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From:
Subject: Coffee Houses
Date: Thu, 23 Nov 2000 00:39:44 EST

Thanks, Jim, for including my information about Grimmer in your column
today.
The 1897 Universal Dictionary defines a coffee house as a "house of
entertainment where persons are supplied with coffee and other refreshments."
Those "other refreshments" in the Acadiana area coffee houses were alcoholic
beverages.
In 1854, Eugene I. Guegnon was sued by Antoine Raggazoni and Ursin
Hebert's widow. Hebert and Raggazoni had owned a coffee house in
Vermilionville, "for the purpose of retailing spirituous liquors and of
keeping a Billiard Table," according to the lawsuit. Guegnon had run up a
huge tab from 1850 to 1853, when a glass of liquor, and a cigar cost 5 cents
each; a game of billiards cost 20 cents. Judgment was in favor of the
plaintiffs. Guegnon was the proprietor and editor of the Vermilionville
Impartial, at that time. He founded the Abbeville Meridional, in 1856.
In 1871, Abbeville's town council set its municipal license fees. Coffee
houses were to pay $75. The next highest fee, $25, was to be collected from
hotels and livery stables. Physicians and attorneys were to pay only $20,
which was the same for retail merchants, unless they sold liquor in smaller
amounts than "an ordinary wine bottle." In such cases, their fee was the same
as for "coffee house keepers." A billiards table in a coffee house cost an
extra $10. Acadiana's coffee houses later came to be called saloons, but I
don't know when.

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