Drive through the eastern side of Livingston Parish, somewhere between Albany and Springfield, and it is easy to pass through Hungarian Settlement without realizing just how remarkable its story is.
There are no skyscrapers or grand monuments announcing what happened here. Instead, its history lives in family names, old churches, recipes written in familiar handwriting, strawberry fields, red, white and green ribbons and dances remembered by one generation and taught to the next.
This September, that history will take center stage as the community celebrates its first Hungarian Harvest Festival, Sept. 25-27 at Fayard Field in Springfield. For the first time, the celebration is also part of the Louisiana Association of Fairs and Festivals, placing a tradition born within a small immigrant community alongside festivals celebrating the cultures, crops and communities that make Louisiana what it is.
But the story of the festival begins long before there was a festival at all. It begins in 1896. At the turn of the 20th century, hundreds of thousands of Hungarians were leaving their homeland in search of greater economic and social opportunities. Most settled in industrial communities across the Northeast and Midwest. A few came much farther south.
The Charles Brackenridge Lumber Company had opened a mill in eastern Livingston Parish in 1890. By 1896, Hungarian immigrants had discovered both work at the mill and something even more valuable: an opportunity to own land. After timber was harvested, the company sold cutover acreage, generally in 20-acre sections for $10 an acre. Mill workers could purchase the property on credit. For immigrants who had little chance of becoming landowners in their homeland, rural Louisiana offered something worth writing home about.
Three of the earliest settlers, Julius Bruskay, Adam Mocsary and Theodore Zboray, began encouraging other Hungarians to join them. Letters traveled to relatives and friends in Hungary and Hungarian communities across America describing Louisiana’s warm climate, mill jobs and available farmland. Bruskay and Zboray even traveled north to spread word of the growing settlement. The Illinois Central Railroad eventually helped advertise the area in Szabadsag, a Hungarian-language newspaper published in Cleveland. And the community grew.
The settlers called their new home Arpadhon, meaning “Home of Arpad,” honoring the Magyar leader traditionally credited with uniting the Magyar tribes and leading them into the Carpathian Basin in the ninth century. These families were not simply finding jobs. They were building a community.
An immigration house provided temporary shelter for newly arriving families while also serving as a school, social gathering place and house of worship. Catholics and Protestants shared the building until each congregation could establish a church of its own.
In 1908, the Presbyterian Magyars constructed the Hungarian Presbyterian Church on 20 acres donated by the Brackenridge Lumber Company. Hungarian-language services continued there for more than half a century, aided greatly by longtime pastor Alexander Bartus. Two years later, the predominantly Catholic community began construction of St. Margaret Catholic Church, named for Hungary’s St. Margaret. Much of the labor came from local Hungarian men who worked without pay to build a church for their families.
Then came the railroad. The Baton Rouge, Hammond and Eastern Railroad established a depot approximately two miles north of Arpadhon and called it Albany. Commerce gradually shifted toward the new railroad town. The Hungarians even petitioned to rename Albany Balaton, after Hungary’s famous Lake Balaton and fruit-growing region. The request was denied. Albany remained Albany, and over time the name Arpadhon faded from everyday use. The community became known simply as what generations of Livingston Parish residents still call it today: Hungarian Settlement.
A Community Built Around the Harvest
As the lumber industry declined, agriculture became central to life in the settlement. And one crop in particular changed everything. Strawberries.
Hungarian families transformed former timberland into farms, and by the 1930s, strawberries had become the largest agricultural endeavor in Livingston Parish. The fruit became so intertwined with the community that its image remains part of Hungarian Settlement’s identity today.
With agriculture came another tradition: celebrating the harvest. The Hungarian Harvest Dance dates to the earliest years of the settlement and became an annual event by 1921. Community members have long believed the original settlers either brought the dances with them from Hungary or recreated dances they remembered from their home villages.
More than a century later, they are still being danced. Performers dress in traditional-style white costumes accented with the red, white and green of the Hungarian flag. Authentic Hungarian folk music accompanies a series of dances beneath a canopy traditionally decorated with fruit. And then comes perhaps the most charming part. When the dance ends, the audience gets to steal the fruit. It is a tradition that has survived immigration, two world wars, economic changes, assimilation and generations of children growing up increasingly removed from the Hungary their ancestors knew. Food has survived alongside it.
Cabbage rolls, or töltött káposzta, cucumber salad, uborka saláta, Hungarian sausage, kolbász, homemade bread and pastries continue to appear on tables using recipes handed down through families.
The Árpádhon Hungarian Settlement Cultural Association has worked for decades to make sure those traditions are not lost. In 1992, the association compiled community recipes into a cookbook preserving dishes from local Hungarian families. The book has since been reprinted numerous times.
When Hungarian Settlement celebrated its centennial in 1996, food, music and dance were again at the heart of the celebration. Residents 75 and older were honored. Hungarian food was served. Folk musicians performed. Dancers gathered beneath a canopy of vines and fruit. And, just as generations had done before them, the community danced the Harvest Dance. Thirty years later, another chapter is beginning.
A Festival for the Next Generation
The inaugural Hungarian Harvest Festival takes many of the traditions Hungarian Settlement has protected for more than a century and brings them together for an entire weekend. Festivities begin Friday, Sept. 25, with Heritage Day and opening night, including an opening ceremony, recognition of Hungarian citizens age 75 and older, vendors, midway attractions and live entertainment.
Saturday brings Queen’s Day, visiting festival royalty, music, dancing and cultural presentations before one of the weekend’s biggest moments: the Hungarian Harvest Dance at 6 p.m. The celebration continues Sunday with worship, music and another presentation of the Harvest Dance at 1 p.m. And admission to the festival is free.
There is something fitting about Hungarian Settlement entering the Louisiana festival family through a celebration of the harvest. Louisiana’s festivals tell the stories of the people who made homes here.
Some celebrate crawfish, sugarcane or strawberries. Others preserve music, faith, food or the heritage of people who arrived from somewhere else and eventually became inseparable from Louisiana itself.
Hungarian Settlement belongs in that story. The original settlers could not have known what would remain 130 years after they arrived among the pine forests of Livingston Parish. They were looking for work, land and an opportunity to build better lives. Their descendants inherited something more. They inherited Arpadhon.
The name may have disappeared from most maps, but the community it represented never really disappeared. It survived in churches and kitchens, in family stories and old photographs, in strawberry fields and Hungarian words, and every time another generation learned the steps of a dance first performed here more than a century ago.
This September, beneath the red, white and green, they will dance it again. Only this time, all of Louisiana is invited.
