Acadia Parish Assessor

After the original church at Pouppeville was moved closer to the Rayne depot, at the current sight of St. Joseph’s Catholic Church, a cemetery was laid out to the south of the relocated church. Bucking Christian tradition, the graveyard began with the graves placed in a north-south position rather than the traditional east-west position (the east metaphorically representing the beginning of life with the rising of the sun and the west metaphorically representing the ending of life with the setting of the sun). Perhaps the gravedigger did not have a compass! Whatever the case, the most commonly accepted version of what happened is that the graves were mislaid and before the mistake was discovered, too many people had been buried; the expense of reburials (not to mention the effect it would have had on the grieving families) was too great a cost. The citizens allowed the cemetery to remain as it had originally been placed, albeit at the expense of being a rarity in the civilized Western world. Such an oddity caught the attention of Robert Ripley, who included the St. Joseph ’s Cemetery in his famous newspaper cartoon early in the century. Only recently has the graveyard again been run as an attraction in “Ripley’s Believe It or Not!” and people come from around the world to see the only cemetery in the Judeo-Christian world that faces north-south rather than east-west. A copy of the Ripley article is on display in the lobby of the Rayne Chamber office.

Rayne, LA is one of the trivial pursuit answers.

In 1970, twenty bullfrogs from Rayne left the Lafayette Airport for a thrilling trip which would eventually take two of the hardiest and best-suited specimens on a five-day orbited flight into outer space. The flight was an important NASA research project to aid in determining the effect of prolonged weightlessness on pilots and astronauts for the future. Frogs were chosen as space flight specimens because the ear system of the frog is similar to that in man; it’s size permits small packaging for space flight; and it is amphibious and therefore capable of surviving in an environment of air while pre-launch surgery is performed and in water during the flight. Rayne’s ‘astrofrogs’ blasted off into space on Monday, November 8, 1970 at 1:00am. The launch and experiments were successful, whereupon the heroic frogs expired after 7 days when the power supply was expended. NASA made no plans to recover the craft and bodies of the frogs, thereby remaining in orbit . . . boldly going where no frog has gone before . . .