Lewisville, Arkansas
Lewisville is a town in Lafayette County, United States. The population was 1,285 at the 2000 census; the town is the county seat of Lafayette County. Lewisville is located at 33°21′38″N 93°34′46″W. According to the United States Census Bureau, the town has a total area of 2.2 square miles, all land. As of the census of 2000, there were 1,285 people, 518 households, 349 families residing in the town; the population density was 583.7 people per square mile. There were 577 housing units at an average density of 262.1/sq mi. The racial makeup of the city was 49.34% White, 49.34% Black or African American, 0.16% Native American, 0.70% from other races, 0.47% from two or more races. 2.10% of the population were Hispanic or Latino of any race. There were 518 households out of which 28.8% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 46.7% were married couples living together, 16.2% had a female householder with no husband present, 32.6% were non-families. 30.1% of all households were made up of individuals and 15.3% had someone living alone, 65 years of age or older.
The average household size was 2.47 and the average family size was 3.04. In the city, the population was spread out with 25.8% under the age of 18, 7.9% from 18 to 24, 25.7% from 25 to 44, 22.3% from 45 to 64, 18.3% who were 65 years of age or older. The median age was 39 years. For every 100 females, there were 86.5 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 80.5 males. The median income for a household in the town was $26,719, the median income for a family was $34,712. Males had a median income of $24,408 versus $16,850 for females; the per capita income for the city was $13,733. About 17.2% of families and 21.3% of the population were below the poverty line, including 27.3% of those under age 18 and 16.1% of those age 65 or over. Public education for elementary and secondary students is provided by the Lafayette County School District. On July 1, 2003, the Lewisville district consolidated with the Stamps School District to form the Lafayette County School District. U. S. Highway 82 Arkansas Highway 29 Arkansas Highway 313 W. W. Carloss, member of the Louisiana House of Representatives, 1874-1878.
Fort, one of the first settlers in Lafayette County and the individual whose given name was used in naming the town of Lewisville, Arkansas
Webster Parish, Louisiana
Webster Parish is a parish located in the northwestern section of the U. S. state of Louisiana. The seat of the parish is Minden; as of the 2010 census, the Webster Parish population was 41,207. In 2017, the population estimate was 39,710, a decline of nearly 3.8 percent since the 2011 estimated count of 41,259. The decline represents an average loss of 258 persons per year. Public officials who have long sought to increase the industrial potential of the parish, expressed concern over the downward spiral. Jim Bonsall, the president of the Webster Parish Police Jury, the parish governing body, cited the ending of the Haynesville Shale boom as the primary reason for the population losses; the parish has long depended on jobs in natural gas fields. The parish is named for 19th-century American statesman Daniel Webster of Massachusetts and New Hampshire, it was created on February 27, 1871 from lands belonging to Bienville and Claiborne parishes. The parish centennial celebration was held in May 1971.
Speakers included Police jury president Leland Garland Mims and Judge Enos McClendon of the Louisiana 26th Judicial District Court, who gave a biographical sketch of Daniel Webster. Many officials and parish employees dressed in period costume of the 1870s for the event. Webster Parish is part of LA Metropolitan Statistical Area. Among the first settlers in Webster Parish was Newett Drew, a native of Virginia, who about 1818 established a grist mill at the former Overton community near Minden. At this time the area was Natchitoches Parish and Overton became the Parish Seat of Claiborne Parish in 1836 until it moved in 1848, his son, Richard Maxwell Drew was born in Overton and served as a district judge state representative prior to his death in 1850 at the age of twenty-eight. R. M. Drew's descendants held judicial or legislative positions in Webster Parish as well, Richard Cleveland Drew, Harmon Caldwell Drew, R. Harmon Drew, Sr. and Harmon Drew, Jr. According to the U. S. Census Bureau, the parish has a total area of 615 square miles, of which 593 square miles is land and 22 square miles is water.
Interstate 20 Future Interstate 69 U. S. Highway 79 U. S. Highway 80 U. S. Highway 371 Louisiana Highway 2 Lafayette County, Arkansas Columbia County, Arkansas Claiborne Parish Bienville Parish Bossier Parish Kisatchie National Forest Caney Lakes Recreation Area near Minden The existing Webster Parish Court House in Minden, built at a cost of $876,000, was dedicated on May 1, 1953, with Governor Robert F. Kennon, reared in Minden and served as its mayor, as the featured speaker. Planning on the courthouse began in 1950, when it was determined that the previous structure had become obsolete. At the time of its establishment in 1904, the previous courthouse, built at a cost of $45,000, was said to have "rivaled any other in north Louisiana for its graceful, domed architectural style and marbled hallways." A modern multi-level jail was added to that courthouse in 1906 at a cost of $16,000. The new jail enabled constituents coming to the sheriff's tax office to avoid passing through the jail; when Webster Parish was carved from Claiborne Parish in 1871, the state representative was John Sidney Killen, a native of Darlington County, South Carolina, who beginning in 1849 operated a farm and cattle spread north of Minden.
He was the great-grandfather of a mayor of Minden, Floyd D. Culbertson, Jr. who served from 1940 to 1942, the father-in-law of Webster Parish pioneer William G. Stewart, a farmer and president of the Webster Parish School Board, for whom the former William G. Stewart Elementary School was named. W. W. Carloss, who fought in the Siege of Port Hudson, was the Webster Parish state representative from 1874 to 1888, but he thereafter moved to Lafayette County in southwestern Arkansas. From 1896 to 1900, Thomas Wafer Fuller of Minden, a descendant of a prominent area family, served as the state senator freom Webster and the surrounding parishes of Bossier and Bienville, he was a newspaper publisher, twice the owner of the former Webster Signal. From 1908 until his death in 1920, he was the second school superintendent in Webster Parish. Leland G. Mims, a Minden businessman, served as a Webster Parish police juror from 1953–1976, president of the jury each year from 1956–1973, president of the Police Jury Association of Louisiana from 1965-1967.
Mims' father-in-law, W. Matt Lowe, served on the police jury between 1940 and 1954 and was the mayor of Minden from 1916 to 1920. From 1992 to 2012, Webster Parish was represented in the Louisiana House of Representatives by a member of the Doerge family. Democrat Everett Doerge, a retired educator and native of Minden, unseated the short-term Republican incumbent Eugene Eason and held the seat until his death in 1998, his widow, Jean M. Doerge a former educator, a Democrat, a native of Natchitoches Parish, won the special election as his successor, she was reelected three times, twice without opposition but was term-limited in 2011. The Webster Parish representative effective in 2012 is Democrat Harlie Eugene Reynolds, a retired educator from Dubberly. In 1996, the Webster Parish Police Jury approved a $1,849,000 bid to the firm Finney Co. of Shreveport for construction of a new parish library facility on Est and West Street in Minden. Webster Parish is competitive in most contested elections.
The parish voted for Republican Barry Goldwater for president in 1964 and George Wallace in 1968, when the former governor of Alabama ran on the American Independent Party ticket. Richard Nixon won here in 1972, and
2010 United States Census
The 2010 United States Census is the twenty-third and most recent United States national census. National Census Day, the reference day used for the census, was April 1, 2010; the census was taken via mail-in citizen self-reporting, with enumerators serving to spot-check randomly selected neighborhoods and communities. As part of a drive to increase the count's accuracy, 635,000 temporary enumerators were hired; the population of the United States was counted as 308,745,538, a 9.7% increase from the 2000 Census. This was the first census in which all states recorded a population of over half a million, as well as the first in which all 100 largest cities recorded populations of over 200,000; as required by the United States Constitution, the U. S. census has been conducted every 10 years since 1790. The 2000 U. S. Census was the previous census completed. Participation in the U. S. Census is required by law in Title 13 of the United States Code. On January 25, 2010, Census Bureau Director Robert Groves inaugurated the 2010 Census enumeration by counting World War II veteran Clifton Jackson, a resident of Noorvik, Alaska.
More than 120 million census forms were delivered by the U. S. Post Office beginning March 15, 2010; the number of forms mailed out or hand-delivered by the Census Bureau was 134 million on April 1, 2010. Although the questionnaire used April 1, 2010 as the reference date as to where a person was living, an insert dated March 15, 2010 included the following printed in bold type: "Please complete and mail back the enclosed census form today." The 2010 Census national mail participation rate was 74%. From April through July 2010, census takers visited households that did not return a form, an operation called "non-response follow-up". In December 2010, the U. S. Census Bureau delivered population information to the U. S. President for apportionment, in March 2011, complete redistricting data was delivered to states. Identifiable information will be available in 2082; the Census Bureau did not use a long form for the 2010 Census. In several previous censuses, one in six households received this long form, which asked for detailed social and economic information.
The 2010 Census used only a short form asking ten basic questions: How many people were living or staying in this house, apartment, or mobile home on April 1, 2010? Were there any additional people staying here on April 1, 2010 that you did not include in Question 1? Mark all that apply: Is this house, apartment, or mobile home – What is your telephone number? What is Person 1's name? What is Person 1's sex? What is Person 1's age and Person 1's date of birth? Is Person 1 of Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin? What is Person 1's race? Does Person 1 sometimes live or stay somewhere else? The form included space to repeat all of these questions for up to twelve residents total. In contrast to the 2000 census, an Internet response option was not offered, nor was the form available for download. Detailed socioeconomic information collected during past censuses will continue to be collected through the American Community Survey; the survey provides data about communities in the United States on a 1-year or 3-year cycle, depending on the size of the community, rather than once every 10 years.
A small percentage of the population on a rotating basis will receive the survey each year, no household will receive it more than once every five years. In June 2009, the U. S. Census Bureau announced. However, the final form did not contain a separate "same-sex married couple" option; when noting the relationship between household members, same-sex couples who are married could mark their spouses as being "Husband or wife", the same response given by opposite-sex married couples. An "unmarried partner" option was available for couples; the 2010 census cost $13 billion $42 per capita. Operational costs were $5.4 billion under the $7 billion budget. In December 2010 the Government Accountability Office noted that the cost of conducting the census has doubled each decade since 1970. In a detailed 2004 report to Congress, the GAO called on the Census Bureau to address cost and design issues, at that time, had estimated the 2010 Census cost to be $11 billion. In August 2010, Commerce Secretary Gary Locke announced that the census operational costs came in under budget.
Locke credited the management practices of Census Bureau director Robert Groves, citing in particular the decision to buy additional advertising in locations where responses lagged, which improved the overall response rate. The agency has begun to rely more on questioning neighbors or other reliable third parties when a person could not be reached at home, which reduced the cost of follow-up visits. Census data for about 22% of U. S. househol
U.S. Route 82
U. S. Route 82 is an east–west United States highway in the Southern United States. Created on July 1, 1931 across central Mississippi and southern Arkansas, US 82 became a 1,625-mile route extending from the White Sands of New Mexico to Georgia's Atlantic coast; the highway's eastern terminus is in Brunswick, Georgia, at an intersection with Interstate 95. It is co-signed for its last half-mile with U. S. Route 17, its western terminus is in Alamogordo, New Mexico at an intersection with U. S. Route 54 and U. S. Route 70. US 82 begins at an intersection with US highways 54 and 70 north of Alamogordo, south of La Luz, New Mexico. Heading east out of Alamogordo the road ascends into the Sacramento Mountains, traveling through the Lincoln National Forest. While climbing steep Mexican Canyon, the highway passes the abandoned railroad trestles of the El Paso and Northeastern Railway, passes through the only road tunnel in New Mexico; the road traverses the New Mexico villages of High Rolls and Mayhill After descending the mountains into the rugged, flat plains of eastern New Mexico, it follows a north-northeasterly bearing until Artesia, where it takes a more due-easterly bearing on through to Lovington, veering back to the north before crossing into Texas.
US 82 crosses into Texas from New Mexico at Texas Farm to Market Road 769, turning northeastward toward Plains, where it merges with US 380. US 82 is co-signed with US 380 from Plains to Brownfield, where it joins US 62, US 380 leaves the route. US 82/62 continues northeastward toward Lubbock. In Lubbock, US 82 and US 62 split, where US 82 is a limited access freeway west of US Route 87. From Wolfforth to downtown Lubbock, US 82 is named Marsha Sharp Freeway after Marsha Sharp, former head basketball coach of the Texas Tech Lady Raiders and Women's Basketball Hall of Fame inductee, it once again merges with US 62 east of the campus of Texas Tech University, where it continues eastward through Ralls, where US 62 makes a sharp turn to the north and leaves the route. US 82 continues eastward across the level plains of the Llano Estacado to Crosbyton and dips downward as it crosses the White River of Blanco Canyon, where the Texas Department of Transportation maintains the Silver Falls Rest Area with facilities and hiking trails.
After climbing out of Blanco Canyon, US 82 exits the Llano Estacado and enters the rolling plains near Dickens, Texas. US 82/SH 114 continues eastward as a co-signed route until Seymour, where it merges with U. S. Highways 183, 277 and 283, with US 183 and 283 leaving the route at Mabelle. US 82/277 continues eastward to Wichita Falls. US 82 leaves US 287 at Henrietta and continues east, signed independently across the remainder of Texas, crossing into Arkansas in downtown Texarkana. US 82 enters Arkansas in downtown Texarkana proceeds due east across the flat plains of the Red River, it crosses the Red River at Garland City on a new bridge passes through the towns of Lewisville and Magnolia. At Magnolia the route joins US 79 for two miles before continuing eastward; the route passes through the cities of El Dorado and Strong before crossing the Ouachita River just north of Lake Jack Lee continues through Crossett and Hamburg to Lake Village. The route continues from there across the Mississippi River to Greenville, MS.
US 82 follows the historical alignment of Arkansas Highway 2. Through the entire state, the highway is four-laned with interchanges at major junctions. After crossing the Mississippi River from Arkansas via a four-laned, cable-stayed Mississippi River bridge, the road travels northeast toward central Greenville turns east to Columbus, passing through Indianola, Greenwood and Starkville, while bypassing Itta Bena. According to the Mississippi Department of Transportation's website www.gomdot.com, construction is now underway on a U. S. 82 bypass around Greenville. The new road will commence at the opened MS River Bridge and terminate at the current U. S. 82 near Leland, creating a half-loop freeway around South Greenville. Cloverleaf interchanges are presently being built at the freeway's junctions with MS 454 and MS 1; this new bypass will be the southern terminus for the planned freeway connector to Interstate 69, under construction through the northern Mississippi Delta. From Starkville east through Columbus and on to the Alabama state line, US 82 is built to freeway standards.
The Mississippi section of U. S. 82 is defined in Mississippi Code Annotated § 65-3-3. Throughout Alabama, US 82 is paired with unsigned State Route 6; the highway enters the state east of Columbus and bears southeast towards Northport and Tuscaloosa, where it crosses over I-20 and I-59 south of town. It is known in West Alabama as McFarland Boulevard, in memory of the late Honorable Ward Wharton McFarland, a political and civic leader who died in 1979. After leaving Tuscaloosa, the route continues southeast, passing through the cities of Brent and Maplesville en route to Prattville, on the northern edge of the Montgomery metropolitan area; this 92-mile drive goes through some of the most rural areas of the state, much of it two lanes with the exception of the section from Tuscaloosa to Centreville. Upon arriving in Prattville, it runs concurrently with I-65, with which it goes through downtown Montgomery with, splits off to the east south of downtown. After leaving Montgomery, the route continues southeast through Union Springs and Midway en route to Eufaula, on the Alabama–Georgia state line, where it
Time in the United States
Time in the United States, by law, is divided into nine standard time zones covering the states and its possessions, with most of the United States observing daylight saving time for the spring and fall months. The time zone boundaries and DST observance are regulated by the Department of Transportation. Official and precise timekeeping services are provided by two federal agencies: the National Institute of Standards and Technology; the clocks run by these services are kept synchronized with each other as well as with those of other international timekeeping organizations. It is the combination of the time zone and daylight saving rules, along with the timekeeping services, which determines the legal civil time for any U. S. location at any moment. Before the adoption of four standard time zones for the continental United States, many towns and cities set their clocks to noon when the sun passed their local meridian, pre-corrected for the equation of time on the date of observation, to form local mean solar time.
Noon occurred at different times but time differences between distant locations were noticeable prior to the 19th century because of long travel times and the lack of long-distance instant communications prior to the development of the telegraph. The use of local solar time became awkward as railways and telecommunications improved. American railroads maintained many different time zones during the late 1800s; each train station set its own clock making it difficult to coordinate train schedules and confusing passengers. Time calculation became a serious problem for people traveling by train, according to the Library of Congress; every city in the United States used a different time standard so there were more than 300 local sun times to choose from. Time zones were therefore a compromise, relaxing the complex geographic dependence while still allowing local time to be approximate with mean solar time. Railroad managers tried to address the problem by establishing 100 railroad time zones, but this was only a partial solution to the problem.
Weather service chief Cleveland Abbe had needed to introduce four standard time zones for his weather stations, an idea which he offered to the railroads. Operators of the new railroad lines needed a new time plan that would offer a uniform train schedule for departures and arrivals. Four standard time zones for the continental United States were introduced at noon on November 18, 1883, when the telegraph lines transmitted time signals to all major cities. In October 1884, the International Meridian Conference at Washington DC adopted a proposal which stated that the prime meridian for longitude and timekeeping should be one that passes through the centre of the transit instrument at the Greenwich Observatory in the United Kingdom; the conference therefore established the Greenwich Meridian as the prime meridian and Greenwich Mean Time as the world's time standard. The US time-zone system grew from this, in which all zones referred back to GMT on the prime meridian. In 1960, the International Radio Consultative Committee formalized the concept of Coordinated Universal Time, which became the new international civil time standard.
UTC is, within about 1 second, mean solar time at 0°. UTC does not observe daylight saving time. For most purposes, UTC is considered interchangeable with GMT, but GMT is no longer defined by the scientific community. UTC is one of several related successors to GMT. Standard time zones in the United States are defined at the federal level by law 15 USC §260; the federal law establishes the transition dates and times at which daylight saving time occurs, if observed. It is the authority of the Secretary of Transportation, in coordination with the states, to determine which regions will observe which of the standard time zones and if they will observe daylight saving time; as of August 9, 2007, the standard time zones are defined in terms of hourly offsets from UTC. Prior to this they were based upon the mean solar time at several meridians 15° apart west of Greenwich. Only the full-time zone names listed below are official. View the standard time zone boundaries here; the United States uses nine standard time zones.
As defined by US law they are: From east to west, the four time zones of the contiguous United States are: Eastern Time Zone, which comprises the states on the Atlantic coast and the eastern two thirds of the Ohio Valley. Central Time Zone, which comprises the Gulf Coast, Mississippi Valley, most of the Great Plains. Mountain Time Zone, which comprises the states and portions of states that include the Rocky Mountains and the western quarter of the Great Plains. Pacific Time Zone, which comprises the states on the Pacific coast, plus Nevada and the Idaho panhandle. Alaska Time Zone, which comprises most of the state of Alaska. Hawaii-Aleutian Time Zone, which includes Hawaii and most of the length of the Aleutian Islands chain. Samoa Time Zone, which comprises American Samoa. Chamorro Time Zone, which comprises Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands. Atlantic Time Zone, which comprises Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands; some United States Minor Outlying Islands are outside the time zones defined by 15 U.
S. C. § exist in waters defined by Nautical time. In practice, military crews may
1890 United States Census
The Eleventh United States Census was taken beginning June 2, 1890. It determined the resident population of the United States to be 62,979,766—an increase of 25.5 percent over the 50,189,209 persons enumerated during the 1880 census. The data was tabulated by machine for the first time; the data reported that the distribution of the population had resulted in the disappearance of the American frontier. Most of the 1890 census materials were destroyed in a 1921 fire and fragments of the US census population schedule exist only for the states of Alabama, Illinois, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, the District of Columbia; this was the first census in which a majority of states recorded populations of over one million, as well as the first in which multiple cities – New York as of 1880, Philadelphia – recorded populations of over one million. The census saw Chicago rank as the nation's second-most populous city, a position it would hold until 1990, in which Los Angeles would supplant it.
The 1890 census collected the following information: The 1890 census was the first to be compiled using methods invented by Herman Hollerith and was overseen by Superintendents Robert P. Porter and Carroll D. Wright. Data was entered on a machine readable medium, punched cards, tabulated by machine; the net effect of the many changes from the 1880 census: the larger population, the number of data items to be collected, the Census Bureau headcount, the volume of scheduled publications, the use of Hollerith's electromechanical tabulators, was to reduce the time required to process the census from eight years for the 1880 census to six years for the 1890 census. The total population of 62,947,714, the family, or rough, was announced after only six weeks of processing; the public reaction to this tabulation was disbelief, as it was believed that the "right answer" was at least 75,000,000. The United States census of 1890 showed a total of 248,253 Native Americans living in the United States, down from 400,764 Native Americans identified in the census of 1850.
The 1890 census announced that the frontier region of the United States no longer existed, that the Census Bureau would no longer track the westward migration of the U. S. population. Up to and including the 1880 census, the country had a frontier of settlement. By 1890, isolated bodies of settlement had broken into the unsettled area to the extent that there was hardly a frontier line; this prompted Frederick Jackson Turner to develop his Frontier Thesis. The original data for the 1890 Census is no longer available. All the population schedules were damaged in a fire in the basement of the Commerce Building in Washington, D. C. in 1921. Some 25 % of the materials were presumed another 50 % damaged by smoke and water; the damage to the records led to an outcry for a permanent National Archives. In December 1932, following standard federal record-keeping procedures, the Chief Clerk of the Bureau of the Census sent the Librarian of Congress a list of papers to be destroyed, including the original 1890 census schedules.
The Librarian was asked by the Bureau to identify any records which should be retained for historical purposes, but the Librarian did not accept the census records. Congress authorized destruction of that list of records on February 21, 1933, the surviving original 1890 census records were destroyed by government order by 1934 or 1935; the other censuses for which some information has been lost are the 1810 enumerations. Few sets of microdata from the 1890 census survive, but aggregate data for small areas, together with compatible cartographic boundary files, can be downloaded from the National Historical Geographic Information System. Mayo-Smith, Richmond, "The Eleventh Census of the United States". In: The Economic Journal, Vol. 1, p. 43 - 58 1891 U. S Census Report Contains 1890 Census results Historical US Census data from the U. S. Census Bureau website Hollerith 1890 Census Tabulator by Columbia University "The Fate of the 1890 Population Census" from the National Archives website
Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette
Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette, known in the United States as Lafayette, was a French aristocrat and military officer who fought in the American Revolutionary War, commanding American troops in several battles, including the Siege of Yorktown. After returning to France, he was a key figure in the French Revolution of 1789 and the July Revolution of 1830. Lafayette was born into a wealthy land-owning family in Chavaniac in the province of Auvergne in south central France, he followed the family's martial tradition and was commissioned an officer at age 13. He became convinced that the American cause was noble in its revolutionary war, he traveled to the New World seeking glory in it, he was made a major general at age 19, but he was not given American troops to command. He was wounded during the Battle of Brandywine but still managed to organize an orderly retreat, he served with distinction in the Battle of Rhode Island. In the middle of the war, he sailed for home to lobby for an increase in French support.
He was given senior positions in the Continental Army. In 1781, troops under his command in Virginia blocked forces led by Cornwallis until other American and French forces could position themselves for the decisive Siege of Yorktown. Lafayette returned to France and was appointed to the Assembly of Notables in 1787, convened in response to the fiscal crisis, he was elected a member of the Estates General of 1789, where representatives met from the three traditional orders of French society: the clergy, the nobility, the commoners. After forming the National Constituent Assembly, he helped to write the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen with Thomas Jefferson's assistance; this document was inspired by the United States Declaration of Independence and invoked natural law to establish basic principles of the democratic nation-state. He advocated the end of slavery, in keeping with the philosophy of natural liberty. After the storming of the Bastille, he was appointed commander-in-chief of France's National Guard and tried to steer a middle course through the years of revolution.
In August 1792, radical factions ordered his arrest, he fled into the Austrian Netherlands. He was spent more than five years in prison. Lafayette returned to France after Napoleon Bonaparte secured his release in 1797, though he refused to participate in Napoleon's government. After the Bourbon Restoration of 1814, he became a liberal member of the Chamber of Deputies, a position that he held for most of the remainder of his life. In 1824, President James Monroe invited him to the United States as the nation's guest, he visited all 24 states in the union and met a rapturous reception. During France's July Revolution of 1830, he declined an offer to become the French dictator. Instead, he supported Louis-Philippe as king, but turned against him when the monarch became autocratic, he is buried in Picpus Cemetery in Paris, under soil from Bunker Hill. He is sometimes known as "The Hero of the Two Worlds" for his accomplishments in the service of both France and the United States. Lafayette was born on 6 September 1757 to Michel Louis Christophe Roch Gilbert Paulette du Motier, Marquis de La Fayette, colonel of grenadiers, Marie Louise Jolie de La Rivière, at the château de Chavaniac, in Chavaniac-Lafayette, near Le Puy-en-Velay, in the province of Auvergne.
Lafayette's lineage was one of the oldest and most distinguished in Auvergne and in all of France. Males of the Lafayette family enjoyed a reputation for courage and chivalry and were noted for their contempt for danger. One of Lafayette's early ancestors, Gilbert de Lafayette III, a Marshal of France, had been a companion-at-arms of Joan of Arc's army during the Siege of Orléans in 1429. According to legend, another ancestor acquired the crown of thorns during the Sixth Crusade, his non-Lafayette ancestors are notable. Lafayette's paternal uncle Jacques-Roch died on 18 January 1734 while fighting the Austrians at Milan in the War of the Polish Succession. Lafayette's father died on the battlefield. On 1 August 1759, Michel de Lafayette was struck by a cannonball while fighting a British-led coalition at the Battle of Minden in Westphalia. Lafayette became marquis and Lord of Chavaniac. Devastated by the loss of her husband, she went to live in Paris with her father and grandfather, leaving Lafayette to be raised in Chavaniac-Lafayette by his paternal grandmother, Mme de Chavaniac, who had brought the château into the family with her dowry.
In 1768, when Lafayette was 11, he was summoned to Paris to live with his mother and great-grandfather at the comte's apartments in Luxembourg Palace. The boy was sent to school at the Collège du Plessis, part of the University of Paris, it was decided that he would carry on the family martial tradition; the comte, the boy's great-grandfather, enrolled the boy in a program to train future Musketeers. Lafayette's mother and great-grandfather died, on 3 and 24 April 1770 leaving Lafayette an income of 25,000 livres. Upon the death of an uncle, the 12-year-old Lafayette inherited a handsome yearly income of 120,000 livres. In May 1771, aged less than 14, Lafayette was commissioned an officer in the Musketeers, with the rank of sous-lieutenant, his duties, which included marching in military parades and pr
Lafayette County, Arkansas
