Caddo Parish Courthouse - Shreveport, LA (The Death of the Butterfly Man)

501 Texas St.

Shreveport, LA 71101

32.512156,-93.749811

            We begin our next story in 1838, when a newly created Caddo Parish was in need of a parish seat and center for local government. A temporary courthouse, if you wish to call it that, was established at the private residence of Thomas Wallace. Wallace would later become an important figure in Shreveport and Caddo Parish history, also giving Wallace Lake its name. Obviously, this would only be temporary, and by 1840, the parish then used a structure at the corner of Texas and Market Streets. In April of 1855 the building was sold at a sheriff’s sale, leaving the parish without a courthouse once again so they rented a structure in the 500 block of Market Street from Ephraim C. Hart. Finally, in 1860, someone would come up with the ingenious idea that maybe, just maybe, the city needed a permanent courthouse so a two-story colonial-style structure would be erected.
            As we have learned, during the Civil War, Louisiana was a state without a capitol, as

Photograph of the original Caddo Courthouse.

legislature would move from New Orleans, to Baton Rouge, to Opelousas, to Shreveport, finally returning for good to Baton Rouge. During the times that the temporary capitol was in Shreveport, it set up shop at the Caddo Parish Courthouse. By the time the capitol was returned to Baton Rouge, the building was in great disrepair and would ultimately be demolished in 1889. In 1892, a new Romanesque-style courthouse was built and would remain as the center of local government until 1926 when it too, was demolished and replaced with the current courthouse that stands there today.

C.E. Byrd High School - Shreveport, LA (The Infamous Catacombs)

3201 Line Ave.

Shreveport, LA 71104

32.480412,-93.745716

www.cebyrd.com 

            When Clifton Ellis Byrd, Sr. first arrived in Shreveport in 1892 the city was in desperate need of an educational system. With a humble salary of seventy dollars a month, Byrd would rent out two rooms of a YMCA building and establish the first public high school. The first year’s enrollment garnered seventy students and the need for a larger school was needed so the school moved to the old Soady building on Crockett Street. After another move in 1899, the Caddo Parish School Board, now ran by its newly elected superintendent, C.E. Byrd, it was decided that a large permanent school finally be built. Construction would begin in 1924.
            In 1925, the honorably named C.E. Byrd High School was complete. To this day, it remains the largest and oldest high school in Shreveport. Home of the Yellow Jackets, C. E. Byrd High School is now a science and mathematics magnet school that has seen thousands upon thousands of students walk through its antique hallways. Although I have never been inside C.E. Byrd High School, I can relate to attending a school of such age.