Hop on down to the Rayne Frog Festival to
have a “toadally” awesome time!

The annual Rayne Frog Festival is scheduled for the second weekend In May with a full schedule of music, delicious foods and drinks, signature events such as frog racing and jumping, selection of the Rayne Lions Club Derby Queen, Diaper Derby, Arts & Crafts show at the Civic Center and the Grande Parade.

For more information, including a schedule of events, please see: www.raynefrogfestival.com.

​

Rayne has the distinction of being designated the official Louisiana City of Murals. This designation is the result of a cooperative effort between the City of Rayne and a group of citizens who formed the Rayne Beautification Board.

The Board commissioned Robert Dafford, an internationally renowned muralist, to decorate the blank brick walls of buildings in the town with renderings of the town’s history and its claim to fame--frogs!

In his career, he has created a variety of sets’ backdrops, and costumes for dance companies, Mardi Gras krewes, arts council events, museum exhibits, as well as for many school productions from university level to elementary schools. He enjoys collaborating with interior designers, architects, historians, choreographers, or directors to create specialized painted effects for their projects.

Recent works include a commission for the City of Rayne’s 25th Annual Frog Festival in canvas form to be placed on the Rayne Civic Center’s exterior. The reason Dafford is painting the mural on canvas is a practical one. Should the building become obsolete, the canvas can be removed and placed elsewhere in Rayne.

​

Cemetery at Rayne’s St. Joseph Catholic Church

After the original church at Pouppeville was moved closer to the Rayne Depot, at the current site of Rayne’s St. Joseph Catholic Church, a cemetery was laid-out to the south of the relocated church. Bucking Christian tradition, the graveyard began with the graves placed in a north-south position rather than the traditional east-west position (the east metaphorically representing the beginning of life with the rising of the sun and the west metaphorically representing the ending of life with the setting of the sun). Perhaps the gravedigger did not have a compass.

Perhaps the priest did not oversee the work of a common laborer. Whatever the case, the most commonly accepted version of what happened is that the graves were mislaid and before the mistake was discovered, too many people had been buried; the expense of reburials (not to mention the effect it would have had on the grieving families) was too great a cost. The citizens allowed the cemetery to remain as it had originally been placed, albeit at the expense of being a rarity in the civilized Western world. Such an oddity caught the attention of Robert Ripley, who included the St. Joseph’s Cemetery in his famous newspaper cartoon early in the century. Only recently has the graveyard again been run as an attraction in "Ripley’s Believe It or Not!" and people come from around the world to see the only cemetery in the Judeo-Christian world that faces north-south rather than east-west.

​