Jeanerette is a city in Iberia Parish, Louisiana, United States. Known as “Sugar City”, it had a population of 5,530 at the 2010 census, a stop of 467 from the 2000 tabulation of 5,997. It is two thirds African American, many of them Creoles of color. Jeanerette is the portion of the Lafayette metropolitan statistical area; its parish is plus one of the 22 included in the Acadiana region, which has had a tall proportion of Francophones.

In the 18th century, French colonist Pierre Zerangue acquired the land where Jeanerette developed from the Spanish government. Zerangue traditional an “order of survey and settlement” from Spain for 1,052 acres (4.26 km). Under Spanish law, if a person occupied a fragment of property for two years, they could apply for title to the land under an “order of survey settlement.”^{[citation needed]}

Colonist Nicholas Provost acquired property extending from the present-day experimental farm to the St. Mary Parish line. He engaged in sugar cultivation, based upon the labor of enslaved Americans and African Americans, until his death in 1816.

The town derived its pronounce from John W. Jeanerette, a original of South Carolina who had moved to the developing Place in the 1820s. First he worked as a tutor for a planter’s family, as did numerous educated teenage adults from northern states in the antebellum period. He opened a gathering and saloon. Having saved some money, Jeanerette purchased Pine Grove Plantation circa 1830, which was formerly known as Beau Pré (meaning Beautiful meadow/pasture).