Frenier is at the end of a short, scenic drive through beautiful swampland and has endured as a community. A recently improved boat launch and dock has become an ideal setting for lakeside dining at first rate seafood restaurants.
Frenier was populated by the early 1800s by French and German farmers who migrated from the Mississippi River levee to the high ground they found on the southwestern shore of Lake Pontchartrain. Once the railroad came through in the 1850s the farmers were able to shift from subsistence farming to growing cash crops like cabbages in the rich, organic soil that they could now easily market to New Orleans and as far away as Chicago. Other small communities sprang up along the tracks on the isthmus, often arising from the water stops that the steam locomotives of the era had to make along the way. The West Indian Hurricane of 1915 nearly did them all in. (See the Hurricane of 1915 article in “History.”)
