Kenner (Images of America)

In 1682, when French explorer Robert de La Salle landed his canoe expedition on the banks of the Mississippi River to find a massacred Native American village, he never could have imagined that 300 years later the site would have grown into a city of over 75,000 residents and a major international airport. Louisiana’s fifth largest city, Kenner was built in the shadow of New Orleans based on a history intertwined with French and antebellum plantations, agricultural farms, and rural subdivisions. Against a backdrop of Indian, French, Spanish, American, and Confederate control, it suffered river floods, hurricanes, epidemics, Civil War occupation, and governmental infighting, through which a rich heritage of freed slaves, French, Irish, German, and numerous Italian immigrants and settlers persevered and prospered. A host to vanished tribes, famous explorers, renowned entrepreneurs, world-class boxers, Confederate and Union troops, US presidents, a pope, and countless celebrities, as well as being the site of tragic airline crashes and record hurricanes, Kenner’s history is a tale worth telling.