Thanks, Jim, for including my information about Grimmer in your column today. The 1897 Universal Dictionary defines a coffee house as a "house of entertainment where persons are supplied with coffee and other refreshments." Those "other refreshments" in the Acadiana area coffee houses were alcoholic beverages. In 1854, Eugene I. Guegnon was sued by Antoine Raggazoni and Ursin Hebert's widow. Hebert and Raggazoni had owned a coffee house in Vermilionville, "for the purpose of retailing spirituous liquors and of keeping a Billiard Table," according to the lawsuit. Guegnon had run up a huge tab from 1850 to 1853, when a glass of liquor, and a cigar cost 5 cents each; a game of billiards cost 20 cents. Judgment was in favor of the plaintiffs. Guegnon was the proprietor and editor of the Vermilionville Impartial, at that time. He founded the Abbeville Meridional, in 1856. In 1871, Abbeville's town council set its municipal license fees. Coffee houses were to pay $75. The next highest fee, $25, was to be collected from hotels and livery stables. Physicians and attorneys were to pay only $20, which was the same for retail merchants, unless they sold liquor in smaller amounts than "an ordinary wine bottle." In such cases, their fee was the same as for "coffee house keepers." A billiards table in a coffee house cost an extra $10. Acadiana's coffee houses later came to be called saloons, but I don't know when.