Marie Thérèse Coincoin was born in August 1742 at Natchitoches to an enslaved African couple, François and Marie Françoise, in the household of the post's founder, Louis Juchereau de St. Denis. When she was sixteen, an epidemic killed both her parents and her owner, St. Denis's widow. Between 1759 and 1766 she bore five children, and no record names a father for any of them.
Rented and freed
Her new owner, St. Denis's daughter Marie des Neiges, wife of Manuel de Soto, rented her to Claude Thomas Pierre Metoyer, a French bachelor who kept a tavern. They had ten children. In 1777 a Spanish priest brought criminal charges against Madame de Soto and Metoyer. The Code Noir barred them from marrying, and historian Elizabeth Shown Mills writes that Coincoin was the one who suffered; a 1770 ordinance prescribed public shame and a lashing for a woman in her position.
Her freedom is usually dated 1778. In Mills's reading of the Natchitoches records, Metoyer bought his older children on July 29, 1778, and Coincoin and their newest infant on April 7, 1780, freeing her by a private paper his 1783 will acknowledges. In 1788 he married a widow. For their free-born children he arranged for Coincoin to hold 80 arpents, about 68 acres, and promised her 120 piasters yearly.
Tobacco, bear oil and her children
On that farm at Cedar Bend she planted tobacco and trapped bears and turkeys, selling the by-products. In April 1792 she and Metoyer sent skins, barrels of oil and tobacco to New Orleans. She spent the profits on her first children, by then scattered from Opelousas to Nacogdoches. Mills counts three children and three grandchildren bought free. In 1802 she gave up her annuity, though not her land, so that Metoyer would free their last enslaved sons and promise their daughter Susanne her freedom.
She also held people in bondage. In her fifties she bought an African-born woman, Marguerite, and later two men, Harry and Louis.
The Isle and the legends
Her sons settled Isle Brevelle, and Mills calculates that by the 1830s her descendants held about 18,000 acres and nearly 500 enslaved people, and lost it in the Civil War and Reconstruction.
Several stories about her are contested. That she founded Melrose traces, Mills finds, to the curator François Mignon in the mid-twentieth century; the earliest tradition, from 1927, names her son Louis. Louis claimed 911 acres in 1795 and 1796, while still enslaved, and was freed in 1802. The Park Service dates the African House to about 1800, but surveys of 1813 and 1814 place Louis's dwelling across the river, and Mills reasons that he began building after his 1818 court victory. A 2016 review of the archaeology judges the cabin called her house since 1978 probably an overseer's house on a later plantation. No record of her death survives; Mills concludes she died about March 12 to 15, 1817, and was probably buried at Shallow Lake Cemetery. A descendant wrote in 1974 that she still told people Coincoin built Melrose "because I want them to be proud of her."
Visit St. Augustine Church on Highway 484, a working parish her son Augustin founded. Melrose Plantation stands on the land Louis claimed.