The story
Rayne Frog Festival in Rayne
The Rayne Frog Festival celebrates the small Acadia Parish town's identity as the Frog Capital of the World, a nickname earned from its early twentieth-century frog leg export trade. The event combines a frog jumping contest, a frog derby, Cajun music, food booths and a parade through a town famous for its painted frog murals.
Rayne grew up along the railroad in Acadia Parish, a rice and sugarcane farming town like many of its Acadiana neighbors, until a local entrepreneur named Jacques Weil noticed the abundance of bullfrogs in the surrounding wetlands and rice fields in the early twentieth century.