St. Charles Parish, LA
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Moving along River Road, the first site of note is the former Delta Match Corp., which opened in 1952 as the first large wooden match manufacturing plant in the South. It became the largest of its kind in the world before it became TransMatch in 1970 and closed down in the 1980s.
Next, the present-day Fairfield Subdivision and Riverbend Business Park are on the old Fairfield Plantation of H. Frellsen. The area itself was earlier known as Frellsen Charlestowne Subdivision in the area of Patterson Plantation, a later split-off from Fairfield Plantation.
Next along is the former Luke Plantation, now the site of Bar None Ranch Estates. The LaBranche Plantation Dependency is actually a garconniere of the now-vanishing LaBranche Plantation. Listed on the National Historic Register, it is open to the public for tours. The earlier plantation house, built in the 1790s, was burned during the Civil War.
The Elkinsville post office served the village of that name, established after the Civil War by freed blacks immediately upriver of the St. Rose community, in the area of First through Fourth Streets. This post office opened Nov. 21, 1889 with John B. Walton the first postmaster. It, however, closed in 1893 with mail then going to the St. Rose post office, which opened Oct. 5, 1893, with Blanche Cambre the first postmistress.
Much of Elkinsville history is the living memory of matriarch Virginia Vinnett Harris, 91 at the time of this publication. She was the daughter of Emile and Octavia Clark Vinnett and wife of the Rev. Solomon Harris, the second youngest of 15 children – 12 sons and three daughters.
At the entrance to First Street, for many years, the residents of Elkinsville lived in what might be called today a gated community, with the black residents forced behind a locked gate with a 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew.
“They had two big cypress columns and a gate,” she recalled, with the gate only coming down in the 1940s.
She married the Rev. Harris in 1930, at the age of 18, when he was 22. He was employed at Pan-American Refinery and managed the semipro St. Rose Tigers baseball team for 15 years during the 1930s and 1940s.
In 1944, however, the couple attended a church revival and their lives were transformed.
“We went down to the Mississippi River together with 13 others to be baptized,” she recalled.
Once they received the Lord, he soon became a minister at True Vine Baptist Church in Hahnville in 1950, later moving to St. Mary Baptist Church in Luling before his death in 1993.
Living in St. Rose and serving churches on the West Bank meant many trips across the old Luling-Destrehan ferry.
“We’d have to wait on that ferry and it’d be thundering and lightning, and he’d ask if I was scared and I’d say no. But I was scared,” she said.
The church families were loving and made up for the couple being childless. “Anybody’s trouble was everybody’s trouble,” she remembered.
Also fresh with memories of Elkinsville is Lester B. Smith, 82 at the time of this publication.
“The whole St. Rose area was kinfolk when I was a kid,” he said. “Everybody was our uncle or our auntie. You just felt like everybody was kin.”
With everyone living closely together, family ties were strong.
“I remember my grandmother had this thick grapevine on her porch,” Smith said. “One time I walked past, and she could see me through the vines but I couldn’t see her. She called me over and told me whenever I asked, I had to say her to her.”
He remembered some of the old stores in Elkinsville, such as Andre Elfer’s grocery on Fifth Street and the Adam Vinnett store, which yet stands, where he met his wife, Thelma, at a dance.
He had grown up knowing his bride-to-be from the neighborhood and “had the largest crush on her.” They attended “back church” together at Fifth African Baptist Church but she initially didn’t like him much.
“When she was 15, she told me if I was the last thing under the Christmas tree, she’d leave me there,” he recalled.
Two years later, when he was 20 and she was 17, they married. That was more than 60 years ago, and they now have five children – ester, John, Robert, Betty and Graylin – 14 grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.
Elkinsville ended up with two Baptist churches because the members had originally come from different plantations and stayed together. Fifth African Baptist was established in 1871 and Mt. Zion Baptist in 1874.
After attending St. Rose School through seventh grade, he did field work for several years. “If you didn’t have any money, you couldn’t go no further.”
Later, Smith got a job at Pan-American Refinery in Destrehan, which lasted 15 years until that fateful day in late 1958 when 480 employees were told their jobs would be over that December. The plant closed when the company decided to build a catalytic cracker in Texas City, Texas, instead of in St. Rose. He later ran a janitorial service until his retirement.
Next along from Elkinsville is the noteworthy St. Rose Tavern, established b the Elfer family in 1922 to help service the working men building railroads and the Airline Highway through the area.
Next is the present International Matex Marine Terminal (IMTT), on the site of the former Cedar Grove Plantation. The Cities Service Terminal Company came to St. Rose as an oil export terminal in 1922 on the plantation site, and IMTT took over in later years.
Hilda Trellue of Metairie, part of the Crespo family of St. Rose, is descended from Juaquim Joseph Crespo. She later married into the extended Sellers family of Ama.
Juaquim Crespo, originally from Barcelona, Spain, came to the United States in 1873 as a minor, his total worldly possessions in a knotted silk handkerchief.
His first wife was Elmira Becnel, with whom he had two children, and his second wife was Malvina Songy, with whom he had eight children, including Hilda’s mother, Yrena Crespo.
Juaquim Crespo, a devout Catholic, hosted mass for a time at his home, Cedar Grove Plantation. He also hosted many church fairs to build the present-day St. Charles Borromeo Catholic Church.
He even reportedly gave the Rev. John Basty of St. Charles Borromeo Church (who served from 1918 to 1949) his first sheep.
After his death, the property was acquired by Cities Service Co., which came to St. Rose as an oil export terminal in 1922.
Combined with the construction of Airline Highway in the early 1930s, St. Rose continued to grow and prosper.
In 1929, the State Bank of St. Rose changed its name to St. Charles Bank and Trust Company and merged with Good Hope State Bank in June 1932.
The lifeblood of St. Rose has always been its sense of community. Virginia Vinnet Harris also exhibits her own comfort, as she says,” I’ve got Jesus, who’s going to take care of me.”
Courtesy of L'Observateur | First Published in 'River Current' magazine, January 2000
The tiny community of Sellers predates Norco on the site of the old Sellers – or Diamond Plantation – which adjoined Myrtleland.
If any place deserved to be haunted, it was the old Trepagnier, or Myrtleland house, for in 1811, the largest slave uprising in North American history was launched at Woodland Plantation in present-day LaPlace, and swept downriver, intended for New Orleans.
Along the way, Jean Francois Trepagnier refused to abandon his home and was murdered and chopped to pieces. The family, in time, abandoned the home, and it was razed in 1957. His named is recalled in Bayou Trepagnier, which was once an important trade route for upriver farmers returning from the markets of New Orleans.
The village of Sellers took its name from “Colonel” Thomas Sellers, who has the distinction of founding not one, but two communities in St. Charles Parish.
Born in St. Tammany Parish in 1846, he worked as a youth on the antebellum riverboats, where one of his friends found fame on his own – Samuel Clemens, also known as Mark Twain.
With the War Between the States, the river commerce dried up and he soon joined Ogden’s Regiment of Louisiana. He was discharged as a private but, through affiliation with Twain’s “Colonel Mulberry” character, was always known as “Colonel.”
He and his wife, Louise, bought Diamond Plantation in present-day Norco, but the encroachments from the 1872 Bonnet Carre crevasse soon brought their stay to an end. They sold out in 1897 to Leon Godchaux and moved to New Orleans, but his name remained behind. In 1893, he bought Alice Plantation in present-day Ama and died in 1915.
The Sellers Post Office opened Dec. 15, 1894 and remained until Nov. 14, 1930, when the Norco Post office opened with Lille Vaughn was postmistress.
The New Orleans Refining Company bought 460 acres of land located between Sellers and the old Good Hope sugar plantation for a price of $21,000. It was a shrewd investment, as the site became one of the largest oil products refineries in America, but it began as an asphalt plant until 1920, when refinery units began operating.
In 1925, postmistress Lillie Schexnaydre, later Vaughn, and Charles Melancon, manager of the refinery, took the company’s acronym and formed the name Norco.
In 1928, Shell took over the facility and Norco’s boom began. The village began being officially designated Norco in 1934 by the Post Office. Rodney Cambre, whose 1930 birth certificate clearly states “Sellers,” remembers most of those boom days.
“It was a whole different lifestyle then,” Cambre said. “It was almost like a little frontier town. It was very primitive when I was a kid.”
Cambre’s grandfather, Anelis Cambre, was “an old horse trader who learned different languages.”
He made use of those languages during Prohibition when he would befriend foreign seamen, pretending to be a fellow countryman, and buy liquor from them to bootleg around town.
In the 1930s, most of the country was in the midst of the Great Depression. One wouldn’t have noticed it around Norco.
“Everybody was occupied,” Cambre said, what with the construction of the Bonnet Carre Spillway, a 7,000-foot-wide flood control system monitored and operated by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Construction began in 1929 and was completed in 1932, with President Franklin Roosevelt attending the dedication.
Lost in the construction of the Spillway, however, were the sites of Oxley, later Roseland Plantation, Hermitage and Delhommer. After the Civil War, freed slaves lived in the area. The Hermitage was owned by Judge Pierre Rost, who also owned Destrehan Plantation.
Airline Highway, originally a two-lane highway and now designated as U.S. Highway 61, was authorized by then Gov. Huey Long in the early 1930s as an alternate to River Road between New Orleans and Baton Rouge.
However, in Cambre’s youth, all this bustle was excitement and thrills for the boy. “People didn’t travel much by automobile,” he said. “When my brother and I head a car coming, we’d run to see it.”
“My daddy (Maurice J. Cambre) ran a meat market on Norco Street. It was the center of gossip in town.
Maurice Cambre found a bit of prosperity with selling meat from a truck to the large Civilian Conservation Corps camp in Montz which was engaged in building the present C.C. Road and Prescott Road. He later worked for Shell.
“It was comical,” Cambre said. “People would let their cows out, they’d graze on the levee, then come back in the evening and wait at the right gate.”
Cambre also remembered the big Shell Plant Days, held in early summer each year for employees and their families. It included baseball games, free beer for the men and doughnuts and sandwiches with pink lemonade for the children.
“Shell always prided themselves on having a good baseball team,” Cambre said, and added they were ranked in the semi-pro league.
Indeed, the River Road front portion of Shell was called “Shell Country Club,” as it included tennis courts, a swimming pool and golf course.
The Royal Theater likewise stood near the Shell Main Gate on River Road. Built in the early 1940s, its first feature was “Sunday Dinner for a Soldier,” which Cambre remembered clearly. The theatre was razed in the1970s after years of vacancy.
Shell Chemical opened its “West Side” plant at Diamond Subdivision in 1955, taking down the old Diamond Plantation house, former home of Colonel Sellers. Nearby was Bethune High School, opened at the same time in 1952 as Carver High School in Hahnville, for the segregated education of African American children, named for Mary McCloud Bethune, a prominent educator. It endured to the desegregation of the high schools in 1967. Today, only a few slabs remain of Bethune High School.
Claytonia was built by Dr. John Earle Clayton, originally the company doctor for the Lyons Lumber Company in Garyville. After the 1928 fire which nearly wiped out Garyville, he moved to the Sellers in 1932, established a medical practice, and built his two-story mansion on the north side of Airline Highway. In 1965, Hurricane Betsy destroyed it. Clayton himself served as parish coroner for 25 years before his retirement in 1968.
The catalytic cracker unit explosion on May 5, 1988 rocked the town of Norco, and many tales are told of doors blasted into houses and scores of injuries across town. After the massive rebuilding effort, Norco survives and even thrives. New houses and businesses continue to be built, and the partnership of town and industry endures.
Courtesy of L'Observateur | First Published in 'River Current' magazine, January 2000
The town of New Sarpy was named for Leon Sarpy, the owner of the Sarpy Plantation, which was a present-day Norco. Originally, Sarpy operated three plantations in the area, including Good Hope, Island and Prospect. Good Hope Plantation, by the way, wasn’t in Good Hope. Good Hope Plantation was, rather, in the area of Good Hope Street in Norco.
Island Plantation was in Good Hope, and its site was later the Island Refining Company, which later became Good Hope Refinery and the present-day Orion Refining Company.
When New Orleans Refining Company, whose acronym created the name Norco, came into the Sellers area, Sarpy relocated to Prospect Plantation, which wasn’t near Prospect Avenue in Good Hope, but rather where the St. Charles Sheriff’s Office substation is located – in New Sarpy.
So much for local geography.
Leon Sarpy was originally from Tennessee, and he fought at the Battle of Shiloh during the Civil War. He bought his first property in St. Charles Parish in 1869 and in time owned Prospect, Good Hope and Sarpy Plantations.
Prospect Plantation was built in 1815 and taken down in the 1920s. In the same year Sarpy bought the plantation, the Good Hope Baptist Church was established in 1869. The church replaced its building in 1881 after a levee setback and built its present church in 1930.
The Island Refinery first located in the Good Hope area in the late 1910s.
New Sarpy opened its post office Nov. 18, 1937, with Lucy Vander Linden the first postmistress.
Along the way through most of the 20th Century history of New Sarpy was Roger Guedry Jr., 71 as of this publication, of West Hoover Street. He and his wife, Theresa Duplessis Guedry, celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary this year.
The oldest boy in his family of nine, Guedry remembers trees and gardens where row upon row of houses now stand. “They didn’t have half these houses,” he said.
The son of Roger Sr. and Delphine Kinler Guedry, he keeps the family interest in maintaining the garden, just as his father and grandfather did.
“Daddy was up every morning at 4 a.m., to raise the shrimp boxes, work all day, raise the boxes again and tend his garden, sunup to sundown," he said. "People then didn’t know nothing but work."
He also remembers when a black man named Wagner would pick up the mailbags daily at the depot and deliver it to the post office in a wheelbarrow. “They always did that about 50 years ago,” he said. “We didn’t have any street lights, and it was nothing to walk right into a cow.”
He remembers Miss Van, who ran the old post office and the Zeringue’s store and still lives near the Migliore Food Store, which survives on its booming lunch trade and its convenience for the community.
As a youngster, he recalls fields on all sides of his home and horses pulling wagons in the 1930s. “River Road was nothing like it is now,” he said.
Wagonloads of sugarcane would pass down the street, followed by noisy children who would call for a stalk to chew as a snack.
By the time he was 14 and a student at Destrehan High School, he was doing fieldwork. At 15, he lied about his age to get a job at General American. Would War II had begun three months earlier, and jobs were plentiful.
At 16, he worked at a Texas City, Texas refinery on oil rigs right after graduation, and he returned to GATX at 17 and worked there 40 years, ending up as a supervisor in the blending department before he retired at 57.
Guedry met his wife, originally from Gonzales, at a dance in New Orleans at the Silver Star. She remembers it a little differently.
“My girlfriend and I would go there, and he used to come in with a gang of guys. I was invited to a party and went with this guy. He came in with his brother and he told him he could take me away from that guy.”
Needless to say, the tall, wavy-haired Roger succeeded with the petite, dark-hared beauty. They started going steady at Carnival, were engaged by Easter and married that August 1949 at St. Louis Cathedral.
His first car was a 1937 Ford, which the young couple still used for the first few years of their marriage. They first moved in with one of his older sisters, then to an apartment behind Migilore’s, then to a block house built by his cousin and finally to his present home, which he got for $50 down 45 years ago. Guedry, however, really hit his stride as part of GATX’s softball team where, as a pitcher in the 1950s, he once pitched three games in one day, one of them a one-hitter.
Meanwhile, she also launched her own career, cooking in school cafeterias, including Norco Elementary, the old New Sarpy Elementary (the building of which is now the offices of Orion Refinery) and Harry Hurst Middle School for a total of 25 years.
Nowadays, their time is split between vacations to Branson, Mo., casino trips and visits to their favorite store – Walmart. “Our friends call us Mr. and Mrs. Walmart,” Guedry said.
He also makes outdoor swings and chairs and spends time at their camp in Waveland, Miss. The couple raised three children, and they also have 10 grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.
And, with 50 years of love and marriage behind them, they look forward to many more years of living in New Sarpy – forever young.
Courtesy of L'Observateur | First Published in 'River Current' magazine, January 2000
Despite its current appearance of a sleepy little village strung along River Road, Montz was once one of the two bustling towns on the East Bank of St. Charles Parish, the other being St. Rose.
It had a post office, train station, several grocery stores and garage (run by Elyzee Dufresne). Today, the town is hardly a shadow of itself.
“The Corps of Engineers really helped destroy Montz, between the Spillway construction and the levee setback in 1973 that displaced 44 families,” Coleen Perilloux Landry said.
Landry, youngest child of Zephirin and Vivian Cambre Perilloux, remembers when Montz was a heaven on earth for a little girl.
“Pure innocence, “ she recalled. “Fields to roam and river batture to play in.”
However, Montz has had more than its share of tragedy and misfortune. Nov. 11, 1912 saw one of the largest train wrecks in U.S. history, when an excursion train left New Orleans at 11:30 a.m. headed for Woodville, Miss., in a heavy winter fog.
Following the excursion train was a freight train headed for the same place. The excursion train had engine trouble when it reached Montz, and the engineer sent a flagman named Cunningham back to place flares to warn the freight train following.
However, for reasons unknown, the freight train didn’t stop and slammed into the excursion train, nearly slicing it in two. Fourteen people died at the scene and one later from his injuries. Doctors came from LaPlace and New Orleans.
Montz had its origins from early German settlers whose families still thrive here. The name of Montz is a transmutation of the original “Manz.”
Land transactions here date back to the 1760s, and early villages in the area included Virginia Town, Coffee Town and Keller Town. Many of the black residents came to the area after the Civil War through the Son’s of Levi Benevolent Association, founded by Achille Hawkins, a free man of color, through Good Hope Baptist Church.
The Montz post office opened Jan. 11, 1905, when the population was estimated at 500 people. The fist postmaster was Louis Duhe. It closed May 31, 1927, and the mail was forwarded to LaPlace, from where the residents still get mail.
Education took a firm hold in the community, led by the Keller family, who provided land for the Keller Consolidated School. Three generations of Kellers served on the St. Charles Parish School Board, including Ozeme, Flavin and Eddie. Flavin Keller’s school busses, called “transfers” in those early days, transported children all along the East Bank. Landry recalled the Keller family – “all very educated and all very skilled people who really believed in education.”
Keller’s buses were more like trucks, with a bench along each side, the students facing across the center. With the often-muddy roads, the boys were often recruited to push the bus out of boggy holes.
Perilloux Plantation, built in the 1820, was acquired by her grandfather, Felix Perilloux, who had a cooperage (barrel-making) business and was a former St. John the Baptist Parish police juror. In time, Perilloux Landing in Montz included two adjoining plantations and a small grocery.
Coleen Perilloux Landry is now a colonel in charge of community relations and crime prevention for the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office. She traces her ancestry to a Perilloux, her great-great-great-grandfather, who came from France to fight in the French and Indian War and married in 1753 in St. Charles Parish.
Landry’s parents met at a party held at Perilloux Plantation. Her mother was born in Lions and lived in Sunnyside Plantation where DuPont is now. Together, they had eight children: Shirley Bassier, Anna Belle Fourroux, Daisy, Charles, Reed, Emmett and Sheldon Perilloux and Coleen Landry.
Students from Montz, Sellers and New Sarpy attended the Keller Consolidated School until 1920, when the school changed names to the Montz School. Landry’s mother was president of the Montz School PTA for 15 years.
In 1927, when the Great Flood struck, the levee was moved back and Landry’s grandmother donated the land for the new school site. In 1930, a new Montz school arose, a brick school with two classrooms and first through third grades. The principal of the Montz School was Marie Cotten, who taught from the 1920s thought 1942, when she returned to her home in Baton Rouge. Cotten was replaced at the school by Edith Trosclair, who continued until the school closed in the mid-1940s.
Coleen Landry still fondly remembers Cotton, one of the top influences of her life, along with Sister Mary Joseph at St. Charles Borromeo.
The Great Flood of 1927 ripped a hole in the levee between Montz and LaPlace, in the area still known as The Crevasse. The Bonnet Carre Spillway construction which followed, while necessary to safeguard New Orleans and other downriver communities, devastated Montz. The plantations of the Kugler, Delhommer and Roussell families were all taken by the Spillway construction, which began in 1929 and finished in 1931, with President Franklin Roosevelt attending the dedication. Guide levees were completed in 1932.
In 1936, the school board requested that a road be built through the spillway for Montz students to attend Destrehan High School and St. Charles Borromeo School to avoid traveling on Airline Highway. At that time, the CC Road, built by the Civil Conservation Corps squad near McReine Road, was the only direct access to Airline from Montz, as Evangeline Road extended from River Road to a dead end, only 12 houses along.
Her father was a St. Charles Parish deputy for 27 years, a state trooper and a bodyguard for Huey P. Long. He later worked at GATX in Good Hope before retiring to his plantation. “He was always very involved in politics,” she said. “I grew up with the ins and outs of politics.”
During the war, her father was an air raid warden, and her mother volunteered for the American Red Cross and was also the light keeper for the kerosene lookout light on the nearby point.
Coleen met Elgin Landry in of Reserve while her bothers were attending LSU. “I had to go all the way to LSU to meet someone from Reserve,” Landry said. He is now retired from the National Weather Bureau. They have four children and one grandchild.
Louisiana Power and Light built its Little Gypsy power plant in 1960, adding more units in 1965 and 1969. Electricity had first come to Montz when Landry was in second grade. Telephones came in 1953, when she was away at LSU. Landry’s career took her to six years with Jefferson Parish sheriff Al Cronvich and 20 years so far with her college friend, Sheriff Harry Lee, including running his first campaign in 1979.
Zephirin Perilloux suffered one more tragedy late in life – the encroachment of the Mississippi River. In 1973 the Corps pushed 44 families out and sliced most of front of Perilloux’s property. The elderly couple was given three days to move out of their 1820 plantation house into a smaller house in the rear.
“He died in 1977 at the age of 85,” Landry recalled. “I really think he died of a broken heart.” Her mother followed in 1985 at the age of 91. However, Zephirin Perilloux’s name will live on, as the firehouse on his plantation site now bears his name.
By arrangement with Landry, the Montz firehouse permanently displays Perilloux’s photograph and flies not only the American flag, but also the French Fleur-di-lis in his memory.
Courtesy of L'Observateur | First Published in 'River Curent' magazine, January 2000
Industry was the making of Good Hope, and industry was the breaking of Good Hope.
Settlers on the Prospect Plantation raised cotton and rice until the advent of General American Tank Terminal, which almost overnight transformed the area with the world’s largest petroleum tank terminal. By March 1931, newspapers trumpeted “The Wonder Town of Good Hope.” In little more than 50 years, it was all over.
Good Hope Plantation, which was not in Good Hope, but upriver in present-day Norco, was one of several owned by Leon Sarpy, originally from Tennessee, who fought at the Battle of Shiloh during the Civil War. He bought his first property in St. Charles Parish in 1869 and, in time, owned Prospect, Good Hope and Sarpy Plantations.
Prospect Street is the approximate site of Prospect Plantation, built in 1815, and was taken down in the 1920s. In the same year Sarpy bought the plantation, the Good Hope Baptist Church was established in 1869. The church replaced its building in 1881 after a levee setback and built its present church in 1930.
The Island Refinery first located in the Good Hope area continued to grow to such a point that the Good Hope Post Office was opened Dec. 28, 1922.
In June 1925, the General American Tank Terminal located on a 77-acre site. On Feb. 4, 1930, Hugo Epstein and Robert L. Crager, representing Good Hope Realty Inc., and Jessie Crews of General American, requested a location of a school at Good Hope. Epstein offered to donate half of the required property and contribute $250 towards the effort. Crews offered a petition.
By March 5, 1930, a bank loan was obtained for the grades one through four, to serve the 100 families located there. The school was built on a budget of $13,373.
The Good Hope Elementary School opened in 1931 and eventually became Good Hope Primary before it consolidated with Norco Elementary in 1979.
By the time of School Board member Flavin Keller’s death in 1943, the population had begun to shift from Montz towards Norco and Good Hope. Good Hope, in its heyday of the 1930s and 1940s, included a modern hotel with a patio built along French and Spanish lines, a bank and a railway station, along with several small businesses (including a newspaper, the Good Hope News, 1929-1930).
Up and down the homey streets were the Little Hope Café, Anthony Migliore’s grocery, Henry Saizan’s grocery, Felix Bourgeois’ meet market, Marie Naquin’s Restaurant, Borrus Clothing and Ray Hebert’s butcher shop. What had survived as Frenchy and Delores’ Restaurant once housed the Good Hope State Bank (which merged with the St. Charles Bank and Trust in June 1932), then Hall’s Pharmacy.
GATX, as General American was commonly known, built 24 four-room cypress cottages with screened porches along muddy Prospect Avenue. Not far away was General American Street.
During World War II, the war industry effort contributed to Good Hope’s growth with the Coastwise Petroleum Company and the Wesco paint company. More houses came in, with a central park lined with oak trees. Cement sidewalks drew roller-skating children, and everyone knew everyone.
However by 1971, the world of Good Hope began to fade with the coming of Good Hope Refinery and the still-vilified Jack Stanley, the refinery’s owner. During the 1970s, the refinery grew and began buying up first a few houses, then blocks, then entire streets. The plant itself fell victim to a seemingly endless series of fires and explosions. Evacuations were almost monthly hardships.
Finally, Good Hope Refinery shut down in 1983, climaxing weeks of layoffs of hundreds of employees. TransAmerican Refining relaunched the plant in 1987, and Orion Refining assumed ownership early in 1999. However, it’s far too late for the town of Good Hope. Only one house remains on Prospect Avenue, that of Charles Andrews, 90, of LaPlace, who bought the house in 1932 for himself and his new bride for $2,000. And he’s not selling.
Edith Matherne Tarullo Trosclair has a wealth of fond memories of old Good Hope. “You can search the world over; you will never find another Good Hope,” she commented.
As a child, Edith Matherne could often be located on the street because she was always singing. She recently visited a 92-year-old friend who was blind but who instantly recognized her when she began singing.
Trosclair, 72 at the time of this publication, was the daughter of Jules “Shorty” Matherne from St. James and Idee Granier Matherne of Vacherie. The couple came to Good Hope in 1920 in search of better times after work slowed down at the Pikes Peak Plantation sawmill at Lagan.
“We had the best time in Good Hope,” she recalled. “Everybody cared about everybody.”
Her childhood memories include a train wreck at the Island Refinery, where a load of tar dumped on the ground. For a long time afterward, she and other children would slice off a piece of tar and chew it like bubble gum. “We had the whitest teeth!”
However, Edith can still recall hard times in the Depression, when her father’s job was cut back to three days a week and her mother sometimes cried, worried about the family’s future.
However, people cared about each other, especially for the children.
“Every kid in Good Hope had a bunch of mothers and grandmothers, “ she remembered. “If I was hungry, I could stop at any house and sit at the table.”
Of course, at that time, there were about 350 residents in Good Hope, and about 15 Matherne children.
She also recalls that her father would regularly get up at 3 a.m. to pick up the fallen magnolia leaves in his yard before going to work and had a passion for listening to radio. “You really listened to Inner Sanctum!” He also served as chief of the East Bank’s first volunteer fire department for a time.
Young Edith started working at Marie’s Restaurant when she was 15. She met Frank Tarullo and married when she was 16. “People grew up faster because we were around grownups.”
The young couple married in the midst of Would War II. Her husband was soon called up, and she wrote letters almost constantly while living with her parents, the beginning of their 28-year marriage.
In time, the coupled had their own children. Jules John Tarullo is now with the 29th Judicial District Attorney’s Office after working many years with the sheriff’s office.
The family endured the Depression, World War II and even Hurricane Betsy, but it was Jack Stanley who ended Good Hope. “It took somebody like Jack Stanley to ruin everything.”
However, the memories remain for Edith Trosclair.
“The kids today will never have my memories.”
She enjoys her autumn years and says her health hasn’t been adversely affected by years of living next to Good Hope Refinery.
“I haven’t been to the doctor since I was 28!” she laughed.Courtesy of L'Observateur | First Published in 'River Current' magazine, January 2000
The town of Destrehan is named for Jean Noel Destrehan, son of Jean Baptist Honore Destrehan de Beaupre, Royal Treasurer of French Louisiana.
Jean Baptiste Destrehan arrived in New Orleans in 1722, cleared his first homesite and built in what is now the town of Harvey. That same year, he began work on what is now the Harvey Canal, the workmen for which lived in a settlement called New Mechanicam. Nowadays, it’s called Gretna.
He died in New Orleans in 1771, but not before he sired seven children.
Jean Noel Destrehan was born in New Orleans in 1754, the seventh child and third son. He married Marie Celeste de Logny, whose father built Destrehan Plantation, where they raised 14 children. He added the two garconnaires and enclosed the ground floor in 1810.
His career included serving in the Louisiana territorial government from 1803 to 1812. He was vice mayor of New Orleans in 1803, speaker of the first house of the legislature and president of the legislative council. However, it was in 1794 that Jean Noel made his mark on Louisiana history, for it was his financing by $5,000 of Etienne de Bore’s experiments in present-day Audubon Park which resulted in the first successful granulation of sugarcane.
This spawned a sugar industry, which inside of 60 years generated more millionaires in Louisiana than in the rest of the United States prior to the Civil War. He died in 1823, after which the house went to his daughter, Eleonore Zelia and her husband, Stephen Henderson, both of whom died prematurely.
The estate passed to her sister and in 1839 was acquired by Pierre Adolphe Rost, who served as a state senator. At the time of the purchase, he was a state supreme court justice. During the Civil War, he was an envoy to Great Britain and France. He died in 1868 and passed the home to his son, Emile, who kept it until 1910.
Finally in 1914, the Mexican Petroleum Company purchased Destrehan Plantation. The company later became the Pan-American Southern Corporation, then Amoco.
The plant closed in 1958, and the historical plantation house crumbled into an abandoned and vandalized ruin. In 1972, the River Road Historical Society finally acquired the house and its surrounding five acres and began restoration work.
Upriver neighbor Ormond Plantation was built soon after Destrehan by Pierre d'Trepagnier on a Spanish land grant. However, in 1798, he was summoned from a family meal and mysteriously disappeared, never to be seen again. In 1805, the house was bought from Mrs. Trepagnier by Richard Butler, who named it "Ormond" after his ancestral Irish home, Castle Ormonde.
The property was acquired by Samuel McCutcheon in 1819. However, after the Civil War, hard times forced Ormond into public auction twice in the 1870s.
It was later acquired by state Sen. Basile LaPlace Jr., but in 1899 he was called out and murdered by a band of men who visited one night. One version says he fell afoul of the local Klan, and another was that it was family members of his mistress, outraged at his behavior.
The next 40 years saw a succession of owners and tenants as the house crumbled. However, by 1942, Ms. Alvin Brown began a major renovation and remained in the house until her death in 1968. By 1974 it was acquired by Betty LeBlanc, executive vice-president of Barq’s Beverages, who continued the restoration work until her death in 1986.
The house is now owned and operated as a restaurant and bed-and-breakfast.
Destrehan gained its post office on June 2, 1916 as the refinery developed and attracted residents. The first postmaster was Charles E. Smith.
Destrehan High School was dedicated on March 21, 1925. However, the original school burned down in the early 1970s and its present-day replacement built soon afterward.
Disasters occasionally hit Destrehan. On Christmas Even 1951, a gasoline barge exploded, burning the 1,000-foot wharf. The Bunge grain elevator exploded in 1970, with one killed in that accident. The explosion prompted the closing of Pecan Grove Elementary School.
On Oct. 20, 1976, the Luling-Destrehan ferry was rammed in the fog by the Norwegian tanker ”Frosta,” and sank, drowning eight 78 people. A memorial to the accident victims was later placed in Edgard in front of the St. John Parish courthouse. The ferry itself closed on Nov. 13, 1983, after 96 years in operation. A memorial to the accident now stands at the East Bank Bridge Park in Destrehan.
Yet business thrived. In 1978 construction began on Plantation Business Campus, immediately downriver from Destrehan Plantation and upriver from the two grain elevators.
Hubert St. Pierre, 72, has seen much of the sweep of 20th century Destrehan history. Now the founder of St. Pierre’s Air Conditioning, he was born on Modoc Lane, the son of Denis St. Pierre and Odette Bossier St. Pierre, both from Lucy.
Denis St. Pierre had come from a family of 15 in which everyone played music, from harmonicas to the elder St. Pierre’s clarinet. He started at Shell Oil in 1926 and played at the Saturday night dances. He retired after a 33-year career. Hubert was one of three sons, including Laurey (at the time of this writing a Baton Rouge resident and Gulf State Utilities retiree) and Ronald (at the time of this writing a Norco resident, Shell retiree and member of the St. Charles Parish School Board).
He used to catch river shrimp in eight shrimp boxes in front of the Dust Bowl lounge, a little bar which had been the Bouvier Drug Store, the Blue Room with dances and movies and Sal Portera’s service station.
Hubert’s youth also included a lot of softball, movies three nights a week at the Shell theater and swimming in the river.
“We had too much fun back then,” he said.
“One thing that helped me the most was the Boy Scouts,” he said. All three boys earned Eagle Scout honors.
Then there was church and Fr. John F. Basty, who served from 1918 to 1949. Associations with the church were always good. He had known his future wife, Shirley, from high school, but it wasn’t until 1948 when he saw her at church and realized his true feelings. They married in 1949, and at the time of this writing have seven children, 19 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
At the time of this writing, his wife still tends the candles at church every morning.
Also, in 1990, Hubert worked with the committees organizing the 250th anniversary of the church’s establishment on the East Bank.
He finished at Destrehan High School in 1943, joined the Merchant Marine and then finished his studies at Delgado to learn the craft. He followed his father like so many sons did in those times, to Shell, where he stayed until 1963.
However, in 1960, Hubert began his part-time air conditioning business, and he began running it full-time in 1963, where he still puts in a day’s work there, joined by his sons.
Courtesy of L'Observateur | First published in 'River Current' magazine, January 2000
West Bank
The Coteau de France included much of the area east and north of Lac Des Allemands to the river, with 640 acres confirmed as being under cultivation as of the cutoff date of Oct. 1, 1800. When, in 1812, the federal government confirmed colonial French and Spanish land grants, the children of Paul Toups claimed 18 arpents frontage by a depth of two and a half leagues (seven and one-half miles) of land south and east of the Coteau de France.
Toups received his grant from the Baron de Carondelet in 1796 for the purpose of developing a cattle ranch. This land extended from Des Allemands and Isle Du Price Noir (Black Prince Island) at Bayou Gauche, east to the rear of present-day Luling.
Des Allemands developed as a town after the Civil War, being home earlier only to the New Orleans Opelousas and Great Western train depot (1856) and a few scattered settlers. It was also the site of one of St. Charles Parish’s two Civil War skirmishes, this one in 1862. The Allemands post office was established on Aug. 19, 1868, with William Kussman the first postmaster. On April 1, 1964, the name of the post office was officially renamed “Des Allemands,” when Mrs. Garnet M. Simoneaux was postmistress.
St. Gertrude’s Catholic Church has its origins as a chapel from Holy Rosary Church in Taft in 1901. Prior to this, a priest would visit the area and have mass in the homes of residents. A newer church site was bought from Carrie and Bert Begue in 1953, and the new church opened in 1955.
Freight boats would ply the waters to take merchandise from the train coming from markets elsewhere, then accept the villagers’ produce.
Public schools in the area began as early as 1879, one built in 1895 on land owned by Charles L. Hopkins. Two teachers taught first through seventh grade.
In 1923, a wooden 70-by-40-foot schoolhouse was built in nine months on property bought from Ernest Peyregne for $300. It was a large room separated into two classrooms by a sliding chalkboard wall partition along its center. An additional room was built later.
That building endured until Allemands Elementary was built in 1931. The newer school was destroyed in an electrical fire in 1974. The ruins were finally taken down in early 1990s. Students then temporarily attended classes at the Des Allemands Assembly of God Church and the Mennonite Church. The 1923 school, however, took on a life of its own. It was moved to Comardelle Village, where it served local children until 1941, then to Bayou Gauche until 1959 and back to Des Allemands, there to become the American Legion Post 316 Hall on Highway 632. Across the street is the present Allemands Elementary, which opened in 1977.
Opal Matherne Dufrene’s family dates back in the area to 1770, when her ancestors arrived from Canada to St. James Parish. Her great-grandfather, Jean Matherne, settled in Bois Choctaw in the late 1860s, and her grandfather, Willie Matherne, moved up the bayou to Des Allemands, where he ran a store, later the DeJean Store.
Here, he bought and sold furs, served on the St. Charles Parish Police Jury for more than 30 years, and died in 1933 at the age of 52.
Opal’s father, Dewey Matherne, sired eight children in the area, whose descendents are many in the area with intermarriages. Dewey was denied the chance to serve in World War II, she remembers, because he already had too many children.
“I used to like to talk to the old people about the old times,” Opal said. “They had homes on both sides of the bayou from Lac des Allemands to Lake Salvador.”
She recalled attending mass at the original St. Gertrude’s with Father Gerald Barrett from Taft. The bell summoned the faithful to worship and woe to those who were late! Four years later she married Gerald Dufrene at the same little chapel.
Des Allemands was a lively place in her youth, especially since few people had automobiles. Amusements were all around, with stores and dance halls and the Fun Theater, Mitchell Dufrene’s ice cream parlor, the Candies restaurant and dances at the Ideal Club and the Smile Inn. (“That’s been there as long as I can remember,” she said.)
Landry Dufrene ran a dance hall next to his bar, and weekly dances were followed on Sunday by afternoon bingo. Other attractions were the duck-calling contest. In her youth “the old peddler” would go house-to-house, selling clothes. The “rolling store” would sell fruit and vegetables. Everyone raised chickens, and most had a cow and hogs.
“I don’t remember seeing any alligators when I was young,” she said.
“People used to visit a lot, lots more than they do now,” she recalled. Children occupied their play with toy boats, jump rope, hopscotch and more. “Kids today don’t have any imagination.”
She also remembered that families would always eat meals together. Special family outings included Audubon Park or Pontchartrain Beach. “It’s a different world today. It’s sad in a way," she said.
A young lady, she would sometimes go with her sister to Adolph Leveque’s store near the old bridge to catch the Greyhound bus to Canal Street in New Orleans to go shopping.
Opal met Gerald at one of those dances at the Ideal Club. She was 14 and he was 17 and from Raceland, driving a 1930s-era Chevrolet. She remembered her father would tease, “Here comes your fishtail Cadillac!” when Gerald came to call. They married four years later. He served in the U.S. Marine Corps and worked at American Cyanamid from 1956 to 1994. They began married life in a little house built next to her grandmother, where they lived for 13 years, then to Murphy Lane, then to Autin Lane for 27 years before moving out to Green Acres near Bayou Gauche a year ago.
And when the wind is up, she can almost hear those chapel bells.
Courtesy of L'Observateur | First Published in 'River Current' magazine, January 2000
In the spring of that year, Union troops captured this vital station, as well as the station at Bayou Des Allemands, building a small army post there manned with 150 men.
In late August 1862, Union troops learned of a Confederate plan to rustle cattle for the cause on the parish’s East Bank.
Under Colonel Thomas, Union troops, consisting of a force of 200 men arrived by rail at Boutte, then marched on to the parish courthouse in present-day Hahnville and camped there overnight.
At daybreak, they scoured the countryside, heading as far as Bonnet Carre Point (present-day Lucy in St. John the Baptist Parish) before doubling back and heading all the way back to Algiers, plundering all the way and on the way destroying Confederate General Richard Taylor’s home downriver of the courthouse.
A few weeks later, in early September, a Confederate force set out of Terrebonne Parish, led by General John C. Pratt. Aided by a newly formed St. Charles Militia, the force was determined to recapture Boutte and Des Allemands stations and resecure the West Bank of St. Charles Parish.
Arriving in Boutte, they found the rail station deserted. They camped and waited until a flatcar happened by, led by Captain Edward Hall, which was transporting 75 union soldiers from Des Allemands headed for Algiers to intercept a Confederate supply train.
The Confederates ambushed and wrecked the train, killing several Union soldiers. At that point, the Algiers train blundered onto the scene and retreated back to Algiers, and Hall surrendered the post to the Confederates. They were later lured into an ambush of their own by more troops landing at the river.
Following the Civil War, the tiny community of Boutte began to acquire its first permanent settlers, mostly farmers and trappers.
Boutte itself gained its first post office on June 29, 1866, with Edward B. Tinney the first postmaster. The Tinney family still remains in Boutte in the house still standing near the corner of Magnolia Ridge Road and U.S. Highway 90.
The town grew from a couple of small grocery stores and a handful of houses to its present size with supermarkets, subdivisions, strip malls and fast-food restaurants.
However, the Rev. John Dorsey, from the vantage point of this rocking chair on his front porch facing Paul Maillard Road, has seen all this growth as it happened.
Dorsey, 84 at the time of this publication, was born Jan. 3, 1915. He has been pastor at Mt. Airy Baptist Church for several decades and remains as a pillar of the community, black and white.
“It was mostly farming, trapping and picking moss,” he recalled of his early childhood memories. “We did play in the woods a lot.”
His father, Sam Dorsey, migrated to the area from St. Louis, Mo., following the railroad tie-camps, cutting lumber by hand for construction of the railroads into the area. He met Pricilla Smith, of Boutte, they married, and he continued working in the tie-camps until his death.
The couple eventually had 10 children, including the Rev. Dorsey, but only four of the 10 are alive at this writing. Two of his brothers and one sister were born in Boutte. Sam Dorsey died in 1931 and his wife in 1954.
“Back then, we lived on the (Magnolia) Ridge and farmed for 60 cents a day. You could count the houses. There may have been 10 or 15 houses,” Dorsey said.
Two general stores also served the tiny population, the Tinney Store near the present intersection of U.S. Highway 90 and the Donnaud Store, which still stands, now vacant on Paul Maillard Road.
When Dorsey was born, U.S. 90 didn’t exist as such. When U.S. 90 was first designated, it came out of New Orleans along the River Road though Luling and up Paul Maillard to the present Old Spanish Trail to Des Allemands and beyond. Paul Maillard Road itself was built in the late 1800s, accounting for its narrow size.
Early days for Dorsey and his siblings were filled with hard work, including picking moss in the marshes, which they would sell at three cents a pound to the Landry moss gin in Paradis, making upwards on $50 at a time.
“That was big money then,” he recalled, while it also brings to mind how much moss had to be gathered for that amount of money.
The back-breaking labor of picking and hauling the moss with a mule-drawn slide paid off, however, and he and his family thrived.
“We raised chickens and pigs and we had a milk cow. We had a garden with corn and sweet potatoes, and daddy and I would go out trapping for raccoons and mink," he said.
The present U.S. 90 was built in the 1930s, at about the same time that Dorsey found his calling and began with his church.
When he first joined the church, “there were about seven or eight in the group.” At present, after more than 50 years of pasturing, the church has a new building and more than 400 in the congregation.
“It’s a good job, teaching and preaching and getting people to change their lives and attitudes,” he said.
Also, in 1935, he married his wife, Lillian Davis Dorsey, whose father, Ben David, taught school for black children in Paradis. Asked how they got together, the Rev. Dorsey replied, ”We just grew up together.”
His formal education stopped after third grade, but that never help back Dorsey, who worked at the lumber camp near Cousins Canal, then did construction work with companies including T.L. James. He then worked 33 years at Avondale Shipyard as a painter, sandblaster and tank-tester. He retired in 1980.
The town, meanwhile, continued to grow. In 1953, it gained an elementary school for blacks, now the headquarters for the Arc of St. Charles. In 1983, Dorsey had another crisis, when the Mt. Airy Baptist Church was forced to move out from its old home, behind the railroad tracks off Old Spanish Trail. With construction of Interstate 310 in 1983, the site was bought out by the state highway department. The church relocated in larger, more modern surroundings on Magnolia Ridge Road.
Now he and his wife enjoy their quiet life in a home filled with living plants, watching what comes next.
Courtesy of L'Observateur | First Published in 'River Current' magazine, January 2000
Bayou Gauche is a peculiar community in several respects. It’s one of the most remote towns in Louisiana, it’s surrounded by water and most of the island is owned by a family corporation, the heirs of the late Sidney Simoneaux, who lease all the home sites to the residents.
"There is a small street that is owned by several different landowners and has been for sometime. My family is one of those owners and has been since my grandfather purchased it. Prior to that it was owned by Andrew Dufrene and a Land company before that." – Suzanne Breaux (web audience contributor)
The area, from Bayou Gauche to Lake Salvador, was home for centuries to a succession of Indian tribes. Areas such as the Temple and Bois Choctaw included Indian burial mounds. Most of those mounds were destroyed by generations of dredging the clamshells to make masonry walls in New Orleans. More than 100 mounds once existed in the Salvador area. Artifacts such as bottles and French coins are occasionally still found in the area.
Since early colonial days, families who subsisted on fishing, trapping and hunting populated areas known as Bois Choctaw, Little Temple, Black Prince Island, Down the Bayou Village, Cabanage and Comardelle Village.
What was called Down the Bayou Village housed some of the earliest settlers including the Dufrenes and Comardelles. Comardelle Village included a school, the Sanctified Church, the Assembly of God Pentecostal Church, Frank Dufrene’s store, Camille Comardelle’s store, Joe Hogan’s store, Charley Plaisance’s store, Pierre Dufrene’s dry-dock and some 30 homes. The last resident to move out from Comardelle Village was Alcide Comardelle.
The Sanctified Church, the Assembly of God and the Pentecostal Church were all under one roof down the bayou, between the homes of John “Buddy” Frickey and Willie Dufrene. It is believed the Sanctified Church began its work in the 1870s before moving to Des Allemands years later, leaving the Assembly of God Church there. The Assembly of God church began services in private homes and organized formally in 1924. It remained until early 1941 when it was barged to Bayou Gauche. The Pentecostal Church began around 1915.
The original building was once the Des Allemands School from 1923 to 1931, when it was barged down to Comardelle where Zoe Petit of Ama was the first teacher. Other teachers included Martha Berthelot, Mae Moore, Clothilde Torres, Lucille Lowe, Grace Somme and Lutie Sammis. Philonese Petit, also of Ama, taught from 1931 to 1940 and died in 1986 at the age of 78.
The students and teachers arrived at school in a school boat, as suggested by Police Juror Enois Dufrene. Later, his son, Johnny Dufrene, piloted that boat, prior to his own years as a school board member.
The school building was moved again in 1941 to Bayou Gauche, where it stayed until October 1958, then returned to a use as the American Legion Hall on WPA Road.
Mail was delivered by boat as well, as were bread (10 cents a loaf) and pies (5 cents each). What evolved out of it all was the village of Bayou Gauche (the left-hand bayou, named for the downstream direction one takes when one reaches the head of Black Prince Island on the way to Lake Salvador). Located along a nine-mile stretch of the bayou and facing Black Prince Island, it was finally reached by roadway and electricity in the 1920s.
Industry found its way into the area with the timber boom from 1890 to 1930. Andrew Hogan opened a sawmill to take advantage of the wholesale cutting of virgin cypress in the area. It continued to operate until 1951.
For Edna Dufrene Matherne, early days in Comardelle Village and Bayou Gauche were hard, but she and her family survived and continue to thrive in the area.
“We all lived at Comardelle Village,” she said, and added she was delivered by a midwife, who had to stay with her mother, Leonise Comardelle Dufrene, for a week after the birth in 1924. Her father was Victor Dufrene.
Edna Matherne, 74 at the time of this publication, and her family remained in Comardelle Village, and attended school at the tiny, two-room schoolhouse through fourth grade, at which time the family relocated to Bayou Gauche. However, as there was no school in Bayou Gauche, she would take the school boat back downstream to the village to attend school.
“It was fun, but it was still a struggle,” Matherne recalled. “My daddy was a trapper in the winter and a carpenter in the summer, building boats, houseboats, skiffs and pirogues.”
The family lived in a house in Comardelle and later built a houseboat and moored it in Bayou Gauche. The houseboat now stands as a private residence at the end of Bayou Gauche Road.
The Comardelle School got its name, not from the village but from Alcide Comardelle, who donated the building. First through fourth grades were in one room and fifth through seventh grades in the second room. Teachers at the time included Philonese Petit and her cousin Louise Petit.
“Mama would make us some rag dolls for us to play with,” Matherne added. “We didn’t have radios or anything like that.” She added, though, that as a young child, she remembers someone coming out in a boat to show silent movies.
And life was hard on the bayou. Doctors were scarce and when someone became sick, a long boat journey out might be too hard on the patient. Her father and several other relatives died after eating tainted oysters when she was 13 years old. She became sick as well and spent two months in a coma. When she awoke and was allowed to return home, it was to discover her father had already been dead and buried for a month.
“My oldest brother, Ray, quit school when he was 13 to help support the family,” Matherne recalled. “But we never starved.”
In 1940, just one month shy of 16 years old, she married Victor Matherne, 23. Not too long afterward, he was drafted into the United States Army. His eldest child, Annabel Marie Matherne Hogan, was born in 1943 but, as she remembered, “Belle was six months old before he saw her.” Her second child, Dr. Ray Matherne, was born while he was home on a furlough. The couple later had two additional children, Mary Dufrene and Michael Matherne.
Bayou Gauche in the old days was about half the frontage along the bayou, from Simoneaux Ponds to the end, and only a mud road connected along various ridge roads to Magnolia Ridge, Paradis and Des Allemands.
“When they put the shells on Bayou Gauche Road, we thought that was a great thing,” she said.
In the midst of Bayou Gauche is the site of the Simoneaux Ponds, which began as a three-story resort hotel when Sidney Simoneaux bought the Bayou Gauche area in 1920s. The second floor had a surrounding gallery, and the third floor was actually the size of a small cabin. The building was first built as a working-man’s hotel in about 1900 to house workers for the corn planting in the drained fields behind it. In later years, the resort hotel was replaced by a one-story clubhouse, which endured until 1982, when the clubhouse was replaced by the present-day Amarada Hess office.
In 1959, Victor and Edna Matherne relocated their family to a 5-acre plot on U.S. Highway 90. Leonise Dufrene died in 1981 at the age of 76.
However, with memories sad and delightful Edna insisted, “I wouldn’t want to go back”
Courtesy of L'Observateur | First published in 'River Current' magazine, January 2000
The origins of Ama lay with the fortunes of the Sellers family, still prominent in the area. The name Ama itself is of undetermined origin. One source states it was named for the daughter of an early owner of Alice Plantation. Another says Ama is Greek for "to love."
Ama itself grew up around the plantations and the population in 1891, when the post office was established, was between 450 and 500. The post office was founded on April 27, 1891.
St. Mark Catholic Church was spawned as a chapel of Our Lady of the Most Holy Rosary in 1898. While the present structure was built in 1946, mass was celebrated in the Ama school. St. Mark's became a mission church in 1961 and was established as a parish in 1974.
Mt. Zion Missionary Baptist Church dates back to 1898 when the Rev. Joseph Thomas founded it. In the early 1900s, the present church was completed (as of this publication). A new church was built following damage from Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
In 1772, Mathew Sellers was born in North Carolina. He, his wife Marie Reine Aucoin and their 10 children migrated to Lafayette with the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. One son, John Sellers was married in 1837. With the 1849 California gold rush, John dashed to the West Coast to “strike it rich,” leaving his wife and children behind. Reportedly he was murdered, and his wife died within a year of the news. The children were raised by Duvhiel Peyroux at Myrtle Land Plantation (once known as the Trepagnier Plantation near present-day Norco). One son was Thomas Joseph Sellers. Sellers, born in St. Tammany Parish in 1846, worked on the riverboats as a “mud clerk,” or an assistant to the purser. A lifelong friend was Samuel Clemens, later known to the world as Mark Twain.
During the Civil War, Sellers served in Ogden’s Regiment and was discharged as a private. However, due to his association with Twain, he was nicknamed “Colonel Mulberry” Sellers for the rest of his life.
In 1871, he married Louise Marie Pyramid Wiser of Swiss origin. Five years later the couple moved back to Myrtle Land, renaming it Diamond Plantation. The Bonnet Carre Crevasse wrecked his plantation. The persistent Col. Sellers, by 1885, was operating Sellers and Company, in charge of demolition of structures after the World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition in New Orleans. By 1889, he was back in St. Charles Parish, having bought the Lone Star Plantation near present-day Luling. The Davis Crevasse washed away his rice crop and, in 1893, he bought Alice Plantation in present-day Ama and named it for their daughter, Alice Augusta Sellers. With forethought, he and his sons, Thomas (born 1872), Robert Sr. (born 1875) and John (born 1888), built Sellers Canal as a short cut to Grand Isle, where he would take the family every summer on his steam launch. When the Hymelia Crevasse struck in 1912, he and his family rode to safety in the launch. He died in 1915.
His daughters included Marie Higgins, Alice Sellers Grazan, Louise Sellers and Florence Sellers Walton.
His grandson, Julius B. Sellers Sr., son of Thomas Sellers, earned a degree at Loyola University in New Orleans and was a teacher and coach at his alma mater, Hahnville High School.
Julius Sr. won a state representative seat in 1940 and served four years. In 1948 he was elected Clerk of Court for St. Charles Parish and served 12 years. He then was elected assessor and served until his death in July 1966. He was succeeded in office by his son, Julius B. “Ducky” Sellers Jr.
"Ducky" Sellers was then elected sheriff in 1972, served four years, and retired from public office. Reportedly, he personally removed his official portrait from the courthouse lobby where it was displayed with other past sheriffs saying he didn’t want to have it hang with such “unsavory” company.
Edwin Trellue Jr., 80 (at the time of this publication) remembers well those early days of the town of Ama. Born in New Orleans in 1918, he attended school there two years before moving to Alice Plantation to be closer to relatives. His father Edwin Sr. was originally from Paterson, where the family ran Trellue Cypress Lumber. His mother was Eugenie Sellers Trellue, one of the daughters of Thomas Joseph Sellers. His mother also taught three grades and was principal at the old Ama school, which was demolished in the 1980s. She also served for a time as postmistress.
Life on Alice Plantation was a bit lonely, despite being surrounded by so many relatives. One of his friends, a classmate at Hahnville High, has remained a lifelong friend, Mary Robert, who later taught at Hahnville High School and still lived in Ama until her death.
Edwin Jr. developed a lifelong fascination with radio. As a child, he built his own crystal radio and entertained passing riverboats with music he broadcasted from an old Victrola he spun with his finger. His interest in radio led to college-level studies at Delgado.
During World War II, Edwin Jr. taught electronics classes to thousands of servicemen. He later went to work for Frigidaire in 1949 and retired in 1979.
After retirement he worked for a time at Lakeside Camera in Metairie.
Trellue recalled that Alice Plantation, which once stood near the present-day Ama Airport, had a massive front porch 60 feet in length which had roll-down canvas shades to create an additional room in inclement weather. Two of his aunts held their wedding on that porch. He commented on his grandfather’s inventive skill, such as in the erection of a windmill on the river batture, which pumped water to a 75-foot-tall cistern filtration tower to supply the plantation with indoor plumbing thought the house.
In later years, after the river levee was relocated, the windmill was replaced by a one-cylinder “bulldog” motor.
“My job was to start the pump every morning,” he said.
He met his wife, Hilda Viola of Cedar Grove Plantation in St. Rose, and a Destrehan High School graduate, when she came to stay with her sister, Ellen Sellers, wife of Julius Sr. Edwin Jr.’s mother, Eugenie, was also an aunt to Julius Sr. They married in 1940. Hilda’s family, the Crespo family of St. Rose, was descended from Juaquim Joseph Crespo, originally from Barcelona, Spain. Edwin and Hilda had one son, Edwin Jr. “Butch,” three grandchildren and five great-grandchildren. Hilda later attended Dominican College and taught special education for years and retired at the age of 69.
Alice Plantation was moved back once to avoid the encroaching levee, but in 1938 a fire of mysterious origin leveled the old place.
Nowadays Alice Plantation is long gone, but as evidenced by the construction of a brand-new post office, the town of Ama will endure and prosper.
The following was submitted by Thomas B. Sellers in February 2015: I am Thomas B. Sellers III. Your history of Ama says Julius B. Sellers was the son of Thomas Sellers. That is incorrect. Julius was the son of Robert who was killed in the 1920s while serving as a federal game agent. At that time, my grandfather took Julius and his older brother Tom to live with his sons at Alice Plantation. Thomas B. Sellers Sr. (the gentleman seated in the chair in the family portrait) had three sons: Thomas B. Sellers Jr. (my father), John Sellers (worked at Shell Refinery in Norco for many years) and Hicks Wiser Sellers. He also had three daughters: Emma Mae Clesi, Florence (Fanny) Meric and Louise (Weezie) Montz.
Courtesy of L'Observateur | First Published in 'River Current' magazine, January 2000
The namesake of Hahnville is Michael Hahn, whose career as an attorney also included stints as a notary public, school board member, police juror, newspaper editor, district judge, U.S. Mint director, congressman and Louisiana governor.
The site of Hahnville was once an Indian village known as Quinnitassa. In 1682, after an arduous journey, Lasalle reached what is now known as St. Charles Parish.
Settlers, especially the German colonists at Karlstein upriver, spread along the riverside. Many local names represented decendents of those first European settlers, including Tregre, Oubre, Schexnaydre, Haydel, Triche and LaBranche.
When the first courthouse was established in 1804, a community known simply as “St. Charles Courthouse” grew up around it. The second courthouse was built in 1826, and that building was remodeled and expanded in 1926. However, in 1976 the historic structure was razed to make way for the present courthouse. In the lobby is a scale model of the old courthouse, constructed and donated to the parish by then-court bailiff Lt. Lawrence Dasch.
The first post office in the area, called St. Charles, was established Dec. 9, 1843, with Francois Chaix the first postmaster. This finally closed on May 13, 1880, and the Hahnville post office opened the following day, with Thomas C. Madere as the first postmaster.
In Feb.1872, civil engineer Thomas Sharpe laid out a village around the courthouse and named it Flaggville, for Othelle J. Flagg, a district judge and one-time elector for the Prohibition Party.
At the same time, Hahn laid out the streets of Hahnville on his sugar plantation just upriver from Flaggville, including stores, streets, a dance hall and an upgraded levee. It was separated from Flaggville by Home Place Plantation. Flaggville, however, never caught on as a name. In time, the entire area became commonly accepted as Hahnville.
Hahn was born in Bavaria, Germany, on Nov. 24, 1830. The family moved to America after his father’s death and settled in New Orleans around 1840. He earned his law degree in 1851 from the University of Louisiana (later Tulane) and became a notary public in 1854. At age 22, he began serving on the Orleans Parish School Board, at one time as its president.
He opposed succession from the Union, but secession came. He remained in New Orleans as Union forces arrived in 1862. Accepting the Union victory, he was elected to Congress representing “Union” Louisiana.
A vigorous opponent of slavery, he made anti-slavery speeches everywhere from Haiti to the halls of Congress. In 1864 he became owner and editor of the New Orleans True Delta.
In February 1864, with Louisiana still split between Union and Confederate control, elections were held for governor. The Union-held portion included St. Bernard, St. Charles, St. John the Baptist, Plaquemines, Jefferson, St. James, Ascension, Assumption, Terrebonne, Lafourche, St. Mary, St. Martin and Orleans parishes. The other 35 parishes considered themselves Confederate.
Henry Watkins Allen was elected the Confederate governor and Michael Hahn the Union governor.
In 1865, in the waning days of the war, Hahn resigned to take a seat in the U.S. Senate but was not admitted by the post-war Congress. In 1867 he took over management of the New Orleans Daily Republican, a job he held through 1871. At that point he retired to the sugar plantation he owned in St. Charles Parish.
He was elected to the St. Charles Parish School Board in 1872, founded the St. Charles Herald in 1873, and was elected as state representative in both 1874 and 1876. In August 1876 he was appointed the state Registrar of Voters. In June 1878 he was named superintendent of the New Orleans Mint, and in November 1878 he was elected to the St. Charles Police Jury.
Hahn was elected as a judge in the 26th Judicial District in November 1879, including Jefferson, St. Charles and St. John the Baptist parishes, and re-elected in 1884. In November 1885, he won election to Congress but died in Washington, D.C. on March 15, 1886.
Hahn’s old home still stands, unnoticed, at 141 Elm Street, moved in later years from its original location on River Road.
Another area historic figure was Lt. Gen. Richard Taylor, whose Fashion Plantation was destroyed in 1862 by Union troops. Following the war, he wrote “Destruction and Reconstruction,” a history of the conflict.
Hahnville High School was dedicated on March 28, 1925 and after years of service, the school was razed in the mid-1970s. A new school, also named Hahnville High School, was built on U.S. Highway 90 in Mozella. While the board briefly considered naming the new school “West St. Charles High School,” popular sentiment prevailed, and Hahnville High School, though now located between Boutte and Paradis, kept its name.
Charlie Oubre Jr., 69 at the time of this writing, says with intermarriage he grew up “related to 90 percent of Hahnville.” His mother, Felicie, was a Keller. His father’s mother was a Madere. His wife, Carol, was a Troxler, and his mother-in-law, Beatrice, was a Triche who once ran the St. Charles Herald.
“When I was a teenager I knew everyone in Hahnville by name,” Oubre said.
He remembered as a young boy playing baseball in vacant fields, swimming (against his parents’ wishes) in the river, fishing and robbing watermelon fields.
“We used to get a watermelon out of the field, put it in a ditch of water for an hour to cool it off, and then eat it,” he said.
There were several small country stores throughout Hahnville, including those of his grandfather, Ulysses Keller, and his uncle, Alvin Keller.
“People used to come sit on the store’s porch and play cards and talk," Oubre said. "Politics was a favorite topic of conversation on those country store porches, and politics was always punctuated by parades and rallies. You’d better believe everybody voted."
Ticket-politics were the thing, and political controversy was on everyone’s lips.
Family political affiliations were also all-important.
“If you gave a Madere a job, that took care of the Maderes,” he said.
He graduated in 1947, served on Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s headquarters staff in Korea and played semi-pro baseball. Oubre worked for Shell, then the St. Charles Sheriff’s Office, where he was chief criminal deputy from 1968 until 1972. He was the parish first judicial administrator until 1978 and then elected to Clerk of Court.
As smaller towns faded, Hahnville’s post office came to absorb them. Taft, just upriver, lost its post office in August 1967. Killona likewise lost its post office in 1987. Now Hahnville is considered to stretch from Union Carbide to Matis Curve.
Courtesy of L'Observateur | First published in 'River Current' magazine, January 2000
D’Arensbourg, born in 1693 in Stettin, Pomerania, now on the Polish/German border but then a province of Sweden, distinguished himself at the battle of Pullawa in the Swedish-Russian War. He was presented with an inscribed commemorative sword by King Charles XII.
He led a group of colonists to the German Coast in 1721 and, four years later at the tiny St. Jean des Allemands church in Karlstein, he married Catherine Marguerite Mextrine of Wurtemberg. She presented him with a child, Pierre-Frederick, the following year.
The colonists struggled initially, from disease, natural disaster and the local Indians. The “Le Grand Ouragan” hurricane of Sept. 12, 1722, and the massacre of Nov. 29, 1729, decimated the colony.
Nevertheless, the colony continued to prosper. By 1723, the area included several dozen homes, contained in the settlement of Hoffen (later Glendale, Hymelia, Trinity and Killona plantations). Augsberg (to the rear of Killona and Waterford Plantations) and Mariental (behind the present site of Agrico and OxyChem industrial plants).
In Feb. 1765, d’Arensbourg was knighted in the French military order of St. Louis. By Oct. 28, 1768, after the secret sale of Louisiana by France to Spain, he helped lead the revolution which expelled the Spanish Louisiana governor, Ulloa. He and his comrades were arrested in August 1769, bringing the short-lived independence to an end, and on Oct.24, 1769, he was convicted of high treason. Because of his advanced age, however, he was granted a reprieve while other leaders were executed.
D’Arensbourg died Nov. 18, 1777, at the age of 84, leaving his son, Pierre-Frederick, the plantation. A local legend persists that the ceremonial sword presented to D’Arensbourg is still in the hands of his descendants.
Louisiana Highway 3141 (Mary Plantation Road) is the site of the old Mary Plantation, which adjoined Killona Plantation, owned by Francis Webb of Kentucky during the Civil War. On the eastern edge is a row of houses once known as Freetown, housing former slaves. It is also believed to be the site of the German colonial community of Augsberg.
By 1849, the Waterford property was bought by William B. Whitehead and Company. In 1877, he partnered with Richard A Milliken, who first named the plantation Waterford in 1879. Milliken had teamed with Charles A. Farwell II in 1857 to for Milliken and Farwell Inc. After Milliken died in May 1896 from being struck by the St. Charles Avenue streetcar, Farwell and his family continued administration.
The area was the site of an 1880 labor strike, when field hands at Waterford and Killona plantations campaigned for a pay raise from 75 cents to $1 per day. As the strikers rampaged down River Road towards the parish courthouse, they freed stock and assaulted resisters, the mob swelling to nearly 500 persons.
One leader was Jake Bradley, arrested and charged a year earlier in the murder of Valcour St. Martin. By March 19, a special troop train from New Orleans set out to help the stricken plantations, which by now totaled 18; it arrived March 20.
Judge James G. Augustin addressed the strikers in front of the courthouse, eventually calming the angry mood. Most of the strikers were arrested but on the following day, Augustin paroled them. On May 14, 1912, the Hymelia Crevasse ripped through the levee above Killona and below Lucy (in St. John the Baptist Parish), near the site of Hymelia Plantation (originally known as Kennermore or Killmore Plantation).
The 6:30 p.m. crevasse gouged out the Hymelia Slough, which drains into Lac Des Allemands to the west, starting as a 300-foot break, growing to 700 feet by morning and spread to 1,600 feet before effort to stem the flow began to make headway. The scope of the disaster is show in a triangle from Luling to Donaldsonville to Raceland. It was not finally closed until Aug. 3, 1912.
Education took an early, firm foundation in Killona. Originally, a school was located on the old Trinity Plantation upriver from present-day Killona and called Trinity. At the same time, a “colored” school was noted by 1886. In 1920, all plantation schools changed their name to reflect the local post office names and Trinity became Killona School. At that time, teachers were Annette Hymel and Bernice Lowe. In 1921, citizens raised money for a Rosenwald school for black students. In 1922, Wildred Keller of Montz built the three-room Rosenwald School in Killona on land donated Charles Farwell of Waterford Plantation. Principal for the white school was Ada Munson and Mrs. B.L. Brooks taught at the “colored” school.
In 1932, the old Waterford sugarhouse burned down. It was rebuilt but dismantled in 1951.
St. Charles School Board member Alfred Green recalled his days teaching at the old, gray frame building of Killona School from 1952 to 1957. That school survived until 1961, when it was replaced by Killona Elementary which itself closed in the 1980s. Green worked at Killona School with principal, Mrs. Enola Darensbough, and fellow teachers, Viola Pickett and Arthur Davis. His later career took him to assistant principal at Des Allemands Elementary School.
Life on the Waterford Plantation sugar operation in the 1940s remains a vivid memory for many area residents, such as Leona Picard of Luling. Picard, known to Waterford workers as “Miss Dickie,” was married to the late William Richard “Dick” Picard, the company bookkeeper.
“We loved living on the plantation.” She recalled.
There were more than 20 small houses for employees, many built by Wilson Brady, and those live-on employees received free rent, water, electricity and a stipend for use of an automobile. “We were well taken care of.”
The Picards moved to Waterford in 1942. Their eldest child, Billy, was born on the plantation, along with his younger sister, Roberta. Billy Picard recently ended his 18 years as principal at Landry Middle School.
She recalled once bathing Billy when the plantation bell run as a fire alarm. “I snatched Billy up and ran!” she recalled with a smile.
The plantation at the time also included a small church, school, company store (which sold everything on credit from clothes, to hardware to food), blacksmith shop, the grinding house and dining hall.
“Miss Dickie” also worked with Mr. Berthelot in the company store. “On pay day, we would get their lists of what they bought and deduct it from their pay. It was hard times, especially for some who had big families.”
F. Evans Farwell, second son of Charles Farwell II, was one of the liquidators of the corporation in 1950. In 1963, the property was acquired by Louisiana Power & Light and the old plantation bell was donated by LP&L.
Nowadays, the center of Killona region is the Waterford III nuclear plant, with the Waterford 1 and 2 steam generator plants nearby. Construction of Waterford Units 1 & 2 began in May 1971.
In 1970, plans were announced to build Waterford 3. The nuclear power plant went into operation Sept. 24, 1985.
Karlstein left no remnant on the landscape of the area, but the legacy continues to thrive, in the descendents of those early settlers still thriving in the region, as well as descendents of formers slaves. D’Arensbourg remains a commonly found family name.
Killona opened its post office Sept. 14, 1887, with Louis Huy the first postmaster. Killona continues to cling to existence, though Killona Elementary School and the post office each closed their doors in the 1980s.
Churches continue to provide the heart for the town, including Canaan Baptist Church, founded in 1866, and Children of Israel Baptist Church founded in 1952. The churches co-exist within a block of each other on Killona Drive.
Courtesy of L'Observateur | First Published in 'River Current' magazine, January 2000
Luling began as St. Denis, named as such by a railroad owner and known locally as Old Town or Cajun Town before being known as Gassenville.
Luling was dominated for years by a series of sugar plantations, their names still part of local geography, from Lone Star and Davis to Ellington and Ashton. Sugarhouse Road is next to the old Ellington Plantation site, which is now known as Monsanto Park, through it has officially been Bicentennial Park since 1976.
The town’s present name comes from Florenz Albrecht Luling, a cotton merchant who was born Feb. 20, 1828 in Bremen, Germany.
He was the son of Albrecht Florens Luling and Friedrike Harlaub. He married Marie Georgina Hermann in New Orleans, and they had four children – Adele, Anna, Carl and Hermann.
Ellington Plantation was built in the late 1850s to the design of the younger Charles Gallier by Francois Mayronne, who had bought it from the State of Louisiana on May 9, 1855 for $115,000.
Florenz Luling, meanwhile, commissioned James Gallier Jr. and Richard Esterbrook to design his “villa” in New Orleans in 1861. It was completed in 1865 but was sold in 1871 to the Louisiana Jockey Club for $60,000 as a clubhouse. It was later subdivided into apartments. The site, at 1436 Leda Court, was designated a historical landmark in 1977 by the Historic District Landmark Commission in New Orleans.
After the Civil War, Ellington was acquired by James Gallier of New Orleans, and then Louis Gustave McQueen. It was acquired on Aug. 6, 1868 by Florenz Luling for $40,500.
The 15-by-75-arpent plantation sale also included “dwelling houses, negro cabins, a steam engine, machinery apparatus, agricultural implements and livestock of every kind.”
F.A. Luling sold the plantation to Richard Viterbo (“a resident of Paris, France”) on May 1, 1882 for $37,000 after the accidental drowning of two of his children. He then moved to Mobile, Ala., and died on May 21, 1906 in London, England at a daughter’s home.
Ellington Plantation was also reportedly the ancestral home of film actress Cora Witherspoon, who co-starred with W.C. Fields in “The Bank Dick.” It was later acquired by John Barkley, a former adviser to President Hebert Hoover and then by Louis Al Blouin.
However, the 1926 arson of the sugarhouse spelled the decline of the plantation’s fortunes, and Blouin sold the plantation afterward. Later owners rented out the property and one Mr. Gadeux, developed a seedless orange there, which grew well. But the first crop froze, and he moved away.
Ellington was later sold to Ellington Realty Company and later to Lion Oil. Tragically for local historians, the house was torn down in the early 1960s to save on insurance costs and liability. The old porch banisters went to St. Anthony of Padua Catholic Church for use as an altar rail, and the old organ was kept for years by Jules Hymel.
March 8, 1884 saw the Davis Crevasse split the levee at 1 a.m. at Davis Plantation, downriver from Lone Star. The crevasse left its permanent scar on the landscape, with a crevasse gully still carved and Davis Pond left by the flood. Immediately downriver is the Davis Freshwater Diversion Project constructed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
The population of Luling in 1887 – when the first post office was established – was between 600 and 700. By 1894, the population was up to 1,000. The first postmaster was J. B. Friedman.
In 1902, the first mission chapel of what later became St. Anthony of Padua Catholic Church was established. In 1926, the church relocated to Post and Ellington Streets. That building was formerly a warehouse for the St. Charles School System. St. Anthony’s became a full-fledged parish church in 1961. In 1969, the present church on Angus Drive at Sugarhouse Road was blessed.
In November 1938, two square blocks of riverfront in Luling was claimed by the Mississippi River, and a new levee was built by the Lafourche Levee District. Several homes and businesses were lost forever. The Luling-Hahnville Bank was razed and its vaults moved. For years afterward, its foundation slab could be seen behind the levee near the old Ferry Inn.
Lion Oil Company began construction of its plant in 1952 and was completed in 1954. The plant became known as “The Barton Plant,” after company founder and board chairman Col. T.H. Barton. In September 1955, Lion Oil merged with Monsanto and remained a division of Monsanto Chemical until 1972, when Monsanto divested itself of Lion Oil and completely took over.
On Oct. 20, 1976, the George Prince ferry disaster killed 78 people when the “George Prince” collided with a Norwegian tanker. A monument to the disaster is in front of St. John the Baptist Parish courthouse at Edgard, and another monument was placed in 2009 at the East Bank Bridge Park in Destrehan.
Residential development began swelling the boundaries of Luling after World War II, with Luling Heights, Lakewood Park and Davis Heights east of Monsanto, and then making the jump across Highway 90 to Mimosa Park, Lakewood West and Willowdale Country Club Estates. A massive 2,000-home development on the old Ashton Plantation site in the shadow of the Hale Boggs Bridge now exists.
The Hale Boggs Bridge opened in 1983, and forms part of Interstate 310, which connects Interstate 10 with Highway 90. It was completed in 1993.
One observer of the Luling town history, as his family has been a part of it for so long, is Sidney Gassen Sr.
“My daddy’s brother was an overseer at Ashton Plantation,” he said.
Sidney, 81 at the time of this writing, is a town native, as was his father and grandfather. The old Gassen house, which once stood near the railroad tracks, had been built in the 1820s but was torn down in the 1950s. Sidney’s parents were John Gassen, born in 1883, and Evelina Jourdan, from New Orleans.
“Her parents died when she was small, and she was raised in a convent by nuns,” he recalled.
His mother was of French and Spanish ancestry and his father was of German ancestry.
John Gassen ran a store at Paul Maillard and River Road and had the first gas pump in town, along with running a foot ferry service.
When the levee moved in 1938, the Gassen Store was relocated near the railroad tracks, where it still stands as the former “Papa John” Busalacci Pool Hall.
“Man, they lost some land here!” Sidney remembered of the move, which took place when he was a teenager.
One of a family of 10 children, his chores included milking each morning and evening. Every child had their job to do, inspired to greater effort by their tireless father.
“He never stopped. I don’t know how he did it,” he said.
Sidney graduated from Hahnville High School in 1938 and was soon employed by Celotex in Marrero as an electrician, where he worked 40 years, starting off at 54 cents an hour.
Not long after he got that job, family pressure was on to fix him up. Finally, Sidney's brother-in-law introduced him to his niece in Slidell, Aline Dubuisson.
“When I met Aline, that was it,” he said. “She had that natural beauty.”
However, Sidney was 20 and Aline was 15, so her father sent her to live with relatives in New York for a year, hoping their love would cool down.
“We were writing all the time,” he recalled.
Once she returned, they married right away. They marked their 59th wedding anniversary on Oct. 13, 1999.
Aline worked at Monsanto for 20 years, and at the Gassen's’ restaurant, the Goody Booth, a popular teenage hangout in the 1960s. (Formerly Frank and Tina’s). She also worked for the St. Charles Sheriff’s Office.
The couple shares a love of family, dancing and travel. They ruled as King and Queen of the Krewe of Lul in 1986, and they enjoy their five grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. Tragically, their only child, Sidney Jr., died in 1995 of cancer at the age of 53.
However, Sidney Gassen Sr. sees the family legacy carry on, and he still loves Aline’s smile.
Courtesy of L'Observateur | First published in 'River Current' magazine, January 2000
Mozella is the Anglicized version of “Mosella,” a river in southern France which flows into Germany. That river was the subject of a classic Fourth Century Latin poem, “Evening on the Mosella,” by Demicus Magnus Ausonius, which translates as follows:
“What colour are they now, thy quiet waters?
The evening star has brought the evening light,
And filled the river with the green hillside;
The hilltops waver in the rippling water,
Trembles the absent vine and swells the grape
In thy clear crystal.”
It’s no surprise, then, that Moselle white German wine comes from the same area.
In some references, there is noted “Mosella Townsite,” and in earlier ones, “Mosella Plantation,” between Boutte and Paradis. During 1945 to 1965, it was known as the “Mozella Strip,” a string of nightclubs, bars, motels and lounges. Its origins go back to the Youngs family, prominent citizens for several decades in the Boutte/Paradis area.
Hicks Lewis Youngs and his brother, Elias, were born in New York City – Hicks in 1832 and Elias in 1836. The family had emigrated from England in the mid-1700s. Hicks and Elias came to Louisiana in 1851, and Hicks became the first railroad engineer making the run on the New Orleans and Opelousas Railroad, predecessor of the Illinois Central Gulf Railroad, which still runs thought the area.
He married Melissa Turnage of Springfield, La., apparently in 1857, and had a son, George, but Turnage died in 1861.
During the Civil War, he served with the Confederate Navy and was in charge of a gunboat at Morgan City. He married Isidora Stansbury of Morgan City, but it seems, she died in childbirth in 1862. In 1865, he married Frances “Lizzie” Culpepper of Mississippi, and they settled on their plantation, raising cotton, sugarcane and timber for the railroad.
His brother, Elias, joined them as well, along with his wife, Mosella Turnage Youngs, from Springfield, La. Mosella was likely the sister of Melissa Turnage Youngs.
According to Kicks Youngs’ great grandson, the Rev. Frederick Youngs of Baton Rouge, family traditions were that there was a falling out between the brothers, and Elias and Mosella moved to Florida.
Hicks, however, stayed and raised six children. Hicks was postmaster in Boutte for 16 years, a police juror for 15 years (serving as president throughout) and a school board member for 25 years.
In addition, he was a parish delegate to the 1898 Louisiana Constitutional Convention. Hicks Youngs died in 1905. Elias and Mosella Youngs both died in 1923.
Public service apparently ran in the blood. Son Luther Archibald Youngs became a physician and became a prominent citizen in Paradis. Another son, Hicks Jr., born in Mosella in 1867, became a pharmacist and served two terms as Mayor of Berwick. He died in 1926. His daughter, Emma, a teacher and distributor of Esso products in her mule-drawn wagon, married Thomas Sellers Jr., school superintendent.
The earliest landowner maps and record located in the St. Charles Parish Clerk of Court’s office, an 1856 map of land grants, note that ownership of the later Mosella Plantation area was to Joseph Mariomeaux, who applied on Oct. 15, 1853 to establish a plantation in the area. The practice at the time was for plantation establishment as a business enterprise to be done through a government patent. A lease for cutting timber for railroad maintenance is noted with area property owner Hicks Lewis Youngs.
However, through a series of buyouts, it appears that Elias and Hicks Youngs consolidated the area’s smaller farms into a plantation and established a sugar mill and cotton gin, called Mosella Plantation.
Mosella Plantation made a good attempt it seems, and lasted approximately 20 years before the property was broken up into smaller tracts though a series of purchases until it went into receivership at the outset of the Depression. It was sold out of receivership in February 1937 to Allan B. Crowder for $500, then to Charles Lynn Thompson in May 1941.
While the old house is long gone, the Youngs Cemetery remains at the site of the Mosella Plantation house, and the property has remained in the family. In 1955 John L. Sellers, son of Thomas B. Sellers and Emma Youngs Sellers, daughter of Hicks L. Youngs and Frances "Lizzie" Culpepper Youngs, built a house on the property. Phoebe Sellers Cellos, daughter of John L. and Hazel Shadell Sellers, and husband Greg Cellos, have restored the house and currently reside there.
This raises questions as to the receivership history presented. All heirs of Hick L. Youngs inherited sizable tracts of what was Mosella Plantation, much of which remains in the family."
– Greg and Phoebe S. Cellos (Web Audience Contributors)
Enter Charles LeGarde Sr.
According to his son, retired attorney, Charles Jr., (still a resident of Mozella), “It was a little plantation, about a mile along the track.”
Charles Sr. and his partners, Archille Mongrue and Jack Pizzolato, bought the site and planned to develop a townsite there.
“He spearheaded the buying and wanted the part across the railroad tracks,” Charles Jr. recalled.
“He was a country boy from Lafourche, and he was running the Luling/Hahnville Bank in the mid-1920s. He finished law school and started a practice in Thibodaux.”
The area purchased for $7,150 included truck farmers, notably the Puglise family. LeGarde also rented acreage for cattlemen. Cane farming still continued in the area and, for many years, a “dummy” rail line transported cane to the sugar mill at Ashton Plantation in Luling.
Charles LaGarde Jr., 78, lives next to Hahnville High School, with Tiger Drive running alongside the east edge of his property, which faces U.S. 90. “Highway 90 took 30 feet of my yard when they four-laned it around 1960," he recalled.
When he was a 5-year-old child, the family lived in Luling, and, “One night, Dad got up and showed us the burning of Ellington sugarhouse,” LeGarde recalled of that 1926 night.
His father later built a second house on River Road in Luling, which still stands, fronted by the massive LeGarde Oak, a member of the live Oak Society and one of the largest in the world.
LaGarde graduated from Hahnville High School in 1938. He earned his bachelor’s degree in prelaw from Loyola University in New Orleans, but the U.S. Army and World War II beckoned.
He was a member of the Army Air Corps of Engineers, building airstrips, which took him all over the world in his four years, from Oran in North Africa to Calcutta, India and Shanghai, China. “I didn’t do any fighting, but I got a lot of geography,” he recalled.
Meanwhile, after the war, Mozella mushroomed into what might be called the entertainment capital of the West Bank, with a host of nightclubs, bars, motels and lounges.
As Angelo “Buster” Puglise recalled, there were Joe Kadak’s restaurant*; Betty’s Music Box, run by Betty Plazzo (which still stands, next to McDaniel’s Enterprises); Mike’s Place, operated originally by Mike Laque; the two story Round House Restaurant and Lounge of Frank Matis, the Matchbox of Jackie DePaul; the Raven, which was started by Joe Puglise as a bait shop and who later added a night club; the After Hours Bar run by Milton Matherne (which still stands on the south side of the highway), and Buster’s own The Angel Motel and Angel Lounge (which was knocked down by 1965’s Hurricane Betsy).
“It was a wide-open little town,” Puglise recalled, though with very little violence. He did recall, however, when a female armed robber made her way into a lounge and was shot and killed herself.
“It was never too rowdy,” LaGarde added.
*Anna Kadakova Keller, daughter of Joe Kadak, provides more insight into the history of the popular "Joe's Café."
"[Joe Kadak] was European born, and formerly owned a restaurant in Luling. In 1940-1941, he and my mother bought 30 acres of land in Mozella on Highway 90, from a Mr. Thompson, and opened their new restaurant there, "Joe's Café."[T]here was a bar in the restaurant, but it was primarily a restaurant with private dinning rooms, which became widely known for their food.
During WWII the staff, waitresses and bartenders were ordered not to charge any customer in uniform of the Armed Forces of the United States for whatever they ordered.
It was a gathering place for the politicians of St. Charles and Louisiana. Daddy was the veterans service officer, co-founder of the American Legion Post in Luling, member of the VFW, American Legion District Commander, liason to the Louisiana Adjutant, served on the staff of Louisiana governors Huey P. and Earl Long and was a close friend of Gen. Fleming, Commander of the Louisiana Air National Guard in the 1950s, Watson B. Miller, National Commander of the American Legion and Rep. Hale Boggs. I remember seeing these people along with parish officials in the restaurant when I was young.
On the lake in the back, he raised pigeons, ducks, chickens, guinea hens roamed freely over the land and he had a bee colony for honey. He was an avid hunter and belonged to the Boutte Hunting Club, whose clubhouse was on the Luling side of the railroad tracks in Boutte (Tinney Lane).
The restaurant had a lodge theme with taxidermed ducks, deer heads and other animals. The color scheme was cream with burgundy and light blue. We sold it in 1959, and after exchanging owners serveral times, it was gutted out by the last owner and then turned into a very large bar and pool room. It burned down in the mid 1970s."
Plans were developed in the late 1960s for a new high school on the West Bank to replace the 1922-era Hahnville High School, and a site was purchased for the school in Mozella.
A committee to name the new school called for the public in August 1973 to submit suggestions. Ideas were plentiful, including the following: St. Charles Westgate Senior High School (the committee’s initial favorite), Hahn Senior High School and West St. Charles Senior High School.
Finally, after public pressure was brought to bear, the name for the new school was made – Hahnville High School, which opened in 1975. This established a school named for a town several miles away, with a Boutte mailing address, a Paradis telephone exchange and physically located in Mozella.
With the locating of Hahnville High School, the Mozella area has begun a slow rebirth, as businesses have been trickling into the area to restore its reputation and good name.
Courtesy of L'Observateur | First Published in 'River Current' magazine, January 2000
The Taft post office opened in June 7, 1905, when the population was estimated at 700. The first postmaster was Louis A. Barre. It closed Aug. 11, 1967, and mail was forwarded to Hahnville.
Taft itself was never a large community, as a 1977 newspaper article mentioned its 10 homes and 36 residents at the time. It’s probably even less now.
The town reputedly got its name from Wiliam Howard Taft’s brother Charles, who had lumber interests in the area. W.H. Taft served as president 1903-1913.
IMC-Agrico is on the site of the former Providence Plantation and was once adorned at River Road by the world-famous Locke Breaux Live Oak. With a height of 101 feet, a trunk circumference of 36 feet and a span of 172 feet, it was one of the largest live oaks ever measured.
Over the years, the oak bore many names. It was the Perret Oak on Providence Plantation in 1791. By 1835, it was known as the Davenport Oak. In 1888, the plantation was bought by brothers Joseph and Pierre Brou, and it was called the Brou Oak. Finally, it was named for Samuel Locke Breaux. It died in the 1960s, believed to be nearly 400 years old, from industrial pollution.
Our Lady of the Most Holy Rosary Catholic Church was founded July 26, 1866 by the Rev. Gustave Jobard on land donated by a man named Bougere.
Until 1900, the church also sustained four mission chapels – in Ama, Luling, Paradis and Des Allemands. These became, in the fullness of time, St. Mark, St. Anthony of Padua, St. John the Baptist and St. Gertrude, respectively.
The church began looking at a larger site closer to most of its parishioners in the 1940s. In 1949, Holy Rosary acquired their recreational plot next to the present church and in 1957 bought the property for the present church and rectory. In 1964, the church itself relocated to its present site, downriver from Home Place Plantation between Hahnville and Flaggville. It retains its cemetery in the original location, virtually surrounded by Dow pipelines.
Notable houses in Taft include the 1830 Trosclair-Triche House, the 1805 Zeringue House, the 1840 Troxler House and the 1840 Jacques Roussel House.
The Zeringue House was owned by Louis Edmond Fortier, who earlier built Home Place, from 1815 to 1839. This house also features a later addition build on the main structure – the former Lucy schoolhouse.
The Cummings-Moberly Cypress Company had, by 1907, established operations and built a school for its employees’ children in 1915. It closed, however, in 1918 when the cypress supply was depleted.
The Colonial Dairy opened in 1935 in Taft and was at one point one of the largest in Louisiana. That property was sold in the early 1960s to Hooker Chemical.
A 1958 census showed 200 residents in Taft – 152 white and 48 black. The handful of houses which remained were absorbed by the U.S. Postal Service into Hahnville on Aug. 11, 1967.
Union Carbide built their Taft facility in 1966, and added their Star plant (located on the old Star Plantation site) in 1980. While initial construction was going on, a Star Plantation house was used as Union Carbide’s first office building.
Hooker Chemical (which was bought by Occidental Chemical in 1968 and changed the name officially in 1982) likewise built on the old Colonial Dairy plant site in 1966.
IMC-Argico began in the mid-1960s as American Phosphate, and Witco was established in the laste 1960s on property bought from Carbide. Shell Chemical – Star Plant (now known as Montell Polyolefins) was acquired from Witco in 1977.
Industry, however, both enriched the parish and depleted Taft for land, transforming an area dominated by sugar cane and dairy farming into one of the highest concentrations of industry for the acreage in the state.
Amire Champagne Troxler, 80 at the time of this publication, remembers much of those early days when cattle roamed free on the levee, most people trapped game and raised their own vegetables and her daddy had the first radio in town.
One lifelong result of that radio was her continued devotion to the Dodgers, having listened to their Brooklyn baseball games as a child. She continues to follow her team even after their move to Los Angeles.
She lives in a tiny, neat house she bought in 1944. She was born perhaps a mile upriver from it, the second child of Roselus and Elvina Hymel Champagne. Her parents were living in her grandparents’ home at the time of her birth. Her sister, Eloise, was 17 months older.
One of the first big events in her life was a tornado which wrecked her parent’s home when she was 2 years old. Her mother saw it coming and ran, looking for little Amy. “My mother had a pot of beans on the stove. She looked for me, and I was under the front porch of the house. Five minutes later, the porch fell in. It took the house and everything.”
When she was 5 years old, the family moved into a new house, built by Willie Madere. That 75-year-house still stands, now known as the Nicholas Davis house, and due to be moved soon to Hahnville High School for restoration.
“My daddy had a slide, and he had a dresser on it and I stood on the slide, holding the dresser.”
Another big event came when she was 10 years old and the Taft-Norco ferry was struck on a fogbound day. “I saw it happen!’ Amy remembered. As her father was working at Shell Oil by that time and was suppose to have been on that ferry, she panicked and ran for the house. Fortunately, he was walking out from the field at the time, having decided not to get on the boat because of the fog.
Amy recalls a showboat with a minstrel show which docked “right in front of the house,” and remembered that after the WPA sidewalk was installed along River Road, she used to roller stake all the way to the courthouse in Hahnville. Life was simple and carefree. Amy said she often would go to Paul Lorio’s grocery for rice or beans or sugar. “You could send a child to the store then,” she added.
Lorio had large glass jars on his store counter, filled with cookies or candies, and she would often get “lagniappe,” like a peppermint stick.
The church was also a large presence in her life, and she remembered her catechism classes with Father Andrew Schorr. “I still have my missal.” The church at that time had pews purchased by the area’s prominent families – the Vials, Maderes, Molleres, Pizzolatos and Calliets. “We sat off on the side,” she remembered.
“I had a wonderful life with my parents,” Amy recalls, and added that her mother was “a whiz” at milking cows, but she “just never got the hang of it.”
Instead, she often helped her daddy working in the fields, while her sister developed into a whiz in the kitchen. Always a “daddy’s girl,“ Amy even would go rabbit hunting with him.
She also remembered well the old Hahnville High School. Her sister was in the first class at the school, and she was in the second one. Proudly, Amy recalled being valedictorian of the seventh grade graduation (“I wore a long, white gown and carried daisies”) and finished fifth in her senior class.
Other forms of entertainment enlivened her youthful life, such as taking the ferry to Shell for swimming or seeing movies.
Luling had another attraction as well, a lively dance hall on Paul Maillard Road. “ I danced the night away a lot of nights with the Silver Leaf Orchestra.”
In 1940, she married Clifford Troxler and before long, he was off in World War II in the Army Medical Corps. She rented the house she lived in for $10 a month along with a friend and, together, they’d walk to the post office, eager for letters. In 1944, she bought the house and had it ready for his return. There, they raised five children – four daughters and a son. She now has eight grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
Her father died in 1977 at the age of 91. Her husband died in 1982. Her mother died in early 1989, and her sister died in late 1989.
Now, she enjoys sharing her home with her son and a granddaughter, but her memories of old St. Charles Parish remain as bright as her eyes.
Courtesy of L'Observateur | First Published in 'River Current' magazine, January 2000
Edouard Paradis, originally from Quebec, Canada, came down in 1856 to provide crossties for the railroads being constructed in St. Charles Parish.
The population was small, and education in Paradis had its struggles, just as in the rest of St. Charles Parish.
Early school records are sparse or missing all together for St. Charles Parish. But in 1895, white children along Old Spanish Trail were divided between Boutte and Des Allemands, with black children attending the Paradis Colored School.
Edouard Paradis died in 1902 and. In 1906, his widow sold the town’s site to Ortman W. Crawford, who asked permission to name the community “Paradis.”
The Paradis post office was established May 9, 1907, with Crawford the first postmaster.
The population at the time was estimated tat 450 persons.
Investors from Illinois, led by Julius Funk, developed plans for a model community at Paradis. They donated property for what became known as the Youngs School, a four-room school named for Dr. Luther Youngs (a school board member), and paid half the cost for it, the school at the time being largest in the system.
The development plan for Paradis also included an attempt to relocate the parish seat of government to Paradis, and the addition of a high school, sidewalks and street lighting. Eventually, only the sidewalks and street lights became reality, and most of that has since disappeared.
Dr. Luther Youngs was a significant person in Paradis history, not just for medicine but also for education and journalism. A native of St. Charles Parish, born of a New York couple, he graduated from LSU and established three offices for his medical practice. Dr. Youngs, however, quickly got into a rivalry over school board politics with J.C. Triche, then owner of the St. Charles Herald. At the same time, J.B. Martin became Superintendent and editor of the Herald.
The Paradis Enterprise weekly, published by Dr. Youngs, hit the streets on June 6, 1914, published every Friday (one day earlier than the Saturday Herald). It was in operation until 1921.
On Aug. 15, 1922, the Paradis Times-Hustler came along under the editorship of J. Lahroy Slusher as a monthly publication. However, it also was short-lived.
In time, the Youngs School was replaced in name by the Paradis Consolidated School, and in 1931 Paradis Elementary School was completed. Since then, Paradis gained two other schools, while Paradis Elementary School closed in 1975. These are J.B. Martin Middle School, opened in 1967 and named for the former school superintendent; and R.J. Vial Elementary, opened in 1975 and named for a later superintendent.
Luke Boyer calls himself, 75 at the time of this publication, one of the “old-timers” in the town. His memories remain fresh, and he can still walk down the old streets and point out who lived where when he was a child.
His grandfather, William Boyer, and father, Peter Boyer, came to Paradis from Gheens, and Luke was born here in 1924. “They were part of that generation that built America for us,” he said.
“It was designed to be a showplace,” he recalled of the town plans. “They came here with money and knowledge and planned a showcase town. They wanted people to see the town from the train and say, ‘Hey! I want to live here!’”
He still remembers Mrs. Paradis and her little cottage on the eastern outskirts of town along Old Spanish Trail. However, as a youngster in a town with a small population, everyone knew everyone. “Anybody could whip your tail,” he said. “Anyone could feed you. If the old people needed you to run an errand, you helped them.”
Boyer recalls, “I had two pairs of bib overalls, one with patches I wore every day and one without patches I wore to church.”
Life as a boy was filled with hard work and adventure, he recalled. “We had a wonderful journey as children,” Boyer said. They were also filled with school days at the old Paradis School, which he attended second through fifth grade, then went to Hahnville High School. He remembers that one school bus picked up all the children from Des Allemands, Bayou Gauche, Paradis and Boutte. In time, with the outbreak of World War II, Luke joined the U.S. Army Air Corps, which later became the U.S. Air Force. He met his wife, Lillie Mae Peyregne, whose father Paul, ran the Smile Inn in Des Allemands at the night spot in 1947. Tow years later, they married.
He returned to service with the Air Force in 1952 and remained until 1968, ending up at the St. Charles Parish Sheriff’s Office. Through a succession of sheriffs, he rose to the rank of chief criminal deputy, while he and his wife greeted three children and nine grandchildren.
In a tour of Paradis, Luke Boyer easily pointed out the Oscar Gervais store, once the Paradis Bank; as well as Dr. Young’s home and other landmarks and where other landmarks once stood. Dr. Youngs, in fact, delivered Luke when he was born. Not far away from his home is the Paradis movie theater building, built by his uncle, Oliver Boyer.
He was raised Presbyterian, attending the old church erected in 1914 at the height of Paradis’ prosperity at the corner of Early and Wisner. The church remains but is now St. Andrew’s Episcopal church. Tragically for many families, when they church was sold in 1967, the graves were dug up and moved away from town.
He remembered that Paradis originally was designed to face the railroad tracks and original entire half of the planned town on the other side of the tracks.
Though few signs remain of the showplace town of Paradis, for Luke Boyer, the old town remains in his memory.
Courtesy of L'Observateur | First Published in 'River Current' magazine, January 2000