Lockport, La., 1995. This small museum, housed in a 1910 bank building, was almost in our backyard — just two miles from where we were living at the time. We designed its permanent exhibit, wrote its master plan & did a folklife survey of local cultural resources. Its centerpiece is a replica paddlewheeler’s pilot house. As you turn its ship’s wheel, the scenery changes thanks to a moving canvas “panorama,” just like the panoramas that entertained audiences back in the 1800s, when moving canvas was as close as it got to “moving pictures”!
Please enjoy a few bits of text from the exhibit:
Welcome Aboard!
In 1910, here at Merchants and Planters Bank, you could hear the whistles of paddlewheel steamboats. After landing at Lockport, they’d continue delivering passengers and freight to the homesteads, villages and plantations hugging Bayou Lafourche, known as “the longest street.”
Over 3,000 years ago the Mississippi River, not the bayou, passed this spot. When the river shifted east, it left rich soil and a navigable waterway. Bayou des Chétimachas, named after a Native tribe, was changed to Bayou Lafourche (“the fork”) because it forks off the current Mississippi River miles to the north.
Listen! There’s the whistle. All ashore going ashore. All others come along on our scenic Bayou Lafourche Excursion back to the days of 1910. Welcome aboard!
The Homestead
At the “front” (along the bayou banks) natural levees of higher ground support crops, livestock and cottage. At the “back” swampy wetlands provide cypress timber and wild game. In 1910 Bayou Lafourche was damned off from the Mississippi. Prior to that, each habitant, or farmer, was responsible for maintaining his section of tall man-made levee to hold back spring floods—but houses were built elevated off the ground, just in case.
Typical cottages, entirely of local cypress, had galéries, or porches, as additional living space during summer and a spot for evening storytelling. Bousillage walls of mud and Spanish moss provided insulation in winter. Chicken coop, vegetable garden, cow barn, rainwater-collecting cistern, and outhouse were all part of the homestead.
Cypress Lumbering
Chop! Chop! Chop! An ax girdled a ring of bark from a cypress tree to kill it. A year later the dead tree was easier to cut down when loggers returned with a two-man passe-partout saw (“goes through everything”). It was also lighter for the pull boats and skidders to float out of the swamp and join with hooks and chains to the hundreds of other logs ready to raft to the sawmill.
Slow to rot, termite-resistant cypress built boats and houses, boxes and fences, while its soft root was carved into duck decoys and myriad household items. Commercial logging began in colonial times, but grew to massive scale after the Civil War when it revived the area’s collapsed economy. But cypress trees take centuries to reach full growth, and even South Louisiana’s vast virgin forests could not withstand clear-cutting. By the 1920s, the industry was in decline.
Up at the Big House
Endless green vistas rippled back from the bayou, marking countless tons of sugarcane planted and cut by human hand, tilled by mule and transported by barge. Fall was grinding season, when pungent odors from local mills signaled boiling cane juice turning to molasses, then crystallizing into sugar. After the Civil War, many former slaves continued working on the same plantations and living in the same rows of “quarters,” but now as sharecroppers or paid hands.
In 1910, with sugar booming, self-sufficient plantations featured blacksmith, butcher, machine shop, ice house, church, school, and store. But within a decade, diseases stunted the cane and anthrax killed many mules. Freezes, floods, and the post World War I collapse of agricultural prices heaped devastation on local growers. Not until the 1940s would trucks, tractors, and harvesters mechanize—and save—the industry.
During World War II, German “P.O.W.’s” (prisoners of war) worked local fields despite the coastal boundary restrictions meant to protect citizens from Hitler’s “Operation Drumbeat” which, off the coast of Louisiana like many other states, pitted U-boats against American merchant tankers.
