Acadia Parish

(This Catharine Cole column appeared in the New Orleans Picayune September 4, 1892.) 

Southwestern Louisiana is divided by nature into three sorts of land—pine hills, prairies and sea marsh. These prairies include large portions of Calcasieu, Cameron, St. Landry and the whole of Acadia Parish.

The total area of prairie in the state is 3,800 square miles, truly enough, a fabuous tract of land, when it is remembered not half of it is under cultivation or bringing in a penny of profit to the owners.

Less than a dozen years ago, this prairie land was popularly considered to be worth nothing. Even the grass on it was not cut for hay. It could be bought in the thousand acre tract at from 50 cents to $2 an acre, and it was, and is, considered among the poorest lands in the state. Today, there is not an acre of this land that has been put under cultivation that is not yielding its farmer at the very least $45 an acre a year of clean, clear profit, and I am willing to support, prove and justify the superiority of this ever-golden prairie land in the face of all the fabulous statistics that are claimed for California and Washington.

Nothing could be more beautiful or inspiring than the physical force of this lovely, level, golden shield of land. You have been driving, let us say, for days and days through the densest possible pine forest, where the large trees were so thickly set that a roadway cut through them looked like a slice taken from a cake, and all at once in the most instantaneous manner, you slip from the forest out upon that wide, rolling, golden, treeless expanse of land—as splendidly far-reaching as the Nebraska prairies, as goldenly beautiful, as prolific, and as healthful.

Your horses trot spiritedly over the springing turf, a strong, salty, Gulf breeze tans your cheek and blows continuously in your face. Here and there, the ponies paddle through the waters of a coulee, and all about for miles each way you can see the fat cattle cropping in the knee-deep grasses.

Hours go by; the delicious breeze seems as interminable as the open spaces. The wheels rumble along as if rolling over asphalt. The spoiled ponies stop to catch up wayside mouthfuls of the grass. One wouldn’t have the heart to rebuke them, it looks so good to eat.

If ever a foreigner needed to have his ideas of Louisiana revolutionized—of that typical Louisiana, all snakes, swamps, Spanish moss and alligators—he need only be sent to the amber land of Acadia and turned loose to meditate on its all but endless prairies.

Acadia Parish is crossed through its middle by a great transcontinental railway. It has within its borders a picturesque river, navigable to the Gulf of Mexico and for the rest it is all golden prairies threaded by numerous bayous and marked off into sections by bands of rich, great trees that are there to furnish even the most impecunious farmer with moss for his mattresses, pecan nuts for his table, and fuel for his home-made hearths.

A dozen years go a few isolated Acadian cabin homes dotted the prairie land with their China trees, tiny cane fields and gardens. A few of the wild Creole cattle, cows and mustang-blooded ponies had the freedom of the parish. In fact, there were not ten souls to the square mile, and a speculator would as soon have thought of investing in our sea marshes as in these southwestern parishes.

Today, that which may really be considered the model town of the state is located in Acadia Parish; and if there is any such thing as a New South, it finds its aptest and most pertinent illustrations at Crowley, and in the rice lands of Acadia.

The chief, in fact the only market crop of Acadia Parish is rice. On these lands, which ten years ago were as bare as a bodkin and which had the reputation of being as unfertile as a salt marsh, as useless as a potato bug, are now growing crops of rice that yield on an average of twenty barrels to the acre, and that, almost, without any other irrigation than what a good God sends from his skies and clouds. Crowley therefore is a rice town. It is the ideal rice town of the state, and its method, its history, its plan, is of interest to every locality.

If a rice town, why not a sugar town? Why not a cotton town with a factory at each of its four corners? Why not a lumber town with furniture factories, toyshops and wooden utensil mills everywhere?

In the very middle of a wide, treeless prairie, Crowley five years ago began to take root. Two years ago, its population was fifty souls and its big skeleton sprawled its gaunt bones surrounded by idle lands that were not even stocked with cattle and did not even yield hay as a source of revenue to their owners. Then lands were plentiful, if high, at $1 an acre. Today, the same lands are cheap and scarce at $500 and $600 the lot, and Crowley’s population has increased from 50 persons to 1,200.

Crowley is laid out squarely on the green base of the prairie, after the most approved methods of model town-building. It is just one mile square and the mile square is bordered all around on all four sides by an avenue that is 115-feet wide. Every other street is an avenue nearly as wide as St. Charles Avenue. The streets are named in numbers, the houses are to number 100 each block, and the avenues east and west have alphabetical names, while those north and south are given some picturesque latitude of title.

At regular intervals are public parks. Directly through the center of the town runs a wide main avenue with a neutral ground in the center. At one end is the railway station, at the other nearly a mile away, set in a square of ground, is the picturesque gray stone stucco courthouse.

As this main street, which is lined on both sides with excellent stores, machinery shops and too many saloons, approaches the courthouse it divides. It curves around the courthouse square, and at the rear merges again into one street, and so progresses past the Crowley College for boys and girls until the corporation limits are reached. The city avenue then becomes the country road over which in harvest times thousands of wagons come toiling up loaded with rice. 

Here and there over the town, earmarks of its prosperity, are pretty and stylish residence houses. It is easy to pick out those belonging to settlers from the North, by the numbers of fruit trees and bushes already planted. It is nothing unusual, as it would be in many other towns, to see at Crowley a house with a cistern under cover for the benefit of the cook. All openings are protected by wire screens and all about are trim rows of pear, orange, plum, and fig trees. The fences are bound by raspberry and blackberry bushes, and the orchard trails off into the sunny expanses of a strawberry bed.

Good wooden sidewalks are placed on every street, and all streets are being properly graded and drained. On the roads leading into town the problem of road-building in the heavy soil of southern Louisiana has been solved. A properly sloped and graded road remains good after weeks of the most tremendous rains. This same road a hundred yards further on, left un-cared for, was literally impassable for any sort of loaded vehicle.

The depot, the four churches, the fine college and the courthouse are the objective points on which the eye readily lights. Of all the churches the most artistic in appearance is the new Catholic Church, not yet completed.

The many shops, the farming implements for sale everywhere, the waving sea of rice, in the midst of which Crowley is like a little island, testify to the nature of the town, its large trade territory and its resources The history of Crowley is itself as wonderful as a fairy tale. Crowley originally belonged to Mr. W. W. Duson, or at least it was his far-sighted enterprise that induced here the investment of capital, brought moneyed men from the northwest and energetic young farmers willing to work for the sake of health and wealth.

Today, the Duson Land Company’s office is doing a rushing business, and lands are constantly being transferred to newcomers, who have heard more of Crowley than of other parts of the state, because Crowley has not been afraid to advertise its resources and invite a comparison of its lands.

That this enterprise of individuals has resulted in a general good is easily demonstrated. New settlers are constantly arriving; new industries are being projected, and the first solid train of rice machinery ever sent South had Crowley for its destination. This is not remarkable when we know that during the rice harvest it is not unusual for 400 wagons a day, loaded with rise, to dump their freight at the depot.

Last year, a gentleman from Michigan was induced to invest a little spare change in 200 acres of Acadian land. He did so at $8.50 an acre, planted it down in rice, and had a first crop that brought him $1,200. He immediately invested $50,000 in rice lands and this year on one farm has a single tract of 1,800 acres that will average twenty-two barrels to the acre. The cost of cultivating this farm is about $10 an acre.

I talked with a farmer whom I met out on a rice road as we were driving over the prairies. He held the reins over a pretty bay horse hitched to a buckboard.

"Four years ago," said he, " I came here with $25 in my pocket. I homesteaded a piece of land, was lent the money to put up a house. Last year, my crop brought me $5,000; this year I calculate to get $7,000 from it."

A French family from New Orleans, working on shares for a large farmer whose fields are less than a mile from town, will clear this year, after all expenses, $2,000 or more. No man need starve in Acadia Parish. There is a constant demand for all produce, a constant demand for workmen, and an excellent opportunity for any man to work in a rice field on shares. During the present summer, a bank has been organized in Crowley. It had already, although operating during the deadest time of the year in a farming country, deposits amounting to $20,000.

The appearance of Crowley, with its neat, bow-windowed homes, and clean, wide streets, is that of some brisk, new and busy western town with a boom on it. Crowley’s boom, however, has already lasted five years, and is not likely to be exhausted while its adjacent farms yield a profit of never less than $45 an acre, while its health remains so good, its fine college is maintained, its churches thrive, and a new, enterprising northern blood is constantly reinforcing its vitality.

Every year Sioux City, Iowa, recreates its boom by erecting a "corn palace." A town like Crowley could make a sensation in the agricultural world if it would only erect a rice palace. It is the natural market of the rice trade of southwest Louisiana, and every industry incidental to its chief industry should succeed here, and be attracted here.

In the oases of forest near Crowley wild plums, Muscatine grapes, and crab-apples grow in profusion. The thrifty northern ladies who are the good housekeepers of their pretty southern homes can show rows upon row of dainty pantry shelves stocked with jams, jelly, and marmalade enough to last each family all winter. Heretofore, these fruits went only to waste.

The crying needs of Crowley are a first-class, cleanly kept hotel and a good house-furnishing store, a good newsstand and trees. The ladies should at once organize themselves into a tree-planting association, with Mrs. Preston Lovell, a brilliant and charming woman from Battle Creek, Mich., as president. The dues should be paid in trees, and the ladies could easily find one hundred members willing to plant a tree a day along the public streets.

A pretty Queen Anne cottage or a charming bow-windowed affair, with broad borches and all modern conveniences can be built in Crowley for $450. But it will only rent for $12 or $15 a month. It is seen that on both sides of the apple, living is cheap in Acadia for the working man.

It is true enough that the history of this modern, practical Acadia is more precious even than the romantic legends of poets and novelists. Louisiana has not a better advertising card for immigration than is furnished by the unintentional fad of Acadia.

CATHARINE COLE