How one stubborn settler carved out a city with nothing but oxen and grit.
By SWLA Photo
Some cities get founded with a ribbon-cutting. Others get carved into the mud, pulled inch by inch by a man too mule-headed to wait for permission.
Lake Charles is the second kind.
Back in the 1840s, when this place was still just swampland and sawdust, the parish seat was a forgettable town called Marion. Not that it had much going for it — a courthouse, a ferry, and maybe a bar if you were lucky. Meanwhile, a rough cluster of settlers had started building along the lake. A mail carrier named Jacob Ryan figured maybe the government ought to move the courthouse closer to where people were actually living.
The parish board disagreed.
They said the move would be too expensive. That the parish couldn’t afford it. That it wasn’t necessary.
Jacob Ryan didn’t argue. He just yoked up a couple of oxen and dragged the damn courthouse down the road himself.
That road — a glorified cow trail at the time — is now called Ryan Street. You’ve probably driven it hungover, late to church, or heading out of town. But once, it was the track a mailman used to haul the center of government out of the woods and into the future.
Oxen, Mud, and Stubborn Men
This wasn’t some marble-columned temple of justice we’re talking about. The courthouse was a wooden box, a shack, maybe. But it was the symbol of power. And in one act of civil disobedience soaked in livestock and sweat, that power shifted toward the lake.
Ryan didn’t do it alone. A man named Samuel Kirby helped. They stopped hauling timber just long enough to haul history. No headlines. No ceremony. Just a small-town stunt that turned into city planning.
They weren’t trying to make a statement. They just wanted their community to matter.
From Lawless to Legacy
It worked. Lake Charles started to grow. Not with a boom, but a crawl — railroads, lumber mills, a population that multiplied from 800 in 1880 to 15,000 by 1905. The courthouse stuck around. So did the name Ryan.
Most towns brag about founders, but here in Southwest Louisiana, we inherited ours like a scar or a surname. There’s no statue of Jacob Ryan, but his name’s on every street sign heading downtown. He didn’t build a city from scratch. He just moved the one that was too stubborn to move itself.
And honestly? That feels right.
📄 Want to see the story in print?
We dug this up from the 1905 Lake Charles Daily American. It’s full of names, legends, and more than a few wild tales about pirates, sawmills, and swamp politics. We’ve embedded the full edition below.
📖 View the full 1905 newspaper (PDF)
Next time you’re driving down Ryan Street, just remember:
The guy it’s named after once hijacked a town with a team of oxen and didn’t ask a soul for permission.