue to support
Democratic Party candidates. Conservative whites tended to leave the Democratic Party after the 1960s, and have overwhelmingly joined the Republican Party. In the
2008 and
2012 presidential elections, East Carroll Parish voted handily for Democrat
Barack H. Obama of
Illinois, rather than his Republican opponents,
John McCain of
Arizona and
Mitt Romney of
Massachusetts. ==Geography==