A Visit to Rapides Parish

(This Catharine Cole column was published in the New Orleans Picayune May 5, 1889.)

Several evenings ago I sat in a Pullman sleeping coach, speeding through the dense, green, fragrant wildernesses of the great Atchafalaya swamp. The wind whipped in at the open window, bringing with it the incomparable perfume of the wild grape and the young willow.  The swamp stretched far away, dismal, repellant, yet picturesque. Knotted roots tangled vines, fallen logs, slices of black earth uprose from the steely surfaces of the still swamp watr. Splendid clusters of the dwarf palm, the warlike Spanish dagger, the beautiful sprawling latanier, half fan, half weapon, massed their rich foliage like so many green bayonets. But near to the railroad tracks the sun rose in white radiance on the peeled and rotting logs where turtles basked, snakes uncoiled and the iris spread its royal flags.

When nature exudes in a swamp in Louisiana it is rich, tropical, juicy, dark, verminy, repellant and lovely all in one. It is like a coffin crowned with flowers; a death trap baited with roses. Its mysteries stir all the Columbus in one; its spicy odors and singing birds allure; its funereal banners feed the melancholy in one, and looking on it all from the safety of the flying train it seems to breathe forth a message of unconquerable sorrow, as it iit were indeed the eternal elegy of the year.

One of these days, I doubt not, this jungle will perish and in its place will be the panorama of peaceful farms and prosperous fields. Wind mills will circle where the black carrion crow tosses his ebon plumes, and dikes will supplant the Spanish daggers; but at present the most intensely tropical bit of scenery in the state is beyond doubt the vast and silent morasses of the Atchafalaya swamp.

My companion in the sleeping coach was a woman who perhaps more nearly than any other approaches the ideal of the coming American woman. Miss Frances Willard is merely known to all the world as the leader of the great temperance movement. Other good things about her that make her a queen amongst her kind are not so well known. She is a woman of advanced ideas of the highest culture and with fine principles. She has a wholesome, healthy body, a hearty appetite, a hungry mind and a generous and unenvious heart. She is not a temperance crank nor a conversational specialist who will bore you to death with her hobby. In this respect she is a shining example to some of her followers. She is the only woman orator of the country--not counting Anna Dickinson in retirement--possessing almost the charm in that respect of Ingersoll, and delightful and eloquent as she is on the platform, I cannot imagine a greater treat to a party of intellectual and refined ladies and gentlemen than to meet socially this woman, who has dedicated herself and her service to the work of saving young people from intemperance and homes from ruin.

There is nothing unlovely or frightening in the anticipation of the coming woman. She will dance and sing and play and amuse herself, but she will live higher and finer than the young woman of today is wont to do. She will cultivate and develop her physique, and she will not believe in tight corsets, high-heeled shoes or inappropriate clothes. She will not marry thoughtlessly nor for convenience and the mental, moral and physical education of her children will begin in her own girlhood.

Thinking these and kindred thoughts I sat mute in the sleeping coach opposite the sweet and smiling and beautiful old maid who is the best known and best beloved old maid in all the world, and as I listened to her brilliant conversation I could not help wishing there were more of our young maids who would pattern after her in goodness, industry and interest.

Through the incident of exceptional railroad enterprise, when the tide of immigration began to flow into this state it expended itself upon the western parishes of Calcasieu and Acadia and others adjoining. The newcomers, possessing virgin soil, were amazed to find broad, high, boundless prairies and no swamps nor tropical jungle. They coveted and covered the lands that were then free to them through the homestead act, and they have made comparatively unfertile lands to blossom like the rose, so that the story of their conquest reads like a fairy tale.

What the farmers from Iowa and the far North have done in these western parishes has advertised the whole state in mighty ways. Now it remains with the land-poor lords of the manors to say whether they will open their fields to the immigrant, and whether Louisiana, with its thousands of idle, fallow acres, shall be chopped up into small farms; whether central factories and refineries shall dot the country, whether the state shall take her own and rank in wealth and products, in peace and plenty, as she did "before the way"--one of the first in the union. From Caddo to Terrebonne, from Calcasieu to St. Tammany, much of Louisiana is in the hands of largely landed proprietors, owning each many thousands acres of good land and upon which, after the fashion of certain proprietors, at the first prospect of a sale they often place such a wild fictitious value as to defeat the purpose of agricultural commerce and delay the prosperity and progression of the state.

As I write this letter I am seated in the window of a big old hotel that hangs over the banks of the Red River at Alexandria. Alexandria, in Rapides Parish, is one of the fine old towns of the state, and Rapides Parish was, before the war, one of the richest and most beautiful of parishes. When I say rich and beautiful I mean more than we, since the war, can really comprehend. It was a vast garden. The country roads were like the private drives of a gentleman's park in England. The huge plantation homes were furnished like palaces, and when the mistress of such a one drove forth it was behind four horses, attended by a coachman and footman. I am told the lawns at Eaton Hall, the home of the richest duke in all England, or the grounds at Versailles could scarcely excel in exquisite order the lawns and grounds of the beautiful country homes in Rapides.

The cotton fields and cane fields were like flower gardens and England itself was not more charmingly pastoral. Today, not one-third of the parish is in cultivation and the rich lands that will laugh into fabulous crops at the mere tickling of plow and hoe are idle, awaiting the coming of the industrious, practical, emigrant farmer.

This hotel was built before the war by the planters as a convenience for their families when they were enroute by boat to the big city. It must have been a grand place oin those days, with its high-priced chef and finely furnished rooms, each one almost big enough to house a regiment in. It is three stories high, of brick, with broad balconies and nearly a block long. Just across the road is the river, a stately, splendid stream, scarcely less yellow than the Tiber, and flowing between its green and bowery banks with a most musical rush and murmur.

On the other side under the trees are sloping banks, green fields and a prosperous village called Pineville, while between the two places a ferry boat, like a huge steam-driven shuttle, knits at the commerce of the parish. Above the village gleaming grayly under the green, betwixt the brown of newly-plowed lands, are the huge rock piles of the quarry recently opened by Mr. R. S. Day. Farther inland trees hide the ruins of the old Louisiana State Military academy, in its prime when "Major" Tecumseh Sherman was president there, of course, before the war. On this side of the river the old town, with its long façade of riverside shops and stores., its fine old-fashioned homes trellised with roses, its angular streets, broad, tree-lined and shady, its peaceful spires and pleasant environment of green fields, is one of the most promising and attractive in the state, and the immigrant who settles hre is sure of a living, of a lovely home, of a peaceful and prosperous life.

Rapides Parish has an area approaching 500,000 acres. Of this, about 150,000 acres are cultivated or improved, and the 2,000 farms in the parish are estimated by Town Talk of Alexandria to be worth $2,200,000. It will be seen that there are thousands of acres of land ready for the plow lying idle until the new settlers come to work. These idle lands are worth from $10 to $20 an acre and can be bought for what they are worth. Several plants, notably Mr. Day, are renting out small farms, for in this great state two or three acres goes in public opinion as a small farm.

In the statistics of agriculture, one man and a mule is reckoned as necessary to the cultivation of every ten acres of land. The best land in the parish can be rented at from $3 to $4 an acre, or else paid for in produce. It will produce per acre, with moderate cultivation, from two to four tons of hay--two crops a year--one bale of cotton, 300 bushels of sweet potatoes, forty bushels of corn, 2,000 pounds of sugar, or two barrels of molasses. It is not unusual for a thrifty farmer to almost double these figures in the matter of corn and sugar and cotton.

Saturday morning, my good friend Mr. Archie Williams drove me by a circuitous route to Oaklands, the fine plantation home of Mr. Josiah Chambers. We skirted the sweet old town and the high banks of Bayou Rapides, visiting the new ice factory, lumber and planing mills, and then pushed off into the country, following a sandy road that ran between neatly fenced fields in which were crops of sugar, cotton, corn and hay. A fairer country outing could not be made. The morning was bright, dewy, and gay with song of birds; the Negroes worked in the fields, and an air of busy thrift was everywhere. The wide road had broad marginal notes of clover, and behind this were hedges of rose vine, lofty colonnades of trees bending over the brown path, flecking it with leafy shadow and trailing long scarfs of vine from one plumy crest to the other. Redbirds dashed across the path, straining the dim, melting perspective with color; a tumult of meadow birds tumbled in the fields, and up in the forks of the trees the sleep,, meek heads of the domes made me remember a love song of a poet who sang, "In the spring a lovelier iris comes upon the burnished dove."

Here and there, knee deep in clover were herds of cattle, and from ut the prosperous fields the thrifty farmhouse homes of some Belgian settlers seemed to smile at us cheerily. Rapides has a growing population of these people. They build neat homes, keep their small farms in perfect order, are good citizens and taxpayers and have taken permanent root in this rich soil. They are temperate, peaceable and law-abiding, and belong to that class of immigrants who are most desirable for an agricultural country.

When a Rapides Parish farmer surveys his land he looks upon broad acres of corn, cotton, and hay, and if he is thrifty, vegetables as well. He has his stretch of woodland, furnishing him with fuel, and his share of a bayou. Stock cannot starve nor crops blight with him, and it is probable that his comfortable plantation home, with a million roses starring his roof, is under the shade of a dozen pecan trees, that are a source of profit that never fails.

At "Oaklands," my fine old host, a gentleman not less kindly, but happily more successful, than the owner of "Queechy Run," showed me 900 acres of rich land divided off in corn and cotton. In the orchard were pears, peaches, plums, persimmons, grapes, figs, English walnuts and pecans. The roomy plantation house covered with rose vines and jessamine stood under the shade of magnolia trees; and in the kitchen garden, all in full bearing or bloom, were artichokes, asparagus, peas, beets, corn, eggplants, tomatoes, strawberries and a long list of commonplace staple vegetables.

In the pasture were sleek Jerseys and the average summer yield of butter amounts to more than seventy pounds a week, while in the poultry yards, in addition of chickens, ducks and geese, the mistress of the manor had set 500 turkey eggs. I do not think there are many "model" farms between the Atlantic and Pacific that can make a finer showing than "Oaklands."

Another day, guided by the same good friend, I was welcomed to Flowerton by its gentle and gracious chatelaine. Here, under a huge grove of oak and pecan trees, knee-deep in the sweet clover, set like a picture in a pink frame of roses, is the old and rambling plantation home of Mrs. Clare Flower. It is the ideal southern home with its wide balconies, broad halls, huge rooms and luxurious, refined and hospitable life.

Old family servants cling to these homes and adore the mistresses and masters of them. The detail of farming life has not lessened the repose and social enjoyment of the family circle; the newest books, the best periodicals, the finest music, the family paper, all belong to these homes and give ample proof of the fact that the life of a prosperous, practical Louisiana planter is attended with less drudgery, more rewards and greater comforts than is the life of the farmer in any other part of the country.

Life is not sordid in the South. It can never become so in a country where nature is so lavish with her lagniappes, where for temperamental reasons we all incline naturally to the soft and sunny side of things and where only occasionally is found an individual whose creed is that money is the best thing in life.

It is very pleasant to come into a town like this, to lodge in a room as big as a chapel of St. Peter's; to come and go and learn the names and ways of the people, and to get into one's marrow a little of the gentle, genial, easy-going content that seems to sweeten life for even the poorest. I like to hang over my balcony and watch idly for the coming of a steamboat down the tranquil river, or to see the string of oxcarts moving along the dusky road country-ward on a Saturday evening. I like tsit by a burly, broad-hatted planter, in town for the day, and hear him expand about crops or cattle, or engage an idle tourist who has come this way for the fishing in champion sporting yarns.

I like to lean in at the shop windows and admire the improved tackle and flies that suggest the best sport in the world, or ramble down the long and shaded avenues where roses nod beside all the balconies and purple larkspurs and sweet-peas and pansies lift their mild faces about the old houses. The other afternoon I came upon an old house so covered with roses that nothing was to be seen save the jagged comb of the roof, and as the sweet wind came breathing up from the river it stirred this wondrous tapestry of bloom so that a thick rain of shell pink petals came stealthily showering down upon the grasses. It was a house of roses seen through a shower of roses, and it stood in the fairest rose country in the world.

Strolling down these sandy streets, or along the green embankment of the broad river, I make many friends among the kindly citizens, who have a fashion of welcoming strangers in a right royal way. And some of the old, gray ones delight to talk of the town as it was in the long gone days, when Major Sherman was the masterful president of the boys' college, or seminary, as it was called, across the river.

A gruff, stern, soldierly sort of fellow," says one; "a genial, friendly gentleman," says another; and all agree that he frequented the best homes in the parish, and was made welcome in royal southern fashion everywhere. He was tall, slim, austere, in those days, and not a handsome man, I learn, and that when the time came for him to go away, he went with a troubled heart, for he had made warm friends in Rapides Parish, and had won the respect of all. A heap of ruins of grass-grown bricks and stones, wrapped in the velvet of moss are all that is left of the seminary; but the citizens hope that some day the university will be removed back to the pleasant hills and quiet forests of Rapides, where, at least, the cadets would be free from evil influences.

Alexandria is a town that can truthfully be said to be looking up and to have turned over a new leaf in a business way. It has an outlet for its commerce by means of the river and by two railroads, while half a dozen other roads are projected to the town. An ice factory has just been completed, two planing mills, a brick yard, a cotton compress, and a saw mill are the present factory interests of the place. A handsome synagogue, a Methodist, Catholic and Episcopal church and several Colored churches, with three good public and several private schools indicate the moral standing of the people. The stores are large and finely stocked with goods. There are two excellent newspapers, a tire company, a bank and good hotels and livery stables.

It is both a cotton and a sugar market and an excellent site for any of the factory interests that ought to flourish in the South. There are 2,500 good, honest, practical, healthy people in this town. Their record in health, morals and education is an excellent immigration document, and within the next ten yars they ought to be good for factories, shops, mills and such small industries as will increase their wealth, comfort and popularity. On the banks of a fine river in the heart of the richest land, with inexhaustible forests of pine and fair and fertile fields, with bayous threading the hills and streams coursing by every farm, with a soil that it hostile only to the orange; with roses everywhere, and an always summer sky overhead, Alexandria can only fail of being a big, bustling, thriving town through a lack of proper enterprise.

The old dreamy, rose-leaf days are dead; the picturesque un-alertness is at an end, and the pretty town, under its clustered trees by the riverside, will grow under the magic of railroads, immigrants and land agents. Every blizzard in Dakota is an advertisement for Louisiana; every mining fiasco in California is a reminder of the certain gold that lies in our cane and cotton and rice fields, and this rich Red River parish has room, lands and a welcome for ten thousand brawny men.

It is early in the morning with that dewy, cool, crisp feel of an undefiled country yet in the air. The old black Mammy who belongs to the hotel has made the rounds with her tray and small cups of black coffee. She stands on the porch, her tray poised nicely, her fine amber face in profile against the early rose sky. She stands and reminisces, to my great content.

"De Baily dam? Laus, honey, yonder's whar hit wuz--by de bend in de river. I kin hear dem gunboats a snortin' yet, and see de shells fallin' like black-eyed peas in de woods, wid de soldiers at work like mad pullin' down old marse's sugar-house and buildin' a dam acrost de river. When de water is low you kin see a bit of it yet. Them men wuked an' wucked fer mor'en a week, and they toted off the whole sugar-house, and then when de waters riz they floated the gunboats over the falls, and they called dat savin' Bankses' fleet."

The river flows on with its pleasant swish and murmur, and across the still morning there comes the call of a convent bell. Carts begin to rattle down the shady, sandy streets, and I can hear the idlers settling their chairs for a good loaf under the store porches. What does it matter just now whereabouts Baily's dam was made in the river? I can see men at work in the even fields far away, and the cattle re cropping on their pasture lands. This is the land of peace and plenty; the roses are red in the gardens, and the South is like a gracious almsgiver. She smiles and offers all the sweets of life in exchange for muscle, a brave heart, a glad spirit and a willing hand. Which would you have? Baily's dam and souvenirs of Sherman? Nay, that was of yesterday, and now the sunrise is red on the river, and all this summer wold is in its morning.

CATHARINE COLE