Bicentennial trivia

... celebrating SC Parish’s 200th birthday

You can be a Herald-Guide Bicentennial supermodel like Amanda Pertuis. E-mail heatherb@heraldguide.com and we’ll arrange to make you famous, too. New model each week.

Throughout 2007, the Herald-Guide will feature seven trivia tidbits about St. Charles Parish in each of our weekly issues. Here’s this week’s installment.

1. On Monday, Nov. 11, 1912, Montz was the center of national attention after 14 people died in a train accident caused by fog.

2. The PTA had its beginnings in the 1920s and looked after schools and also established cafeterias where free milk and lunches were provided to the needy.

3. Pan-American Pertroleum Corporation of Destrehan was hit hard during the Great Depression and started searching for machines to replace workers to cut costs.

4. In 1941 the St. Charles Herald's motto was "To meet the needs of industrial and agricultural St. Charles."

5. The Herald’s competition in the early 1900's was the west bank's Paradis Enterprise Weekly and the Paradis Times Hustler, and the east bank's The St. Charles News and The River Parishes Journal.

6. Everyone in the region came to St. Charles Parish in the 1920s to see the Locke Breaux Oak - the world's largest oak tree of its time. It stood 75 feet high, spread over 166 feet and had a 35-foot circumference.

7. In 1909 the first history book on St. Charles Parish was published. John Hanno Deiler wrote The Settlement of the German Coast of Louisiana and the Creoles of German Descent.