Morehouse Parish

(This Catharine Cole column appeared in the New Orleans Picayune Nov. 13, 1892.)

There was a crisp frost on the grass and rose bushes, sparkling like salt crystals in the pale sunlight, that early morning when we journeyed forth from Farmerville, in Union Parish, to Bastrop in Morehouse.

A few idlers and friends had collected to see us off. I remember with gratitude how politely they restrained any emotions of amusement over the unique spectacle of my turnout. For days, I had cherished the hope that at worst we might be mistaken for movers, or that the semi-occasional passer-by might suppose I was a rich "widow lady" enroute to look after my plantation, or on a visit to sons or daughters at some neighboring college. But of late the vanity had all been taken out of me. A few days since, we had stopped for dinner at the child-crowded home of an itinerant minister, who, after confiding to me that one of the chief drawbacks of his ministerial career was the home-made socks, knitted with all the bumps and knots of homespun yarn left in to torment the flesh and try the temper, which his country sisters in the Lord persisted in giving him, confessed that when my equipage first stopped at his gate he had taken us for patent medicine people.

I think this rankled in me considerably, for, as we drove along a dusty road, I related it to Philip.

Philip is, as I have elsewhere hinted, a sort of dusky simbol of silence. His few utterances have not been particularly inspiriting, but at any rate he serves as a sort of Lion’s Mouth, into which I have lodged complaints and those hopes and fears that must inevitably harass a woman on so lonely and so long a trip.

"Dat ain’t nothing," said Philip. "Yisterday when we was a-comin’ cross de bayou in de flat, dat shock-haided ferryman said he suttenly mistook us for show people."

I always said Philip was a general discourager. The next five-hundred mile buggy trip I undertake, my driver-—whether white, red, yellow, or black—must be warranted to flatter. Do not most employers like to be flattered? Aren’t a great many straw people all over the world illuminated by the small, serviceable effulgences of their planetary system of courtiers? Besides, do we not remember the story of that actor, who, playing to a crowded but cold audience, walked down to the footlights and cried out from his heart: "You must applaud, I cannot act unless you applaud."

However, 200 miles across pine hills, cotton lands, through forests and tedious intricate stretches of swamp had been damaging alike on the looks of my baggage, the ponies and the buggy. That is an ugly, American word that ought to be extirpated. Suppose Mr. William Black had, owing to the limitations on proper vehicles for the expression of his ideas, been forced to call his delightful book, "The Strange Adventures of a Buggy," or Miss Scidmore obliged to call her pleasant outing in chrysanthemum land "Buggy Days in Japan?" All the pleasant suggestion and cheerful invitation that ought to breathe in book titles would have been lost to us.

The worst of it was, or is, my buggy is one of those high swung, early American arrangements that look like nothing so much as a Granddaddy Longlegs in a magnified condition.

Among the friendly persons who wished me bon voyage that morning were Judge G. H. Ellis and Mr. H. H. Naff of Bastrop, two prominent lawyers attending court at Farmerville, and who had already told me stirring romances of the resources and beauty of Morehouse Parish.

"You keep straight East, cross two rivers and when you have traveled thirty-five miles you will come to Bastrop," said one of these gentlemen.

Thirty-five miles! It seems it is always thirty-five miles. The black pony turned his long, slim head and looked at me reproachfully. Nothing can convince me that the pony does not understand what thirty-five miles means quite as well as I do. Goodness knows we have heard it often enough. One day it was: "You go round Sam Hinckles’ corn field and tuhn to the left till you come to Red Haw Spring, and then keep on for thirty-five miles and I’m durned ef you don’t strike the town before you know it." Another time it was: "Jest keep straight on for thirty-five miles, and if you don’t get lost you’ll be there."

The Bastrop way out of Farmerville is a most charming road, over a long, gently sloping red hill, with forest growths that are now a mingled mosaic of bronze and gold and scarlet and cherry and pale primrose yellow. A few late wild flowers still stand by the way, chiefly tall stalks of golden-rod, now glowing like the flames of funeral lamps set out at the bier of nature.

I can never learn the names of the wild flowers. No one knows. There seems a sort of general term given to everything. At least, whenever I have asked the name of any delicate wood blossom I am told it must be a shameweed. Louisiana’s flora needs the loving pen of "Pearl Rivers."

It was Saturday and many country wagons, drawn by fat oxen, were going into town. Some were loaded with corn and others with hides and pelt. At this time of the year the farmers who think they are in need of a little ready money will take their corn to market and sell it for 40 or 50 cents a bushel.

Next February and March they will buy the same corn back again and pay $1.25 a bushel. I am only a poor, weak woman, not accustomed to doing the thinking for farmers, so I cannot explain where the profit to the farmer comes in.

I was just at the beginning of a bit of dried-up swamp that margins a picturesque bayou when we came upon a charming bit of nature’s bric-a-brac that should have fallen to the share of some artist, not a mere grateful layman like myself.

By the side of the road—that shaded, dew-wet, leaf-strewn, rutty country road of late October—there stood a huge trunk of a tree, one of those moss-grown monoliths of the forest that all the art of the world cannot artifice. From out its spongy side grew directly one above the other three shelves of lichen, each being twelve inches in breadth, a rich golden brown and bronze on the top side with broad bands of pale gold near the outer edge, and a deep hunter’s green on the underside.

As if this were not enough, two of those handsome red, black, and white birds curiously named by the Negroes on account of their peculiar cry, "Lord-God birds" were standing with heads together on the topmost shelf. I laid a detaining hand on the reins and watched them for many minutes. Evidently on this exquisite, al fresco table, all dew-jeweled and plushy, they were breakfasting on a mutual worm. Finally some movement of the horses frightened them away.

Carefully, the ponies picked their way across the bone-dry bit of swamp. It was pierced at every pore with cypress knees, curious cedar-colored cones, ranging in height from an inch or two or three feet, red on top, and certain breakage to any horse’s legs that have the ill-luck to stumble on them.

The trail broadened, the cypress trees retired somewhat and we came to a halt before a bayou more beautiful than those that live in the amber of Longfellow’s poem, "Evangeline."

Like a Nuban crescent of some shining, ebony moon it clasped the gray and green forest. Here and there some old, hoary, many-columned cypress tree stood far out in its waters. At the tip horn of its crescent, where a log was tethered by the frosty green rushes, a long-legged crane was taking his own photograph in the unrippled stream. On the other shore the brown sand banks sloped gently and the cypress trees crowded forward like plumed warriors guarding a temple. Overhead the blue mystery of the heaven was shot with silky wisps and wools of floating clouds. We might almost have thought ourselves the first discoverers.

A flatboat was drawn in to shore on the other side. One grows wise after several hundred miles of experience, so we looked about for the means of summoning the ferryman and presently found a cow horn on a log. Just before he combusted himself in the effort, Philip managed to blow a mighty blast, answered by a mournful "hello!" and after a time, paddling like a duck, the ferryman in a pirogue came around the bend.

It is not easy work taking two nervous horses over a deadly bayou, in a flatboat that lets in more water than it keeps out. Today, they seriously objected. They kicked against crossing at all, and the red pony, who is a mare, had the most approved equine hysterics.

I clung on to the taffrail. I haven’t the remotest idea that the slender posts at the end of the flatboat can be down in the books as a taffrail, but the term is descriptive and sounds well. I clung on to the taffrail and prayed, parenthetically inquiring in the most casual tone of voice I could command if the water was deep.

"Hit’s fo’teen feet clos’ to sho’ and nigh onto sixty outen the middle," answered the ferry boy, "and you’ll have to pay fo’ bits for bein’ ferried over."

I paid it instantly. Country people often lack a certain savoir faire in the matter of financial transactions. They want you to pay early, if not often. After that comes geniality, although I must say that from the Land’s End to the John O’Groat’s house of Louisiana, a traveler will be daily, hourly, the recipient of kindly courtesies that are not to be paid for in any other coin than that minted in the heart, and bearing the stamp of gratitude.

Corn fields, cotton fields, sorghum fields, patches of sugar cane just for the children, homely and comfortable country homes, bits of woodland worthy of Claude Lorraine—all these filled in the measures of that day’s journey into Morehouse Parish.

It was getting election time, and at one house fifteen or twenty men were collected. I asked what they were there for of a farmer riding along the road. "Oh, jes a little friendly compact," he answered. "Projectin’ in favor of our candidate."

He had a big gun on the hollow of his arm, and I told him so. "Yes’m I calculate this is the best gun ever brought into the parish. It has belonged to me for forty years. I reckon I’ve killed a thousand deer—a mile off—with this here gun." 

Dear old monumental liar! How pleased he must have been over my enthusiastic belief in him!

It was a little past noon, when crossing the Ouachita River at the pretty little town of Ouachita City, we found ourselves properly within the limits of Morehouse Parish. For miles the drive was as level as a boulevard, along the wooded, steep shore of Bayou Bartholemew, with the clear green, winding bayou on one side and fine plantations on the other. Then on through a thickly-settled country until early in the afternoon the peaceful church spires of the fine old town of Bastrop came shining, with their slender steeples, red belfries and admonishing crosses, into view.

North Louisiana is no more like south Louisiana than a Methodist is like a Catholic, except that both are good. In north Louisiana we have a hilly, or at any rate an upland country. Some of the hills attain an elevation of 300 or 400 feet above the level of the sea. Here, all the hardwoods that grow famously, or used to, until the forests sere denuded, in Minnesota, Ohio, Illinois, Missouri, are in their primeval richness. Here, minerals in certain sections abound in paying veins, and mineral springs are plentiful, with medicinal qualities equal to any tht have been better advertised.

Here, all the fruits that grow in the United States, except oranges and bananas, can be profitably cultivated. Here, hickory nuts, walnuts and beechnuts grow as they grow nowhere else in the South or North, and huckleberries are more plentiful than ever the "Autocrat of the breakfast Table" found them during his boyhood days on a Massachusetts farm. Here, people have underground cellars and store away winter apples. Here, it snows in the winter and lassies know the luxury of "snow ice cream."

But the snow is light and infrequent; just enough to benefit the soil and crops. At this time of the year, an Indian summer, in all its purple gorgeousness, warmth and balm, hangs on the hills and breathes a soft smoke n the air, as delicate as the bloom on the grape.

Sometimes in this golden country two crops of corn a year are raised, while at all times cattle may live in the cane brakes and hogs fatten for market on the superabundant mast.

Robinson Crusoe on his island never had more comfortable benefits under his hand ready for use than confront the immigrant who throws in his fortunes with those of the kindly people of the Ouachita Valley. Of course, he will not grow rich in fairy-tale fashion, but thrift, temperance and pluck will stock his little farm, fill his barns, and give him the blessed independence of being no man’s slave and no man’s debtor.

Perhaps the queen of the north-country parishes is Morehouse. It has an area of 500,000 acres. It is bounded by the Arkansas state line, with West Carroll Parish and the Boeuf River on its east, Union Parish and the Ouachita River on its west, and Ouachita and Richland Parishes and Bayou Boeuf on the south. On the river banks is some swamp land, but the major part of the parish is rich alluvial soil, producing lavish crops of corn, cotton, tobacco, sorghum, potatoes and fruits. Here and there, between the wooded hills and beyond the river bottoms and swamps, are stretches of prairie, easily productive of the best yields.

In the neighborhood of the Ouachita and Bayou Barholomew the timber lands are subject to overflow, and these lands, wooded with the finest trees, belonging either to the government or for sale at cheap rates, are chiefly available for timber, which is easily floated out during high water. Occasionally, small farmers set up holdings on the cleared lands, where the returns in crops more than pay for the risks they run from overflow. However, the bayou bottoms are to the farmer in Morehouse a mere detail; on the finer soils, free from overflow, the yields of produce exceed the ratio of those of almost any other parish.

Last year, the total acreage of the parish under cultivation was 69,124 acres. On this small tract was grown 20,700 bales of cotton, 110,000 bushels of corn, and 6,200 bushels of potatoes, to say nothing of tobacco, peanuts, oats and sorghum cane. The prices of lands are: the market value of best farming lands, $40; woodland, $1 to $10; hill lands, $5 to$6 an acre. I was shown farm lands, white with cotton, that had been in constant cultivation for sixty years.

As another illustration of the generous nature of these lands waiting to be settled up into small farms by newcomers, Mr. N. H. Naff, whose intelligent pen has patiently advertised the resources and advantages of Morehouse, says that the natural grasses that afford good grazaing are almost innumerable. One vine of scuppernong has been known to produce barrels of fruit, and Morehouse produces in proportion to acreage under cultivation more corn and cotton than any other parish in the state.

Lying between the Ouichita and Bayou Boeuf the lands include swamps, alluvial lands not subject to overflow, hill lands and prairies. The three towns in the parish are Bastrop, Oak Ridge and Mer Rouge. Each one of these is the center of highly-cultivated farming lands. The country houses are handsomely built, the fences are tidy and well kept, and wherever there are homes are certain signs of thrift.

Both the rivers named are navigable and are the sources by which cotton shipments are made. The Houston Central Road runs through the parish. The New Orleans and Northwestern Road is now building through this parish, tapping the town of Bastrop.

Morehouse has 16,000 people. It supports forty public schools. There are country churches all over the parish and it has a great number of prosperous little villages that hope for further development through the railroads that now give most of them direct communication with New Orleans, Alexandria, Natchez, and Little Rock. The total assessed value of lands is $1,217,795, and the total parish assessment is $2,125,530. The parish tax, including 2 mills for school purposes, is 6 mills. The uncultivated land in the parish amounts to 457,522 acres. Much of this is subject to homestead entry, and any young man can take up all the land he wants, renting it at $3 an acre or paying for it in a share of his crop.

It is curious to note that although livestock rarely need feeding, and fatten all year without the farmer’s care, the numbers are out of proportion to the farmers. There are in the parish only 2,710 horses, 4,250 cattle, 1,750 sheep and 10,825 hogs. If the farmers of Morehouse knew what was good for them, not a pound of meat would come into the parish, but instead they would export hogs enough to stock the New Orleans market.

Bastrop is one of the finest old towns in the state. It is beautifully and picturesquely situated, and its comfortable southern homes seem characteristic of hospitality and refinement from the roses that clamber over the sunny porches to the gentle chatelaines that grace the thresholds, offering pretty welcome to strangers. The town has had always the reputation of being one of the richest and finest in north Louisiana. Its population numbers about 1,000, with town lots, etc. assessed at $117,695. A fine courthouse stands in a great public park, with broad, clean streets on all four sides, flanked by shops, stores and general business houses. These are well-built brick edifices with here and there a little Corinthian-columned row of lawyers’ offices.

There are sixteen business houses, two weekly newspapers--the Clarion and Appeal--two drug stores and three excellent markets, five churches, two hotels, a jewelry store, barbershops, tinsmiths, blacksmiths, livery stable, cotton gin and planing mill, Masonic, Knights of Pythias and B’nai Brith lodges and a fine High School. The Jewish synagogue is one of the handsomest buildings in Bastrop, the Methodist church is particularly artistic with a beautiful belfry, and Baptist, Episcopal and Catholic sanctuaries, while less imposing, are comfortable and well kept.

By the new year and through the enterprise of a few leading men, Bastrop is to have a national bank. I was amazed to hear, by the way, while collecting statistics of Bastrop and its parish, that a clever artist and draftsman residing in the parish offered to the police jury to make a topographical map of the parish, 80 by 100 inches for $100, to be exhibited at the World’s Fair, and the police jury, densely enough and perhaps not desiring the immigration that would certainly result from tht one piece of enterprise, declined the offer.

Never had a stranger a better guide through a promising and charming old town—that sort of an old town mellow in loveliness and with a crisp atmosphere of commercial activity tingling one’s mental spirit and rendering most applicable the term promising—than I, in the person of Rev. H. W. Knickerbocker, the earnest and scholarly young pastor of the M. E. Church. Mr. Knickerbocker has built, also during his term, a church at Mer Rouge, a pretty village on the Houston Central Railroad.

It is strange that so refined and social a population as Bastrop possesses, including brilliant lawyers, clergymen and newspapermen, with many charming and thoroughly cultured women, does not maintain a library and a literary club. This lack allows such good material to go to waste.

In the near future Morehouse Parish, whose first settlers belonged to the aristocratic colony of the Baron de Bastrop, will reassert itself as one of the richest countries of the New South and take again its old, magnificent position among the wealthy people of the South. Railroads have opened the doors leading into this golden country; railroads will prove to be its inspiring immigration document.

With the way once free to them, desirable men will gladly avail themselves of so generous a soil, so genial a climate, so kindly a people. Men with money will come to turn the golden Morehouse forests into furniture; the western blizzards will blow the disheartened farmers south to these cheap, easy lands. Such men and more money will bring in their wake schools, churches, libraries, and even literary societies.

CATHARINE COLE

Notes:   WILLIAM BLACK (1841-1898), author of popular Gothic romances, wrote The Strange Adventures of a Phaeton (1872). ELIZA SCIDMORE (1856-1928), a journalist-photographer, wrote, Jinnkisha Days in Japan (1891). LORD GOD BIRD, the ivory-billed woodpecker, nearly two-feet long, is now considered extinct. It was last sighted in 1940.  PEARL RIVERS was the pen name of Eliza Nicholson (1849-1896), owner-publisher of the New Orleans Picayune. She was a poet, and Catharine Cole’s employer. JOHN O’GROAT: Elihu Burritt (1910-1879), a Connecticut writer and reformer, was author of A Walk from John O’Groat’s to Land’s End (1864).  AUTOCRAT OF THE BREAKFAST TABLE was the popular name of American physician-writer Oliver Wendell Homes (1809-1894), who wrote a book by that name in 1859.