The oldest state chartered harvest festival in Louisiana! It all began over 80 years ago, when the placid port at Morgan City and Berwick received the first boatload of jumbo shrimp, fresh from the deepest waters ever fished by a small boat. The very first celebration was held, appropriately on Labor Day, when members of the local unit of Gulf Coast Seafood Producers & Trappers Association, in recognition of the holiday, staged a friendly labor demonstration that has come to be known as the first festival. There were frog and alligator hunters, shrimpers, crab fishermen, dock workers and oystermen parading in the streets. Of course, it was not the grand procession that it is today, but it was the first street parade nonetheless.