Elizabeth “Elisa” Toups was born in Abbeville, Louisiana in 1879 to Valerin and Eugenie Desormeaux Toups. In 1895, she married Iberia Parish farmworker, Joseph Alfrede Boudreaux. The Boudreaux’s bore seven children in Louisiana before the booming seafood industry of the Gulf Coast called them to her shores. Recruited by the Barataria Company, the family moved to Biloxi in 1914 and went to work in the factories. They set up their homestead in the “Barataria Camp”, a series of two or four room shotgun houses or rows of two room apartments provided by factories for their workers. As was typical, the men and older boys went to work on factory owned boats while the women and younger children worked diligently, shucking oysters and peeling shrimp. Often, even the smallest children were required to stay near their mother in the factory as there was only occasionally an older girl to watch them in the camps.
After settling in their new hometown, Elisa and Joseph bore their last child in Biloxi in 1916. Sadly, this child passed away at the age of one and half years, and six months later, Elisa herself succumbed to pneumonia due to the Spanish Flu epidemic.
The Barataria Company covered burial expenses and, at her request, Elisa was buried in Erath, Louisiana, near her father.
While her tenure in the seafood industry on the Gulf Coast was brief, her contributions and legacy are to be honored and remembered.