A female steamboat captain in Louisiana

Alas, I’ve been busy with work and home remodeling (don’t remodel … just take my advice blindly on this; it will mean working with men of few words who will silently judge you while you laboriously debate monumental decisions such as grout color) so I haven’t had much time for blogging.

However, since my husband keeps telling me the remodeling project is somehow “my thing,” I thought I’d shamelessly share a recent post making the Facebook history group rounds.

In 1930 a New Orleans newspaper proclaimed Blanche Leathers the “only woman licensed river pilot.” I think they meant she was the only woman licensed to be a river pilot, an elite group of people entrusted with guiding ships through Louisiana’s tricky waters.

Blanche wasn’t the only female river pilot of her day. But she was the only one who piloted a veritable floating mansion with plate glass windows, a piano and pretty drapery.

The story goes that Blanche was the daughter of a Tensas Parish cotton planter. In 1879, she was 16 and ready to party for Mardi Gras. She boarded a steamer for New Orleans, fell in love with the captain and married him. They honeymooned aboard the steamer, which also became their marital home.

Blanche’s husband, Captain Boling Leathers, would leave his wife in charge of the boat when he left to go ashore because he didn’t trust his crew. Eventually, she got a river pilot’s license. She would bring steamers down the sugar coast – as the stretch between Baton Rouge and New Orleans was called – with bales of cotton piled so high that you couldn’t see the lower decks.

Life on the river suited Blanche. Passengers included planters, politicians, gamblers and professional opera companies. The price of cabin passage included meals, which for lunch alone meant soup, chicken, roast, chops, vegetables by the dozen, salad, hot rolls, ice cream, cake and pies. It’s a wonder the passengers didn’t roll off the boat.

After 18 years on the river, Captain Blanche retired to New Orleans. A life of movies and shopping and motoring and bridge wasn’t for her. Soon she was back on the river for another stint as captain.

She piloted for a few more years and died in 1940 at age 79.

A lighthouse disappears and reappears in 1875

See that little red icon? That marks Timbalier Bay off the coast of Louisiana. From 1857 to 1941, a keeper was stationed at a lighthouse on this lonely spot to keep the light burning brightly for ships.

As you can imagine, this is a spot vulnerable to hurricanes. From time to time, the lighthouse has fallen prey to Mother Nature and had to be rebuilt.

In 1875, word came from the oystermen that the lighthouse had once again been knocked down, this time taking the keeper and his family with it. The keeper was just referred to as Judge Collin.

Days later came the happy news that the lighthouse was still there with its light burning brightly.

The deputy collector of customs wrote to a New Orleans newspaper confirming the report.

Previous to reports of the gale (and whether it was fake news), the lighthouse made the newspaper because it was fairly new and deemed “large and costly.” So, maybe the oystermen were just having a bit of fun: Ho, ho. That big, shiny lighthouse got knocked down!

From Lighthouse Friends, here are the keepers who kept the lighthouse burning bright through the years. You’ll see that Keeper Collin/Collins lasted two years before calling it quits. Very few lasted a long time at the post. While the solitude likely appeals to some, the fierceness of a Gulf storm probably quickly dulled the charms of lighthouse keeping.

• Elijah Chester (1857 – 1859)
• W. Taylor (1859)
• Jacob Lottmann (1859)
• Louis Alley (1859)
• William Douglas (1859)
• Thomas C. Barton (1865 – 1866)
• B. C. Miller (1866 – )
• F. Collins (1875 – 1876)
• John Anderson (1876 – 1877)
• Richard A. Fitzgerald (1877 – 1881)
• William Munck (1881 – 1884)
• David Conners (1884 – 1885)
• Cornelius Canty (1885 – 1898)
• Fred Tredup (1898 – 1905)
• Joseph B. Brockenborough (1905 – 1906)
• William H. Oliver (1906 – 1908)
• John C. Gray (1908 – at least 1921)
• Eddie M. Authemont (at least 1935 – at least 1941).

The only person buried at the State Capitol

Huey facing the State Capitol he built for all of eternity.

The death of former Gov. Edwin Edwards (Louisiana’s only four-term governor) sparked a debate the other day. It was well known that Edwards wanted to be buried on the Capitol grounds. This was so well known that a political aide admitted to me that she walked the perimeter of the Capitol garden two nights in a row to see if a hole was being secretly dug. She expected one last fast one from our most colorful and controversial governor since it’s supposed to take an act of the Legislature to be buried at the Capitol. If you’re from Louisiana, you tend to expect shenanigans. I can’t explain it.

But back to the debate.

Huey Long – the political firecracker who built the State Capitol building and was gunned down in a marbled hallway there – actually is buried in the Capitol gardens. I thought his wife was placed beside him. My friend insisted it’s just Huey out there in the grounds. I looked it up – and, of course, she was right.

The Legislature passed a resolution to bury Huey outside his beloved State Capitol.

I’m not sure that most tourists realize there’s a grave amongst the neatly trimmed hedgerows and rolling hills of the Capitol gardens. The original marker now is in a museum. It was replaced by a towering monument with a statue of Huey looking at the State Capitol. It doesn’t look like a headstone.

Huey’s original marker.

By the way, there’s a crater in front of the statue that would make a great sledding hill if we got snow in Louisiana. Most Louisiana kids have slid down that hill on their bellies using a piece of cardboard. It’s great fun.

Back to Huey. He wasn’t governor in name when he was assassinated. But he was running the state as a U.S. senator with an eye on the White House. He died 30 hours after he was shot by a rather nerdy looking eye doctor in a Capitol hallway that used to lead to the Governor’s Office (now it’s where the Senate president and House speaker conduct business).

The day of his funeral was sweltering hot. Many among the 100,000-thick crowd fainted from the heat. The LSU band played. His widow wore black. His daughter wore white. From the grand Memorial Hall (wrongly called the Rotunda by most everyone), the heavy coffin was carried down the steps of the State Capitol to the Capitol gardens. It must have been a relief for the pallbearers to place it on a horse-drawn carriage for the rest of the journey to the grave. Huey’s family sat in folding chairs until the graveside service was over and they could escape the spectators to the privacy of a limo.

Here’s a newspaper account: “The sun beat down on trampled grass and dirt-caked concrete. Scraps of paper lay lifeless and hot in the windless air. It looked as though some great picnic party had encamped in the vast garden and now near dusk was straggling home. Huey Long was in his grave.”

He’s been there every since.

As I looked at the coverage of Edwin Edwards’ funeral, which was held over the weekend, I was struck by the similarities to the Long funeral. Both had a horse-drawn hearse, marching band and the difficult, final walk down the steps of the State Capitol to the Capitol gardens since both governors’ viewings were held in Memorial Hall. Edwards’ coffin didn’t stop at the gardens. It moved through and onto the Old State Capitol a few blocks away for his funeral service.

There is a rumor circulating in Louisiana right now. The speculation is that Edwin Edwards was cremated and his ashes quietly spread on the Capitol grounds to fulfill his supposed wish of wanting to be buried there. So maybe Huey’s no longer alone.

Sawmill towns

In the saw mill town of Alco, the mill stopped running in 1945. Saw mill families moved to other saw mill towns. Soon, the only commercial building still in operation was the post office, which hung on until the 1960s.

Ghost towns fascinate me.

I’m not talking about the ghost towns of the Old West with wooden buildings battered by the wind and tumbleweeds blowing across layers of sun-baked dirt. I’m not even sure those towns exist outside “The Brady Bunch.”

What fascinates me are the places that once thrived only to slowly fade away. Places that once had stores selling RC cola and pink frosted gingerbread planks. Places where old people sat on their front porches and watched a very small world pass by. Places where people sang hymns on Sunday mornings and took naps on hot summer days.

The cemetery in Neame has seen better days. It’s hard to believe the town once was home to 500 people. Now all that’s left is an abandoned cemetery.

A lot of ghost towns in Louisiana involve a saw mill.

Lumber companies would build saw mills and construct an entire village around them. My grandmother’s grandparents lived in a Texas saw mill town. Everything was owned by the saw mill, including the workers’ homes. When her grandfather died of a heart attack during his lunch break, the company kindly allowed his widow to live in their humble home until her own death.

Some saw mill towns even had their own schools and cemeteries. The communities tended to be short-lived. Once the mill closed, the town died. People drifted away in search of work.

Saw mill town in Louisiana include: Alco, Ashmore, Barham, Blanche, Carson, Chasmore, Fisher, Holdup, Hutton, Kurthwood, Lecompte, Longleaf, Longville, McNary, Meridian, Neame, Peason, Seiper, Victoria and Ward.

Not all of these are ghost towns. Lecompte is still around and serving fabulous pies at Lea’s.

St. Joseph Co-Cathedral

The interior of Thibodaux’s cathedral.

Even though we live in Baton Rouge, we got married down the bayou in Thibodaux. One of my grandmothers was recovering from cancer surgery at the time. The other was in her 90s and didn’t travel well. So, Thibodaux it was since they both lived in or near that small town.

As an added bonus, the cathedral (technically called the co-cathedral) is GORGEOUS.

And, I was born at the old St. Joseph Hospital in Thibodaux back in the days when nuns helped deliver babies. The hospital was conveniently located next to the cemetery just in case that gall bladder surgery didn’t go so well. But I digress.

St. Joseph was built in the 1920s. It took several years for the church to be completed. The interior is jaw dropping.

The exterior isn’t so shabby either.

But the interior is stunning. The ceilings were just a stark white until the 1940s, when the church redecorated.

On a side note, we got married just after Christmas, when the church was still decorated with poinsettias and evergreen. This was on purpose. It saved on the florist bill. Just a handy tip.

If you’re ever in Thibodaux, take a peek inside. You will think you’ve been transported to Rome.

Free Stuff Friday: Are a disaster junkie? There’s a website for that!

Disasters happen.

I’ll admit it. I’m obsessed with the Titanic disaster. If I could dive down to the wreck and explore it room by room, I would.

Turns out I’m not alone in my fascination with the tragic chapters in history.

Gendisasters.com specializes in curating the events that touched our ancestors’ lives. They’ve archived the newspaper articles on accidents, air disasters, bridge collapses, fires, floods, hurricanes, steamboat explosions and more.

Here’s my dad listening to storytime at the hospital. This was the first of many times he’s made the newspaper.

What can I say? Our lives aren’t terribly newsworthy until disaster strikes. My father first made the newspaper at a year old when he ended up in a hospital sick ward. To this day, I’m not sure why that was newsworthy. I guess cute, sick babies sell papers.

Gendisasters catalogs accidents by state so it’s easy to click on articles. Even better, they’re further cataloged by town.

The Lioness was enroute to Natchitoches, when a load of gunpowder exploded. Fifteen people died, including a congressman.

I have to admit: I had no idea Louisiana’s experienced so many steamboat explosions.

Check it out: http://www.gendisasters.com/

Visiting the past in old postcards

You can visit the past in old postcards. The present is a little trickier since smartphones and social media have edged out postcards.

You can find postcards of Disneyland on eBay – just not at Disneyland.

My 3-year-old niece collects postcards. Do you know how hard it is to find a postcard these days? Well, let me tell you.

We went to Disneyland last year. Since my niece is very much into Disney and often flounces around the house dressed as Elsa, I scoured Main Street, Frontierland, Tom Sawyer’s Island, you name it and couldn’t find a single postcard. Finally, a cast member – who wanted so badly to be helpful – conferred with another cast member and directed me with such optimism to a little shop in Fantasyland filled with everything a wannabe princess could need – except a postcard.

A few years ago, I went to China, the land where tacky souvenirs are made. I found scorpions on a stick, pearls, silk dressing robes, Chinese candy, magnets, playing cards, vases, fans and plenty of figurines. Postcards were scarce until we went to the Silk Market (more of a flea market than piles of rippling silk) in Beijing, where I wandered the stalls while a colleague was measured for a custom-made silk smoking jacket. I stumbled across a stack of postcards and bartered them down in price (I love China). Then, EVERYONE in my group wanted to know where I found postcards. See, there’s still a market for them!

This postcard shows what I imagine downtown San Antonio looked like during my grandmother’s youth, when she briefly lived there.

Postcards used to be much more common. In fact, if you scour eBay, you’ll find snapshots of towns in past decades. They’re even helpfully categorized by state and town. It’s neat to see city streets through our grandparents’ eyes.

I doubt this still exists since motor courts like this are dying. It would be interesting to do the research!

Alas, I couldn’t find any postcards for Louisiana on eBay. So, I looked on etsy, which has loads of them.

Banana Grove Morgan City, LA

A simple Google search yields tons of postcards for sale or shared.

Maybe a resource you hadn’t considered?

The oldest church in the Louisiana Purchase

St. Gabriel Catholic Church

For my birthday each year, we usually drive to Natchez, a town we both love for its quirky restaurants, shops and rich history. The pandemic changed those plans.

The restaurant and shopping options aren’t as plentiful in Natchez as they usually are. Plus, our favorite restaurant didn’t survive the pandemic, and we’re not going to be over that disappointment for a long time. So we went to New Orleans, where I felt like a big city girl in the Museum of Art, made a really poor lunch choice, wandered a Magazine Street antique store crammed with crockery and wished a barefoot, wild-eyed homeless man the best of luck in finding a ride to the shelter.

Pierre Landry was a woodcarver and plantation owner who is buried at St. Gabriel.

For the second day of my close-to-home birthday trip, we headed to Donaldsonville. It’s an only hour away but neither of us had ever been there. It’s an old city surrounded by sugarcane fields and industrial plants. The town itself has a downtown that’s seen better days and loads of old homes. Like most small towns in Louisiana, it’s a fading beauty of a place.

Then we headed back over the Sunshine Bridge and down River Road to St. Gabriel, one of Louisiana’s oldest settlement (now home to McMansions where former governors live and prisons where … , nah, I won’t make that joke since we’re rooting out corruption).

Here’s the thing about River Road in Louisiana. It’s frustrating. We zipped past the former leprosy colony (now home to the National Guard) and met the end of the road. River Road isn’t seamless. It dead ends in places. So you have to backtrack, detour and pick it up again. Think you can drive from New Orleans to Baton Rouge along River Road? Recalibrate your thinking.

The church was closed, but I took a snapshot through one of the windows.

Anyhoo, we finally arrived in St. Gabriel, which holds the oldest church in the Louisiana Purchase. It’s a beautiful story. The Acadians were tossed out of Nova Scotia and scattered to the wind. Some made their way to the American colonies. Others ended up in English prisons or French slums. Many of those who survived (and many didn’t) settled in Louisiana, where they built a church from the native cypress trees. Through the years of hardship and loss, they never lost their faith. The testament to their faith stands to this day.

It’s a small church that still houses the original bell, stamped with the year 1768. Behind the wooden building is a cemetery that must hold far more graves than there are tombstones.

Not everyone buried at St. Gabriel during the 1800s was an Acadian. Above is the grave of Charles Dakin, whose brother designed the Old State Capitol in Baton Rouge. Exactly why he’s buried at St. Gabriel is a mystery. Like his brother, Charles was an architect. They often worked as a team, designing hotels and churches in big cities like New Orleans and Baton Rouge. Yet, here he is, in a country graveyard, among settlers. Like them, he found a resting place far from home.

Miss Teen’s house

A few years ago, I took a picture of the inside of Miss Teen’s house in Gibson. This was her kitchen, where she made chicken spaghetti. The only bathroom in the house was off the kitchen – probably because it was an addition.

Miss Teen was an old woman who was friends with my granny. Her husband died years before she did. Because they were childless, she lived alone in this house and spent a lot of time on the front porch watching the world go by.

The house was a shotgun shack, and there was nothing fancy about it. One room flowed into the next. Most of the rooms had a bed in them.

I always liked Miss Teen’s house because of the details. Look at those beautiful columns in the kitchen. I had to stick my phone through a broken window pane to get this shot. Now I’m glad that I did. The house was torn down recently after sitting abandoned for decades.

A lot of old houses in small towns are disappearing across Louisiana. Beautiful carpentry disappears with them.

From my high school humanities class, I know that Miss Teen’s house was a shotgun shack. It wasn’t a narrow shotgun shack like you’ll find in New Orleans. This was a wider house with Queen Anne trim. However, if you fired a shotgun through the front door, the bullet still would go through the house and out the back door in a straight line.

Look at the high ceilings! It’s such a shame that this beauty is gone.

If you’re like me and you’re fascinated by the beautiful bones of old buildings, visit the Facebook page for abandoned Louisiana and Mississippi: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1861783194060956/

Bread Pudding, Part 2

Ask and ye shall receive.

In search of my Granny’s bread pudding recipe from long ago, I decided to post a request in the family texting circle. Granny is long gone, and the woman never wrote down a recipe in her life. But I was hoping that – together – we might piece this one together.

Here’s the response I got:

My mother: Your Nanny (Aunt Olive who died last year) made it. She would’ve known. But her recipe was like Granny’s – however much you want of this, that and the other.

My aunt: I don’t have it.

My cousin (Aunt Olive’s daughter): Mom used bread, milk, sugar and maybe eggs. Maybe other ingredients. She would whip up her own meringue using egg whites and sugar, then bake it to turn the top a golden brown.

Eureka!

It’s the meringue that was lurking on the outskirts of my memory. That meringue made the bread pudding different from most other bread puddings.

This little bit of family history helped improve my recipe searching tremendously. I scoured the internet for bread pudding with meringue recipes – and the memories started flooding back. Yes, she used warmed milk. Yes, she set the pudding in a pan of water when she baked it. Yes, she used a cake pan. Yes, it only called for a few eggs.

Here’s what I suspect the recipe was (I’ll try it out):

2 cups soft white bread cubes
1 quart scalded milk
2 eggs, slightly beaten, PLUS
2 egg yolks, slightly beaten
9 tablespoons granulated sugar, divided
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon real vanilla
2 egg whites
1/4 cup melted, unsalted butter

directions

Mix bread and milk together. Add the eggs and the egg yolks with 5 tbsp of sugar and salt. Add to the milk mixture with the vanilla and butter.

Mix well and pour into a slightly greased 1 1/2 quart casserole. Bake in a pie pan of water in a 350 degrees F oven for 45 minutes.

For Meringue Topping: Beat the egg whites until stiff and add the 4 tbsp of sugar to it. Pour in slowly.

Top the already baked pudding with it, making swirly peaks for decorations. Bake again at 300 degrees F until a golden brown.