LAROCHE, DANIEL CONSTANT I (ca. 1825-ca. 1885). Daniel Constant LaRoche I, businessman, was born in Honfleur, Normandy, France, in the 1820s and went to sea as a young man. He immigrated to the United States in the 1850s. In New York he met and married Elizabeth Cunhalt, a German immigrant. They moved to New Orleans and later to Point Isabel (now Port Isabel), Texas. LaRoche served in the Confederate Navy and was captured during the battle of Mobile Bay; he escaped and made his way to Bagdad, a Tamaulipan boomtown on the mouth of the Rio Grande across the Rio Grande from Clarksville, Cameron County. There he helped to run cotton through the federal blockade. After the Civil War LaRoche resettled his family at Point Isabel and participated in the coastal trade. He died there in the mid-1880s.
