A summer town across the water
Bernard Xavier de Marigny de Mandeville, from one of the wealthiest families in New Orleans, laid out the town on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain in 1834, and it was incorporated in 1840. He kept a large plantation where Fontainebleau State Park is now. By 1890 Mandeville had 1,012 residents, the largest population in St. Tammany Parish at the time.
It was a resort before it was a suburb. Families crossed the lake for whole summers in lakeside homes and hotels, and daily steamboats carried them over, with bands on board and more music at pavilions and dance halls on shore. The steamship ferry kept running until 1936. In 1893, the parish library notes, the little town had five grocery stores, three hotels, two barrooms, three butchers and three bakers, which says plenty about how the summer crowd ate.
Music came across the water with the visitors. The Dew Drop Social and Benevolent Hall opened in 1895, hosted early jazz greats and is on the National Register of Historic Places. Ruby's Roadhouse has been open since the 1920s. The first span of the Causeway opened in 1956 and a second followed in 1969, and Mandeville turned from a summer stop into a place people live all year.
The lakefront and the market
Lake Pontchartrain is a brackish estuary, fresher to the west and saltier to the east, and Mandeville sits on its quieter north shore. The parish tourism office points to the seawall, the waterfront restaurants, the marina and the Sunset Point Fishing Pier as the ways in, plus the cabins built over the water at Fontainebleau State Park.
On Saturday mornings the City of Mandeville runs the Trailhead Community Market in the old part of town, where more than 80 farmers, food vendors and artisans sell seasonal produce, eggs, honey, cut flowers, plants and prepared food. In spring the lakefront smells like a boil. Crawfish Cookin' for a Cause has held its crawfish fundraiser at the Lakefront Splash Park for fifteen years, raising money for local families dealing with catastrophic illness.
