Jackson Parish

(This Catharine Cole column was published in the New Orleans Picayune Oct. 30, 1892.) 

"Philip," said I the other afternoon as we were jogging dustily along in our high, laden buggy, keeping a sharp look-out for the little village of Vernon, for fear we might pass it by inadvertently.

"Philip, why do you suppose, does our state government maintain a bureau of immigration?"

"Gawd knows," said Philip, chuckling.

To say that the answer tickled me would be to put it mildly.

The one crumpled rose leaf under the forty mattresses of ease that are the distinguishing luxuries of these Familiar Adventures of a Buggy, is the fact that the cat seems to have got Philip’s tongue.

In this safe seclusion of print which I have reason to believe will not be penetrated by my amber-hued driver’s eyes, I may admit that up to the present moment I had found Philip unspeakably dull. An occasional monosyllable dropped like a hard nut from a stingy tree, has been the most my gentle, and at times elevating or intellectual monologues, have inspired him to. It is true that one day, when I complained of feeling tired from long driving, he so far dissolved his golden silence as to recommend that I put my feet on the dashboard.

I thanked him kindly, although the lack of the requisite length of limb, to say nothing of the involuntarily exercised restraints of superfluous conventionality were sufficient reasons why the advice was not followed.

And I forget! On another occasion, while driving over some of the prettiest parts of Grant Parish, we passed a certain cotton field.

Philip pointed at it, and with the terse wisdom of an Indian chief, announced. "Thar’s orgin cotton." He seemed so sure about it I hesitated to dispute him. Pretty soon we came upon a finer field, all streaming glorious white flags of peace and truce, and Philip again lifted up his voice: "That’s peanner cotton," he remarked, approvingly.

I set to work to puzzle out what he might mean. When one undertakes to travel on an average of thirty or forty miles each day in a buggy, over country roads, one is likely to grow dull at times and learns to hoard and spread thin every possible subject for diversion. So it took me a good hour to pull to pieces and discover these cryptic six words. Finally, after a process of reasoning worthy of our worthy Chief of Police, I arrived at the following: Here’s a livery stable driver. He drives drummers. Probably one was a musical instrument man who, when the cotton is fairly good, hopes to sell an organ—that is, a melodeon. When the cotton crowds the fields at the rate of at least a bale to the acre, he sanguinely counts that each plantation will be good for a piano. Eureka!

And so, when in answer to my querulous inquiry, Philip proved sufficiently interested to verbally retire behind omniscience, I felt encouraged to proceed.

"You see, the more I see of Louisiana, Philip, the less I think of our state Bureau of Immigration. Has it ever accomplished anything practical? Has a live idea ever penetrated its dense head? Why, if it did no more than hang up a list of our land prices in Castle Garden, that would be good for a thousand good men a year. Suppose it sent a good lecturer through the Northwest, or suppose it pasted big posters all over Ireland and Germany and England and Switzerland, saying ‘Emigrate to Louisiana. No rents. Free lands. No evictions. Free fuel. Meat three times a day. Good homes. Come to Louisiana.’

"Why, we should overflow with rosy families. Neat homes would fairly flower in our forests. Grape vines would be planted. Fences would be whitewashed. Alas! Philip, if I were to turn missionary in my state, the divinest, blessedest work I would do would be to teach our people the moral, inspiring, commercial value of whitewash."

But there isn’t much encouragement in orating to Philip. He is a sort of general discourager of eloquence.

All this while we were still progressing over the fair face of Jackson Parish in search of the parish town of Vernon. We had trotted through the rich belt of pine timber wooding the gentle slopes and were now on that rolling ground peculiar to vast sections of our north-country parishes, and which in agricultural terms is described as "good uplands."

All about were cotton fields, the brown calyxes fairly foaming out their plentitude of the white, wooly staple. It seems it will take something lower than three cents a pound to teach our people that there is more money and less labor for them in other crops than cotton. There are farmers in Louisiana who never will get out of debt until they learn to raise hogs, horses, cattle, sheep, corn, oats, potatoes and cow peas, and regard cotton as a surplus crop.

We passed by a sort of amateur and peripatetic cane mill, a cross between a coffee mill and a sausage grinder, posted up under some wayside shade trees, where a doomed gray mule was kept at mangling, grinding the juice out of some sorghum. Even in these exclusively cotton parishes, nearly every farmer grows a few acres of cane or sorghum and makes each year four or five barrels of molasses. If put to when hungry, I believe, I could produce a poem of real genius on the subject and merits of sorghum molasses and hot soda biscuit, with fresh Jersey butter.

As for the cane molasses made on these primitive mills, it is really the best to be had, save in those rare instances where planters still maintain the old-fashioned luxury of an open kettle sugar-house.

Here and there at the edge of a field of cane or sorghum, men were at work grinding. It is not like looking at the process of sugar making through the wrong end of a lorgnette, for here the cane stalks may be carried on men’s shoulders, and are hand-fed directly into the small, upright crushers.

The mill is no larger than the coffee mill in a big grocery store. It is fastened on a post, and from its handle projects a pole to which the mule or horse is attached, and which he pulls in a circle ceaselessly, in what is not a merry-go-round to him. Underneath the spout, a tub catches the juice. If the mill is small, this may merely be boiled in a big gypsy pot up by the house, but oftener there is a small "sugar house." This will be a crude oven, made of rock and mud plaster. On the top is fitted a boiler. The chimney is a quaint round smokestack of curious shape, dimly suggestive of a Scottish cairn. The whole is under a rough shed. Of course, the cane is but imperfectly ground, and the wet stalks rotting on the ground send otf a sour, moldy odor.

Or perhaps it is a horse-power cotton press set up in a cotton field—a strange, unwieldy affair, that makes my sugar parish ponies "shy" past it snorting with fear.

It is a gigantic and cumbersome piece of wooden machinery, with a forlorn, venerable, useless, out-of-date look to it that is absolutely pathetic—like an old, faithful craftsman discarded for a complication of shining wheels that can do more work in a day than his hands could do in half a year.

Imagine a huge upright iron screw with a heavy square roof weighted with big timbers surmounting it. At the lower end of the screw is a wooden frame or press, under which the cotton is put. Two enormous poles of timber project from the movable roof at sharp angles. To these the horses are hitched, and made to turn in a treadmill. Slowly, the great screw revolves and brings down the weight of the heavy roof on the cotton. Such a cotton press would be unique if exhibited in Chicago. A cotton press of this sort, and I have seen several, gray with the suns and rains of half a century—during these uncommercial travels of mine—looks like some old skeleton of a clumsy mechanical leviathan or mammoth. Nowadays, everything utile is being whittled down fine. By and by we shall carry the world as a pill in our pocket.

Would Vernon never come in sight? Every rail fence I thought must be its suburb. Every dead tree top shining in the distance deluded me into welcoming it as a church spire. We stopped at a farmhouse to ask the way. Twelve miles. Can you imagine, friendly reader, how it felt to be told there were still twelve miles between us and a supper and a bed?

Twenty-eight miles one day, eighteen the next, and forty today, with twelve of them still before us! That meant, with tired ponies and plenty of dust, three long hours of steady driving. No wonder my mental barometer went down.

It was a pleasant old farmhouse at whose door we stood, a wide, rambling, southern sort of country home, very pleasant and homely to look on. Crepe myrtle bushes, in a sort of second mourning of flower, flecked the dead russet leaves on the ground with their pale foam of purple. Grape vines, innocent of leaf and strong and wiry, were twisted all over the big stone chimneys that, like Gog and Magog, guarded each end of the house. 

All along the fence line, as far as eye could see, were rows of laden walnut trees. Just think of it, oh nut-hungry urchins of the big city—more trees than one could count, knobbed and strung all over on every available twig, with great green balls like sour oranges, but each fragrant hull hiding a kernel of the richest nut that grows on American soil.

Under the tees they lay in piles, and a little lassie was busy beating them out. She had brown stockings on and I fancy they had been dyed in walnut juice, and the little maid was fast transforming herself into an Indian princess of the deepest dye. Why, there were walnuts enough on that one place to give every chick and child in New Orleans the colic. There are persons who live away from Louisiana who cannot be brought to realize that walnuts grow plentifully here; that hickory nuts are common mast all over the state; that hazel nuts grow in our hedges, and that millions of our acres are as foreign to tropic jungles as Irish moss is to Spanish olives.

Reader, did you ever beat out walnuts on a purple October day in that sunshine time of long ago when you were "a boy?" Well, I have, and, so once more, it was good to sit in the clean dirt under the wide branching tree, with piles of nuts everywhere, jabbing at them with a big stone, until the pungent juice in protest spouted up in one’s face, in the eyes and over one’s gown. How delicious it smelled—like new cut cedar—and how delicious were the creamy nuts that rewarded this work.

"What will you do with them?" I asked of the little maid.

"My mother is going to make us walnut bread of some when they get dry," she answered, "and the others is for winter nights."

Around the corner of the house, near a pleasantly creaking old stone wall, beside a gypsy kettle, the lady of the manor was making soap. She sat under her grape vines and fig trees, reading the Delineator, and now and then stirring in the large pot with a paddle. She was making soap out of fine yellow butter that would easily have fetched 35 cents a pound in New Orleans.

"The butter was piling up on me so," she said, apologetically, "that it seemed a real pity to let it go to waste. So I am just running off this kettle of soap to get shut of it." 

Nothing very serious is the matter with a state where the farmers’ wives can afford to make soap of Jersey butter.

Slowly, we picked up reins and urged the ponies on. This was Jackson Parish now, and it seemed a broad expanse of fine rolling farmland, with cotton fields right and left and comfortable homes at neighborly intervals. We passed a comely young woman riding a mule. She held a fat baby in her arms, and from the pommel of the saddle hung an antigue carpet-bag. All her urging went as nothing with the mule. He stood stubbornly in the way or moved in an erratic fashion that had more variety than progress in it.

"You’ve got about all you can manage," I called to her. She pushed her brown sunbonnet back and smiled at me winsomely, as sweet a madonna as ever found portraitue in the Flight.

"Yes, and this here old mule is set on gitting the studs, and my quirt ain’t no good no how," she answered cheerfully.

The "studs," effete civilian, is a desire to stop and loaf, and a "quirt" is a whip.

Time and time again, in the course of these confidences with that public who read the Picayune, I have proved, indirectly by comparison, by illustration and by the indisputable evidence of dry facts and figures that Louisiana is the best poor man’s state in the union.

Here, better than anywhere else in the republic can he live comfortably and cheaply, and have the most advantages for the least money. He will not need heavy clothing or boots. His system does not demand the same heavy food. Fuel is to be had almost everywhere for the mere labor of gathering it, and in Louisiana, as nowhere else, the man who wants to work and has no tools will be loaned both implements and land, nor need he pay for these until he shall have scratched an income out of our soft, rich and yielding soil.

Jackson Parish is one of the most central, or one might call it, midland parishes in the state, that seems at this time to be peculiarly adapted for small farms, owned by men of modest means. Land is extremely cheap, fuel costs only for hauling, and the healthfulness of the parish is long since established. The character of this land is clay foundation with a top soul of gray loam. It is threaded by many clear creeks and streams running southeast and whose side lands for many miles are richly timbered with pine, white oak, sweet gum and beech trees. Enterprising northern mill men have already laid hands on these valuable forests and have secured about 14,000 acres of it in Jackson Parish.

Resident farmers are adding to their possessions by securing additional tracts of government land. They turn their cattle loose in the canebrakes, and with sheep on the hills and cotton fleecing their fields—for there is no overflow in Jackson Parish—any man of moderate thrift can live in a state of absolutely monarchial independence.

Jackson Parish, once of enormous area, has been cut down to make other parishes. Before the war, its county seat, Vernon, was a sort of small metropolis, and rich merchants and big stores were features of its general prosperity. The parish has no railroad, but Vernon is only twelve miles away from Ruston, on the line of the Vicksburg and Meridian and Shreveport Road. A railroad will very shortly pass directly across Jackson Parish from El Dorado, Ark., projected on an air line to Alexandria, opening to those timber districts and rendering still more available small holdings for small farmers. We could by the way, ask no greater good for the state than that it should be cut up into forty-acre farms, from Grand Isle to the Arkansas line.

This is a great stock parish. Delicious yellow country butter is made in almost every home, and there are many cows that give a water-bucketful of milk twice a day.

The total area of Jackson Parish is 590 square miles. The total population is bout 7,300. The total parish tax is eight mills, reduced recently from ten mills, owing to the increased valuation of property. For sale in the parish are thousands of acres of "wild" land, at from $1 to $3 an acre, while good, improved lands, that is farms, within easy traveling distance of the Shreveport, Vicksburg and Meridian Road, can be bought at prices varying from $3 to $5 an acre. Of this, I was assured by Mr. W. H. Allen, Parish Clerk, a gentleman widely and correctly informed of Jackson’s resources and advantages. 

There are, out of the thousands of acres of land in the parish, only 30,583 acres in cultivation. Last year, the parish produced 6,000 bales of cotton, 136,000 bushels of corn, and 900 barrels of molasses, mostly sorghum. Of the timber lands there are 129,678 acres, nearly every stick of it of a marketable value. The assessed value of property is: belonging to white people, $464,065; belonging to Colored people, $54,000.

Vernon, the parish seat, is the quietest of little villages, being only twelve miles from the bustling, college town of Ruston. There are several stores whose merchants handle considerable cotton, and an enterprising country paper, the Jackson Patriot, is published in the town. The village homes are pretty and rural and comfortable, and all about are fine farms. When the railroad comes, Vernon may recover much of its old-time importance and prosperity. The Methodist Church is presided over by Rev. C. D. Barr. The affable and popular postmaster, Mr. A. Hill, one of the oldest residents, has a store of anecdote and information about the practical and picturesque of Jackson Parish.

If this parish were in Montana or Dakota, this legible story of its resources, which its smallest farmer can verify, would find enthusiastic boomers and many patron saints and benefactors. It would be opened up to colonists, and advertised by land agents.

And now it is night; far on in the night. I sit by a pine knot fire in the minister’s house. Out o’ window I see the dun hills of Vernontown sloping away in the dark like the shaggy backs of buffaloes in the forest at their feet. A cow bell tankles, an owl hoots. Someone must have passed along the road, for the geese have set up a mighty squawking.

This October night is like an etching—all pale dusks, shadowy shapes and clear outlines limned into soft, clear country skies.

CATHARINE COLE