Golf in Jennings

Jefferson Davis Parish is named for the Confederate president, a naming pattern common in early-twentieth-century Louisiana — but the parish's actual identity is tied to a different kind of history: the discovery of oil at Jennings in 1901 made Louisiana a petroleum state before Oklahoma and Texas earned the same designation. Jennings is the parish seat and retail center for the southwestern Louisiana prairie, set in flat rice-farming country between Lafayette and Lake Charles. Jennings Golf Course provides local recreational golf in a community-supported facility, the kind of straightforward municipal operation that anchors golf access in smaller Louisiana towns where private clubs are not economically sustainable for the population base.