Marie Therese Metoyer

Marie Thérèse dite Coincoin (August 1742 – 1816) was notable as a free médecine, planter, and businesswoman at the colonial Louisiana outpost of Natchitoches (later ). Her freedom was purchased in 1778 by Claude Thomas Pierre Métoyer, with whom she had a long liaison and ten children. She and her descendants established a historical community of Créoles of color along the Cane River, including what is said to be the first church founded by free people of color for their own use, St. Augustine Parish (Isle Brevelle) Church, Natchez, Louisiana. It is included as a site on the Louisiana African American Heritage Trail.

Coincoin was born at the Louisiana French outpost of , the fourth of eleven children of François and Marie Françoise. The parents were both Africans enslaved by the post's founder and commandant, Chevalier Louis Juchereau de St. Denis; they were married in the parish church just three weeks after François' baptism in December 1735.

This suggests that their marriage, like their religious "conversion," was dictated by their master. As children, Coincoin and her sister Marie Louise ditte Mariotte were trained in pharmacology and nursing. These skills helped provide livelihoods when the women gained their freedom as adults. Their other nine siblings would remain enslaved at various colonial posts from Natchitoches to Pensacola.

Coincoin became the young mother of five children (born of a union with an American Indian slave, according to unproved tradition). Other records show that Coincoins first 5 children were of full negro blood and not American Indian or Native American. About 1765 her mistress leased Coincoin to a young French merchant, Claude Thomas Pierre Métoyer, who made Coincoin his concubine.

The efforts of a parish priest to break up their union in 1778, by filing charges that would lead to her being sold away to New Orleans, prompted Métoyer to buy and manumit her. Together they moved from the post, to outlying lands, where their liaison continued until 1788, when he married another Marie Thérèse, a white Creole widow of German and French extraction; Eventually, as they matured and married, he would manumit the eldest five of his ten children whom he held in slavery after he purchased Coincoin and their offspring.

...
Wikipedia