Sailor's songs in the woods

The bay was one of the few places between New Orleans and Galveston with deep enough draft to allow bigger boats to come in from the Gulf, and it was at the conjunction of the Atchafalaya River and Bayou Teche, the major arteries into the plantation country of south Louisiana.

In later years it would become the westernmost point where side-wheel steamships from the Gulf could connect with a rail line running from Algiers (across the Mississippi River from New Orleans) to Brashear City (as Morgan City was then known). That would make the bay and its wharves a strategic point for shippers by the late 1850s and a much fought over point during the Civil War.

But the railroad had not yet been built and war clouds were not yet ominous in September 1849  when a  letter signed "S.C.R. Jr." was published in The Planters' Banner, giving a glimpse into the flavor and character of the busy bay in the days when practically everything moved by water.

This was just about the time that plantations that had been established by Walter Brashear, one of the first men to make a fortune off of sugar in south Louisiana, were being subdivided by his descendants, but before Brashear City had been developed as a substantial port. Brashear died in 1842, and his descendants evidently began to sell parts of his two plantations in the late 1840s.

At the time the letter was written, paddle-wheeled steamboats had been plying the inland waters of south Louisiana for some time (regular steamboat service between New Orleans and New Iberia began in 1819), but the activity described in S.C.R.'s letter draws a picture of a burgeoning international port where the steamers that worked the inland bayous met sailing ships from faraway and exotic places.

Some of these sailing ships could travel a good way up Bayou Teche and had established regular runs to bring trade goods for sale in communities such as Pattersonville (now Patterson) and Franklin. The Planter's Banner regularly ran notices advertising that "a new schooner load" had replenished the stock at one store or another,

"In the winter the bay presents a perfect panorama," the letter tells us, "numerous steamers, brigs, and barks, with other smaller craft, are seen coming up the harbor under full sail; vessels are visible, too, along the bay and rivers, at plantations, discharging or receiving freight, and the alternately hoarse and shrill cries of the sailors and their merry songs sound oddly enough echoing through the woods."

Daniel Dennett, the editor of the newspaper and a constant promoter of south Louisiana, added his own observations to those of the letter writer.

"When this parish arrives at a high state of perfection in regard to the cultivation of our soil and the banks of these bayous and lakes are filled with beautiful greenery and the waving branches of ornamental trees and rich … shrubbery, and luxuriant and highly cultivated fields,  and splendid dwelling houses, and smiling villages, the eye of the stranger will be captivated, and those who visit St. Mary will look upon these bayous, lakes and bays, whose borders will be clothed in all the rich beauties of nature and art, as the scenery of a perfect paradise, where the verdant images of romance have become realities and where Utopian dreams are no longer considered visionary."

 

---

You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.