Harvey’s history is
mostly unwritten

During the French colonial era, the first owner of this land was Jean-Baptiste d'Estrehan de Beaupre, royal treasurer and comptroller for the French Louisiana colony. He established a plantation here. He used his slaves to dig the ditch that would become the Harvey Canal, cutting south from the banks of the Mississippi River to the back of Bayou Barataria, to provide better access.

Years later, d'Estrehan paid German settlers in the area to work on widening the ditch; they used wooden shovels. He paid them with small parcels of land located downriver in Mechanicsham, now the city of Gretna. D'Estrehan built his home where the ditch met the river banks, naming the settlement "Cosmopolite City".

Text from Wikipedia, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.