Grant Parish Port Commission
The Red River and Grant Parish
The Grant Parish Port Commission is considered
one of Louisiana's emerging ports—specifically one with enabling legislation but not yet developed or otherwise operational.
It was enacted to regulate the commerce and traffic
on its section of the Red River.
Use of a port commission provides
organizational leadership to plan, develop, and promote
activities which are necessary for the future of a constructed port.
Grant Parish History and the Red River
The area near Colfax was first known as Calhoun's Landing circa 1756 based on a trading outpost recorded in Post du Rapides documents. Early settlers were European Americans that had come to the area and begun cotton and sugar plantations. Grant formed from portions of Rapides and Winn Parishes where the Red River met Rigolet de Bon Dieu (at Montgomery) down through the confluence north of the Post du Rapides.
Grant Parish's roots are entrenched with use and development of the Red River for colonial trading and military activities. The parish was created during Reconstruction and named in honor of U.S. Grant, though Democrats of the area declared its name was in honor of a steamboat cabin boy R. H. Grant who had become a Captain and ran the Red River from Alexandria to Jefferson, Texas.
Steamboats provided for much of the early trading from the Red River's junction on the south with the Atchafalaya River and through the north into Texas. Plantations relied on steamboats for construction materials and getting their products to market. And the Red River was a tremendous factor in the civil war. There remain Union naval wrecks beneath the waters of the Red on the bounds of Grant Parish.
The parish's 642 square miles are bound on the west by the Red River. Grant Parish is looking to the Red River as an opportunity to restablish its benefit as a commercial and industrial water-based corridor.