Historic Southwest Louisiana: A Story of Heritage, Industry and Louisiana Living

HISTORIC SOUTHWEST
LOUISIANA
A Story of Heritage, Industry and Louisiana Living
by Adley Cormier
A publication of The Chamber SWLA

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HISTORIC SOUTHWEST
LOUISIANA
A Story of Heritage, Industry and Louisiana Living
by Adley Cormier
A publication of The Chamber SWLA
HPNbooks
A division of Lammert Incorporated
San Antonio, Texas

While relatively young compared to other regions of Louisiana, Southwest Louisiana has a rich history. Here bustling pre-fire downtown Lake Charles at the Ryan and Kirby Street
intersection, 1907.
COURTESY OF MCNEESE STATE UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES, CARE OF FRAZAR LIBRARY, PATI THREAT, ARCHIVIST. COPYRIGHT MSU ARCHIVES.
First Edition
Copyright © 2017 HPNbooks
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, without permission in writing
from the publisher. All inquiries should be addressed to HPNbooks, 11535 Galm Road, Suite 101, San Antonio, Texas, 78254. Phone (800) 749-9790, www.hpnbooks.com.
ISBN: 978-1-944891-42-8
Library of Congress Card Catalog Number: 2017959962
Historic Southwest Louisiana: A Story of Heritage, Industry and Louisiana Living
author: Adley Cormier
contributing writer for “Sharing the Heritage”: Garnette Bane
HPNbooks
president: Ron Lammert
project manager: Tim Lippard
administration: Donna M. Mata, Melissa G. Quinn, Lori K. Smith
book sales: Joe Neely
production: Colin Hart, Evelyn Hart, Glenda Tarazon Krouse, Tim Lippard,
Tony Quinn, Chris Sturdevant
HISTORIC SOUTHWEST LOUISIANA: A Story of Heritage, Industry and Louisiana Living
2

CONTENTS
4 LEGACY SPONSORS
5 PRELUDE
6 CHAPTER 1 Southwest Louisiana before European Exploration and Settlement
12 CHAPTER 2 Colony and Territory
24 CHAPTER 3 Imperial Calcasieu is Born
28 CHAPTER 4 Michigan Men
32 CHAPTER 5 Jean LaFitte and Southwest Louisiana
38 CHAPTER 6 Development of Industry
56 CHAPTER 7 J. B. Watkins and the Selling of Southwest Louisiana
62 CHAPTER 8 Feu-Follet and Historic Cemeteries
66 CHAPTER 9 The Streetcar and Urban Life
68 CHAPTER 10 The Great Fire and the End of Imperial Calcasieu
74 CHAPTER 11 Leisure, Recreation, and Hospitality
80 CHAPTER 12 Horse Racing, Gambling and Gaming
84 CHAPTER 13 Issues Down the Road
86 CHAPTER 14 Great Lore and Random Stories
89 SHARING THE HERITAGE
132 SPONSORS
133 ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CONTENTS
3

LEGACY SPONSORS
Through their generous support, these companies
helped to make this project possible.
Axiall Corporation
1300 PPG Drive
Westlake, LA 70601
337-882-8081
www.axiall.com
Hampton Inn Lake Charles
3175 Holly Hill Road
Lake Charles, Louisiana 70601
337-480-6443
www.baywoodhotels.com
HISTORIC SOUTHWEST LOUISIANA: A Story of Heritage, Industry and Louisiana Living
4

PRELUDE
While this corner of the State is a relatively young part of Louisiana, we have an exceptionally rich treasury of history, legends and
tales. There are fascinating stories told of vast enterprises begun, of land and riches claimed, of new romance, of missed opportunity, of
longing for justice, and of vengeance from beyond the grave, all drawn from the lands of Southwest Louisiana. There is also a fair amount
of just plain quirky goings-on that are now being documented, researched, and shared. Every place has a history, some special places
have both a history and a mythology. Southwest Louisiana is one of the places with both.
Southwest Louisiana offers many unusual tales and legends set in the very singular circumstance of geography, history, and culture.
The relative youth of the region does not make for a banal and ordinary history, to the contrary, ours is a history just richly unfolding
as some of the principal characters, situations, and experiences are only now able to be examined in the light of dispassionate review.
The dean of local historians, the late professor Joe Gray Taylor, once said “the general history of Southwest Louisiana is the personal history
of so-and-so’s grandfather, and in some cases, father. This can be a sensitive issue for true research.” However, two generations have passed
since those words. And some of these colorful personal histories are being explored and shared. Ours is a history still in the making.
This is one area of the nation that has surely worked hard and has taken advantage of its resources. Southwest Louisiana has nearly
always found ways around obstacles, converted misfortune to opportunity, and mustered the courage to continue. Ours is a place
that has literally recreated itself several times from the aftermath of storm, fire, and economic crisis. And while Southwest Louisiana is
currently drawing regional and national attention for its exceptionally high degree of economic development and proven potential for
growth, part of that attention must focus on the area’s own rich and colorful sense of place, a foundation that allowed for acceptance,
re-invention, diversity, and the myriad possibilities we enjoy today.
Southwest Louisiana, sometimes called the Imperial Calcasieu
Region, offers historical facts and popular lore that are just now
being shared fresh to an eager public. As a relatively young part of
the country in terms of settlement patterns, Southwest Louisiana is
built of an array of unusual juxtapositions of individuals, geography,
challenges, opportunities, and solutions. Some writers and historians
have even discerned a distinct spiritual energy in our unique
corner. And, as more family, industry, cultural, and community
stories are being uncovered and shared, the distinctive Southwest
Louisiana heritage is being crafted, honed, and documented. This
process crystallizes that unique sense of geographic place, time and
energy. Knowing about the what, the where and the how, helps us
understand the why (and perhaps the why not) of a region of the
American South that is prospering and growing. With a mix of
industry, attractions, wild open spaces, and diverse people,
Southwest Louisiana has become a point of national interest, of
international investment, and of local pride.
The histories, the legends, and this regional lore are three times
enriching. The first is the discovery of the circumstances by witness
or document; the second, the researching and exploration of the
situation by journalist or scholar (or even family researcher) in the
context of a larger national interconnected history, and the third, the sharing with the general public the actual history, conditions, or
tale, amusing, or interesting, inspiring, cautionary, or horrifying as the case may be. This book will offer a ripe sampling of Southwest
Louisiana’s fascinating history and culture.
–Adley Cormier
Courthouses were designed in 1913 for the newly created parishes of Allen, Beauregard
and Jeff Davis. This original Jeff Davis Courthouse was demolished and replaced with the
current model in Jennings in the 1960s.
COURTESY OF MCNEESE STATE UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES, CARE OF FRAZAR LIBRARY, PATI TREATT, ARCHIVIST. COPYRIGHT
MSU ARCHIVES.
PRELUDE
5

HISTORIC SOUTHWEST LOUISIANA: A Story of Heritage, Industry and Louisiana Living
6

CHAPTER 1
S OUTHWEST L OUISIANA
BEFORE E UROPEAN E XPLORATION AND S ETTLEMENT
Southwest Louisiana is geologically part of the Gulf Coastal plain. The five civil parishes of
southwest Louisiana are standing on some of the youngest land on the North American continent,
physically a series of Pleistocene-era terraces. Most of the soils are sedimentary, having been
deposited for millions of years by the Mississippi, the proto-Mississippi, and other streams that
brought sediment from the center of the continent to deposit into the Gulf of Mexico. Under the
ground are deposits of oil, natural gas, sulfur, salt, and various clays, sands, and gravels.
The Prairie Terrace surface is very flat generally, and slopes about a foot per mile towards the
coastline from Lake Charles to the gulf. Closest to the gulf, the land surface is an intricate
patchwork of salt and fresh-water marshes. Since the arrival of man, canals have been cut in the
marshes as a means of transportation, and this has considerably altered the natural patterns of
drainage and erosion. In Lake Charles the elevation is about 15 to 30 feet above mean sea level.
North and northwest of the city are higher elevations, capping out at about 120 to 150 feet or so
at the northern end where the region borders the parishes of Vernon and Rapides.
The area is drained by a series of coulees and creeks, bayous and rivers. On the west, the
Sabine River forms the boundary with the State of Texas, and before that, formed the international
boundary with the Republic of Texas, the Mexican state of Tejas, and original Spanish colony of
New Spain. On the east, the Mermentau formed part of the old boundary with the historical
mother parishes of St. Landry and of St. Martin.
On the north and western portions of the region, the land is covered by second, third, and
even fourth-generation stands of pine, with some hardwoods to be found along creeks, coulees
and bottoms, along with cypress. Much of the original virgin timber—the famed Calcasieu
longleaf pine, which was deemed by many to be the finest structural wood ever found—was
harvested in a series of extensive lumber enterprises which began early in the nineteenth century.
Most of the virgin forests and woodlands were gone by the 1930s, however sustainable tree-farm
culture has returned lumber, pulpwood, plywood and paper to an industrial basis on some of
these traditional woodland areas. Timber and related industries still operate in Southwest
Louisiana, albeit mostly with quickly grown, farm-raised pine on the northern portions of
the region.
On the map the Calcasieu River is shaped like a large question mark carving the center of the
Imperial Calcasieu region. On its lower course its deep channel connects several characteristic
lagoon-style lakes: Calcasieu or Big Lake, the largest and closest to the gulf, further upstream,
Moss Lake, Prien Lake, and finally the body of water called Lake Charles edged on its east and
south with the namesake city. North of Lake Charles, the river winds upstream in a series of
wide-oxbows, then divides into the West Fork, Houston River, and English Bayou, and then
continues eastward and northward to its source in Vernon Parish. The Calcasieu River gave
its name to the entire region, and also specifically to the grassland prairie complex that
spreads eastward toward the alluvial ridge of the Bayou Teche Valley, and southward to the
coastal marshes.
The great Calcasieu Prairie is the general name for a series of grasslands and treeless drainage
basins in this coastal part of South Louisiana. At the arrival of man, this was a massive grassland,
roughly triangular, that ranged from Evangeline Parish on the north, to south of the city of
Lafayette on the east and to Vinton on the west. This was a sea of tall, dense, saw-edged grasses
and sedges, broken only by occasional trees that lined the coulees and smaller bayous, and by
dense, but narrow, stands of cypress, hardwoods, and pine along the edges of the Calcasieu and
other larger bodies of fresh water.
Many of the early Ishak faced this sort of
cypress edged shoreline along rivers, coulees
and streams. As late as 1910 when this photo
was taken, Pithon Coulee looked considerably
different from what it looks today.
COURTESY OF THE IMPERIAL CALCASIEU MUSEUM, SUSAN
REED, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR. IMAGE COPYRIGHT ICM.
CHAPTER 1
7

Above: Rivers could be barriers that had to
be crossed. Rope ferries connected roads and
trails. Here is the Lake Arthur rope ferry
with walk-on passengers and a horse and
buggy in the 1890s. Rope ferries had been
used since the earliest days of the nineteenth
century in Southwest Louisiana.
COURTESY OF MCNEESE STATE UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES,
CARE OF FRAZAR LIBRARY, PATI THREAT, ARCHIVIST.
COPYRIGHT MSU ARCHIVES.
Below: A 1932 image of the Pithon Coulee
Bridge on Shell Beach Drive captures what
most of the shoreline looked like 100 years
earlier. The coulee once flowed through a
large cypress swamp that edged the lake.
There was a rickety walkway—known as
Lover’s Lane—that crossed the swamp
connecting Front Street with the homes of
Margaret Place until 1920.
COURTESY OF MCNEESE STATE UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES,
CARE OF FRAZAR LIBRARY, PATI THREAT, ARCHIVIST.
COPYRIGHT MSU ARCHIVES.
Geologically a clay hardpan a few feet
below the surface prevented most large
trees from growing on the Calcasieu Prairie.
This sea of grass was a significant barrier to
early exploration and to settlement from east
to west or west to east. Explorers and
early settlers much preferred the easier
transportation options offered by the rivers
and bayous that flowed generally from north
to south though the sea of grass, and those
routes were explored and settled first.
On the coastline there is geologic evidence
of general repeated ocean rise and fall,
building-up and eroding the shoreline at
least four times. With each rise and fall, this
process left stranded sand and shell beaches
in the nearly flat Pleistocene terraces. These
stranded beaches are known as cheniers after
the French word for the massive live oak
trees that are found on these elevated strips
of land. The cheniers rise out of terrain that
is otherwise brackish or freshwater grassland
marsh. Cheniers are easily viewed high
ground in the otherwise featureless marsh,
and were among the earliest locations for
both the native American and for the early
European explorers and settlers.
Grand Chenier roughly parallels the
coastline. When you drive Louisiana Highway
82 from Pecan Island to Cameron, you are
on its ridgeline. The chenier coast, with its
combination of elevated strips of sand, and
mix of freshwater and saltwater marshes, is
perhaps the most distinctive and unusual of
the various landforms of the entire Gulf of
Mexico coastal plain. According to geologists,
this unique chenier plain landform can only
be found here in Southwest Louisiana and in
only one other area of the globe, a remote
coastal part of the People’s Republic of China.
Paleo-archeologists surmise that prehistoric
man migrated over the Bering Land Bridge
some 12 to 15 thousand years ago. By the
time those travelers arrived in Louisiana,
distinctive nations and tribal identities had
been developed, along with languages,
culture, customs, and, in some cases,
advanced civilizations with towns, villages,
agriculture, and art.
When the first European explorers visited
Louisiana, they reported that there were at
least six distinctive tribal nations in evidence
in the area that became the state, each
with differing languages, settlements, and
HISTORIC SOUTHWEST LOUISIANA: A Story of Heritage, Industry and Louisiana Living
8

customs. In Southwest Louisiana, the primary
American Indian nation group was noted
to be the Ishak, popularly known by the
Chitimacha word for the tribe: Attakapas.
The Ishak-Attakapas Indians roamed all
over Southwest Louisiana and to some extent
in Southeast Texas, in hunting bands or in
family units. They maintained small mobile
villages that relocated depending on season
and need. They shot buffalo, deer, small
game, all sorts of bird life, and also
gathered nuts, roots, and berries. In addition,
their diets included fish and shell fish.
In fact long-term revisited seasonal village
sites are marked by mounds of shell
that include bones, ash, cooking stones
(made of fired clay) and broken pottery.
These artifacts are about the sole indicators of
native American site habitation as most other
markers deteriorate quickly in our climate.
There is evidence of organized agriculture
as well, with remnants of maize, squashes,
and beans at some of the settlement sites.
There is significant evidence of Ishak-
Attakapas life prior to European settlement in
several rare and widespread archeologically
investigated mounds along riverbanks and
on cheniers throughout Southwest Louisiana.
Before continuing with native American
settlement, you may ask about the Koasati-
Coushatta native-American nation currently
living in the eastern part of the Imperial
Calcasieu area. The Coushatta Nation relates
that their nation’s history began not in
Louisiana, but rather in the southeastern part
of the United States. This tribe was literally
pushed out of their homelands by the United
States Army and white settlers in a decadeslong
process called the Trail of Tears. The
Koasati-Coushatta tribal nation was physically
Above: Cypress and tupelo grew right to the
water’s edge, note the size of the trees in
comparison to the men standing at the left.
Most of the waterways in southwest
Louisiana were similar.
COURTESY OF MCNEESE STATE UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES,
CARE OF FRAZAR LIBRARY, PATI THREAT, ARCHIVIST.
COPYRIGHT MSU ARCHIVES.
Left: The Calcasieu Pass lighthouse, now
gone, was near Leesburg in Cameron and a
navigation aid for schooners and steamers.
Only the Sabine Pass lighthouse remains,
ready to restore.
COURTESY OF MCNEESE STATE UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES,
CARE OF FRAZAR LIBRARY, PATI THREAT, ARCHIVIST.
COPYRIGHT MSU ARCHIVES.
CHAPTER 1
9

This 1925 image of the construction of the
City Docks of the Port of Lake Charles
shows the pilings to be driven in. In the
background, the Old Spanish Trail bridge
that connects the eastern part of the region
with the western. Once challenges to build,
historical roads and waterways are now
part of our heritage.
Courtesy of McNeese State University Archives, care of
Frazar Library, Pati Threat, Archivist. Copyright MSU Archives.
relocated to the Southwest Louisiana area
in the first half of the nineteenth century.
They are not natives, strictly speaking, to
Southwest Louisiana, but are rather from
Alabama, Georgia and the Carolinas. A related
tribal unit, also subject to the Trail of Tears
relocation of the early part of the nineteenth
century, resides on Alabama-Coushatta lands
in the southeastern Texas Big Thicket area.
The primary native inhabitants of this area,
the Ishak-Attakapas, were linguistically and
genealogically related to the powerful Aztec
Empire of Mexico. Early European explorers
and many of the early native nations of
Louisiana reported that the Ishak-Attakapas
had what appeared to be Aztec-derived
rituals that included cannibalism. However
documented evidence for this is sketchy. The
Ishak-Attakapas were never very numerous,
and early European contact did not include
much in the way of academic study of native
peoples. Much of what is known of the early
tribe is taken from reports or even hearsay
learned from the neighboring tribes, the
Caddo Confederations to the north and
Chitimacha to the east.
The few physical remnants of this culture
are in university and private collections. They
consist mostly of arrowheads and pottery
shards. Locally, the Imperial Calcasieu
Museum has a modest display of Ishak
artifacts. Some European sketches and
drawings of villages and individuals exist in
archive collections. Perhaps the most striking
reminder of the original native culture is the
general and common use of the Ishak word
Calcasieu, which was the honorific name for
the paramount chief of the tribe. The word
has been transliterated in various ways
over the centuries in French, Spanish and
English. (On old maps and documents, you
sometimes see “Quelque-chose” or variations
of spellings of the sounds.) The name
translates to “crying or screaming eagle,”
and it was also the war cry uttered by the
paramount chiefs of the tribe.
HISTORIC SOUTHWEST LOUISIANA: A Story of Heritage, Industry and Louisiana Living
10

The eagle motif is sometimes seen in the
region, particularly in the design of the flag of
Calcasieu Parish, and on the pediment of the
historical Calcasieu-Marine National Bank.
Calcasieu Parish is one of very few parishes
in Louisiana to have a name derived from
native-American sources, and is the only
parish to actually be named for a historical
native-American person.
While many Ishak were exterminated by
pan-epidemic European diseases at first
contact, there are still significant numbers of
individuals in Southwest Louisiana and
Southeast Texas who claim Ishak-Attakapas
ancestry. A serious effort is underway to gain
federal recognition by the descendants of this
early people.
Ishak is the name the tribe used to identify
themselves—the word simply means the
people. The nation divided themselves into
two sub-tribes, the Sunrise People on the east
side of the Sabine, and the Sunset People to
the west. The Chitimacha word Attakapas
meaning “man-eater” was the name adopted by
early explorers for the entire group, those
explorers having encountered and engaged
the Chitimacha first. The Chitimacha Tribe is a
recognized native-American tribe currently
with a significant presence in the Charenton,
Louisiana area of St. Mary Parish in the
Atchafalaya Basin. The Chitimacha tribal range
once included much of South Louisiana and
the Ishak were the primary competing tribe
on the western edge of their natural range.
While the Ishak-Attakapas did not have
permanent large and complex villages, nor
major pottery or other artifacts, there is
evidence that the culture once had a rich
oral history tradition shared by the various
scattered village sites throughout their range.
They were a nomadic and seasonally-driven
people, opportunistic hunter-gatherers who
moved from area to area depending on the
availability of game and fish, rudimentary
agriculture, raids on competing tribes, and
the weather. Many native sites were outright
destroyed by European and American settlers
at first contact, sometimes with the assistance
of other tribes who feared the Ishak.
While there are a few academically
explored sites of long-term inhabitation
marked by the inevitable shell midden,
some other long-term settlement sites were
lost due to economic greed and ignorance.
There was evidence that a large, alligatorshaped
midden existed in Grand Lake
until dredged for shell roads under the
administration of Governor Huey Long.
The building of railroads, the dredging for
canals, and the general clearing and leveling
for settlement were undertaken before a
standard archeological review of affected
lands was commonplace. Arrow heads (made
of traded-for flint and chert), shaped-bone
and horn tools, and pottery shards are rare,
but items are still occasionally found by
amateur enthusiasts along streambeds, in the
piney woods, and on cheniers.
The Old Spanish Trail through west
Calcasieu followed an old Ishak trail.
The earliest east-west trail pioneered by the
Native Americans was cleared for use by
early settlers and eventually graveled and
then paved in the 1920s.
COURTESY OF THE IMPERIAL CALCASIEU MUSEUM, SUSAN
REED, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR. IMAGE COPYRIGHT ICM.
CHAPTER 1
11

HISTORIC SOUTHWEST LOUISIANA: A Story of Heritage, Industry and Louisiana Living
12

CHAPTER 2
C OLONY AND T ERRITORY
The early Spanish explorer Hernando DeSoto first visited the land that would become Louisiana
as early as 1540, however he did not visit the southwest corner of the state, passing instead across
the upper central part north of the Red River. The Frenchman Robert, Sieur de LaSalle sailed just off
the Southwest Louisiana coast in 1684-85 in his failed attempt to find the mouth of the Mississippi.
LaSalle had descended part way down the Mississippi River from Canada and had claimed the entire
river valley for the French King two years earlier. He had named the river valley La Louisiane for
his patron, and had tried to consolidate that claim by ascending the Mississippi River, but failed to
find its mouth. Instead, the explorer attempted to set up a colony on the coast of Texas which resulted
in mutiny and death for the explorer. True settlement of what would become Louisiana had to wait.
Fifteen years later, the colony of Louisiana began with the establishment of Mobile on the
broad mouth of its river in Alabama. The Canadian-born and French-speaking LeMoyne brothers,
Iberville and Bienville, forged a tenuous hold on the gulf coastal edge of the continent. Using
Mobile as a base, they further explored the upper gulf coast, and by portage through the Rigolets,
they explored Lake Pontchartrain, its Northshore, and eventually the Mississippi River including
the network of channels of its complicated bayou and delta areas. Exploring parties soon mapped
the region by water marking the Atchafayala, the Ouachita, the Teche, and the Red River.
They established small bases (called “postes”) throughout the region, notably on Dauphin
Island, in Biloxi, in Natchez, and eventually in New Orleans in 1718. St. Denis had already
established his base at Natchitoches on the Red River in west-north-central Louisiana four years
earlier as part of the French plan. The charge was to connect by river exploration, “poste to poste,”
throughout the center of the continent, starting from the northern end of the Mississippi all
the way to the Gulf. In the setting up of “postes” throughout the river network, the LeMoyne
brothers knew that they had to act (and relatively swiftly, for the French) to counter the Spanish
who had strong claims to both Florida and to what would become Mexico and Texas. The widely
scattered, but well connected “postes” were the French model to claim a continent. Opelousas
and St. Martinville began their histories as the westernmost colonial postes in coastal Louisiana.
Somewhat different from the English and Spanish models for exploration and settlement, the
French generally trod relatively lightly over their vast possessions. The St. Lawrence River offered
a ready pathway to the heart of the continent from the north, the Great Lakes further provided
easy connections and portages though the network of rivers and streams. The French were also,
generally, more accommodating and less territorially focused with the native peoples they
encountered. Many of the early traders, explorers, and the courier-de-bois (trail-runners) entered
into liaisons or marriage with native peoples, and many had a foot, so to speak, in both the land
of the “white man” and in the native-American tribal family.
Trade was the principal function of colonization of North American for the French. Economic
exploitation was the principal reason for European exploration of new lands of course.
But the French focus on trading—mostly of fur and other gathered commodities—was
somewhat in contrast to the British mode of settlement.
In addition to the establishment of agriculture—tobacco and other trade-worthy crops—
and trade with native peoples, the British used their possessions on the North American
continent as a refuge (or a literal banishment) for dissidents, for troublemakers, and for those
they viewed as suspect. British colonies in North America served to solve some issues of
religion: Puritans and Pilgrims were relocated to Massachusetts, the Quakers resited to
Pennsylvania, and the Catholics found new homes in Maryland. The British even transported
convicts to Georgia as a solution to social unrest, a practice they continued in Australia for
several generations after the American Revolution closed the colonial jail of the Americas.
Opposite: The newly completed Calcasieu-
Marine National Bank, now an event center,
sports the crying eagle, the Calcasieu as
part of its impressive façade. At the right is
the Weber Building, part of the Kelly-Weber
companies. The historic bank is on the
National Register, the Weber Building is
now gone.
COURTESY OF THE IMPERIAL CALCASIEU MUSEUM, SUSAN
REED, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR. IMAGE COPYRIGHT ICM.
Below: Southwest Louisiana kept its frontier,
wild-west-meets-deep-south tone for
decades. Even in the early twentieth
century, there were still ox-driven freight
wagons in use in downtown DeRidder.
COURTESY OF MCNEESE STATE UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES,
CARE OF FRAZAR LIBRARY, PATI THREAT, ARCHIVIST.
COPYRIGHT MSU ARCHIVES.
CHAPTER 2
13

However in terms of trade neither the
English, or, for that matter the French, ever
managed to score the quick riches that
favored the Spanish and Portuguese forays
into New World exploration and colonization.
Except for the ready riches of the New Spain
colony of Mexico, gold and silver were
not commodities of trade nor were they the
motivation for colonization in most of North
America, including in Louisiana.
The Spanish model of conquest also placed
a higher value on the missionary possibilities
of the Catholic Church as both an organizer of
society and as a means of production and
control of native peoples. Of course, in the
beginning of Spanish exploration and colonization,
the inducement was the ready and
unexpected access to vast quantities of spices,
gold, and silver. In time this relatively speedy
and successful acquisition of riches, augmented
by literally enslaved native populations
and soon imported workers, would create
the monolithic, repressive, overblown, and
essentially unstable Spanish Empire of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The models for North American colonization
were in place as Louisiana, the central
core of the nation, entered the collective consciousness
as a place to explore and conquer.
Much of the early exploration history of
Louisiana focused on the search for control of
the mouth of the Mississippi River. Once New
Orleans had been established and the routings
northward to the center of the continent and
outwards to the Caribbean and Atlantic plotted
and secured, the colony of Louisiana could
grow along those waterways. The Mississippi
connected the colony, with its intricate
network of water routes from the French
Caribbean Islands, to New Orleans to Illinois
to Montreal and through Quebec, to France.
The European push for exploration and
settlement of the North American Continent
focused on the middle Atlantic coastline
for the English, north Atlantic coastline of
Canada for France, and Florida, the Caribbean,
Central and South America for the Spanish.
Once those initial goals had been met, power
politics, negotiation, and outright war were
used by these major players to control more
of the center of the continent.
The English won the Seven Years War
(called the French and Indian War in North
America), and the French were literally edged
out of Canada and that part of what had
been French North America east of the
Mississippi. The bulk of the western half of
the continent was ceded to and controlled
by Spain who added this new possession to
their longtime colony of New Spain. In addition,
Spain controlled Florida, West Florida,
and the vital “Isle of Orleans,” (New Orleans
and surrounding area). Spain therefore controlled
all Mississippi River access to the Gulf
of Mexico.
The American Revolution added yet
another player to the domination game of
North America. The newly independent
former Thirteen Colonies had both claimed
and settled the western portions of the
former English domains captured from the
French. These western lands extended to
the Mississippi River. Settlers throughout
the western dominions eyed the necessity of
control of the essential port of New Orleans
through which their products could more
easily access the world market. Spanish
colonial control of Louisiana river traffic
began in 1763 and would continue for two
more generations. That Spanish control limited
growth, discouraged entrepreneurism, and
delayed movement of goods, thwarting the
prosperity of at least the western part of the
new United States.
Napoleon’s mastery of continental Europe
maneuvered ownership of Louisiana back
to French control in 1800. In 1803, under
the administration of Thomas Jefferson, the
United States contrived to purchase just the
Isle of Orleans from Napoleon, but instead
they were offered the bulk of the central
part of the continent, including the port of
New Orleans and complete control of the
Mississippi River. The U.S. representatives
were amazed and astonished at the audacity
of this real estate venture. With one grand
gesture, the young United States doubled
their territory. And they secured access to the
gulf, a move which benefitted settlers in the
Ohio River valley, the Northwest Territories,
and much of what is now the states of
Tennessee, Mississippi, and Alabama.
HISTORIC SOUTHWEST LOUISIANA: A Story of Heritage, Industry and Louisiana Living
14

Southwest Louisiana was not part of the
Louisiana Purchase. While the boundaries
were specific: lands drained by the Mississippi
River, plus the Isle of Orleans, that specificity
made for a gray area along the western coastal
edge where drainage patterns were clear
and concise, but the politics were not. The
Spanish insisted that their control extended
to just west of the Teche valley, the most westerly
of the interconnected rivers and bayous
connected to the Mississippi River. The
Americans insisted that they had purchased,
by some accounts, all lands stretching to the
Rio Grande. Claims and counter claims were
bandied by the diplomats for decades.
(Boundary disputes between Louisiana and
Texas are nothing new, they continued for
another 175 years, with a U.S. Supreme Court
decision in 1971 setting the boundary once
and for all in a case that allowed the City of
Port Arthur to retain Texas-sovereignty over
man-made Pleasure Island in Sabine Lake.)
Claims, both geographical and political,
were much clearer upriver, so to speak,
and by the time of the Lewis and Clark
Expedition the western and northern portions
of the Louisiana Purchase were fairly
well determined, documented, and mapped.
However, the international boundary between
the United States and Spanish-controlled
land along the gulf coast was still generations
in its creation.
When Louisiana was admitted as a state in
1812, this southwest corner did not have an
established and verifiable border with Spanish
(and then later Mexican) Texas. Politically,
until the Adams-Onis Treaty set an international
boundary with Texas at the Sabine
River, and practically, until the establishment
of an actual United States military garrison in
Southwest Louisiana, this region was highly
disputed territory. The commandant of the
closest United States fort in Natchitoches,
and the Spanish commander of the garrison
in Nagadoches, Texas, negotiated a practical
agreement that effectively neglected this corner
of the coast. They agreed to send no militia,
no taxmen, no law enforcement into this
area that they had determined to be beyond
their charge. Our corner of the State was thus
the first officially condoned “no man’s land.”
As soon as the lines had been drawn on
the map, at least, by the diplomats in the
Treaty of 1821, the United States proceeded
to establish an official presence in the area
to secure this new international border
between Louisiana and Texas. A modest but
essential facility called Cantonment Atkinson
was that first garrison. Provisioned from
Natchitoches, the Cantonment amounted to
a few buildings, a squad of soldiers, and a
stockade on the northeast corner of the body
of water called Lake Charles. But the fact of
its construction and staffing firmly stated
that Southwestern Louisiana was part of
both the State of Louisiana and of the United
States. A granite stone still marks the site of
the garrison, located just north of Veterans
Lakeside Park near historic Bilbo Cemetery.
Pounding grain. Life on the Calcasieu
prairie did not change for many rural
families between the 1840s and the
twentieth century. This image, taken in
1892, could have been taken almost a
hundred years earlier.
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The placid lakefront of 1950s era Lake
Charles. Note the still working waterfront
with warehouses, boathouses and fuel
depots. For much of its history, the lake
was a working body of water. Post-Rita
improvements along the water’s edge have
provided for a new focus for community
and fun.
COURTESY OF THE IMPERIAL CALCASIEU MUSEUM, SUSAN
REED, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR. IMAGE COPYRIGHT ICM.
Before the establishment of the Cantonment,
Southwest Louisiana had been part of a
roughly 7,500 square mile slice of wilderness
on the western edge of the United States
where no militia, no tax-man and no law
could reach. This original “no man’s land”
included most of the Imperial Calcasieu
region plus portions of what are now Vernon
and Sabine parishes on the north. On the
west, the nominal boundary was commonly
expressed as between the Neches River and
the Sabine, on the east the boundary was
expressed as being between the Mermentau
and Rio Hondo, or the Calcasieu as the
Spanish called the river.
Throughout this exploration and early
settlement period, Southwest Louisiana was a
remote part of the continent, disconnected
with the rest of French-explored, and later
Spanish-controlled, Louisiana. North America’s
great inland waterways provided an easy
early transportation network for both native-
Americans and for European explorers and
settlers—the St. Lawrence connected via
Great Lakes to the Mississippi, and the
Mississippi connected to all the tributaries.
This network opened the center of the continent
to exploration.
But, since the Calcasieu River does not
connect with, nor does it easily portage to
any other waterway, Southwest Louisiana was
relatively isolated, despite it being on the
coast. The coastline was sandy and muddy,
the marshes a barrier and the Calcasieu River
marked by sandbars and a twisting channel.
This relative isolation is an important factor
in the development of local culture and
identity, and provided the matrix for a unique
juxtaposition of cowboy, pirate, explorer,
settler, Cajun, Creole, African-American
and immigrant in forming the mix that is
Southwest Louisiana.
The plentiful and interconnected waterways
of Louisiana had already provided a rich
grid for European exploration and development
in the state, using the North American
exploration and settlement pattern that followed
the waterways. Most early Louisiana
towns were strung along the Mississippi, the
Red, the Teche, the Ouachita and the shores
of Lake Pontchartrain, with most areas wellestablished
by the 1820s. Even the venerable
town of Opelousas, by some accounts the
third or perhaps fourth-oldest town in
Louisiana and the seat of the mother-parish,
St. Landry—was connected to the Red and
the Mississippi via the Courtebleu, the Teche
and the Atchafalaya. Uniquely, Southwest
Louisiana was the only corner of the state
not to be geographically connected to, nor,
for that matter, economically reliant on, the
Mississippi River.
Even as late as 1870, a decade before the
transcontinental southern rail line was completed
through the Imperial Calcasieu region,
travelers wrote in diaries of twelve days to
three weeks to travel just from New Orleans
to southwest Louisiana towns and villages.
Twelve days via a combination of steamboats
along bayous, overland ox- or mule-cart
HISTORIC SOUTHWEST LOUISIANA: A Story of Heritage, Industry and Louisiana Living
16

through saw-toothed prairie grass, and rope
ferries crossing alligator-filled streams were
documented as commonplace. Besides, the
scattered settlements on the Calcasieu prairie
were very few and far between, nearly as
distant from each other as from the closest
established communities on the Teche and
the Red. Because Southwest Louisiana was
physically distant and nominally self-reliant
by being so distant, the area became home
to a distinctive culture unlike anywhere else
on the Gulf Coast.
The original Europeans found three distinct
landforms in Calcasieu at first settlement.
In the east, the long-grass prairies
were edged with scrub trees along coulees
and branches where the waterways pierced
the layer of clay hardpan soil that characterized
the flatlands. To the south were soggy
marshes and isolated long cheniers, ancient
shorelines that paralleled the coastline. The
north-west were virgin woodlands of pines
mixed with hardwoods, and cypress-edged
lakes and streams.
On coastal cheniers, and here-and-there
on the vast southwest prairies, a few late
eighteenth-century French and Spanish
land-grants had been established by the
beginning of the nineteenth century. The
earliest settlers had been granted these
ill-defined and remote parcels of land by the
colonial powers of France and later Spain.
Weakly administered by colonial officials in
New Orleans, Mexico City, and in Havana,
these settlement sites were easily forgotten,
places where independent action was an
absolute necessity for survival.
These holdings were generally scattered
cattle ranches, vacheries in the language of
the settlers, with small subsistence gardens.
The very first settlers were French-speaking,
some directly from France but most were
first or second-generation colonial-born
creoles and creoles-of-color. Later, gallicized
Spanish settlers, freedmen and occasional
American colonists were given letters of
patent to their holdings.
After 1755, the Acadians were dispersed
into Spanish Louisiana. The Acadian community
had been forcibly ejected by the British
from eastern Canadian shores where they had
been settlers for over 150 years. The Acadian
refugees were first settled upriver from New
Orleans in an area called the Cabanochee.
The Cabanochee had seen refugees before.
In 1720, German speaking settlers had
been given land grants there by the French
authorities, giving the area its other name, the
German Coast, in what is St. John, St. James,
and Ascension parishes.
Some of the victims of so-called urban
renewal efforts along with some of the
stalwart champions are seen in this image
of downtown Lake Charles taken from the
south shoreline of the lake. From the left
dark water tower, the fly-space of the
Arcade Theater can be seen, then the
Weber Building (both demolished), then the
Charleston Hotel, the Calcasieu State Bank
(demolished), a mere glimpse of the Majestic
Hotel (demolished), and the copper domed
gem of downtown, the Historic Calcasieu
Courthouse. Much of the foreground,
including the boathouses and wharves were
demolished and a portion of the lake filledin
for the construction of the civic center
and parking lots.
COURTESY OF THE IMPERIAL CALCASIEU MUSEUM, SUSAN
REED, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR. IMAGE COPYRIGHT ICM.
CHAPTER 2
17

Dogtrot cabins were well represented in
the piney woods and prairies of Southwest
Louisiana. This distinctive Upland South
housing style was preferred by the waves of
settlers coming to this area just after the
Louisiana Purchase. The dogtrot cabin
has two living spaces separated by a
covered open hallway which allowed for
cooling breezes and open air but
covered workspaces.
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In addition to integrating the Acadians
into established colonial Louisiana on the
Mississippi, the new Spanish administration
in Louisiana strongly encouraged Acadian resettlement
in the lesser-settled and more
remote Teche valley, along the Lafourche, in
the Avoyelles area, and in the open prairie
lands and bayous of what they considered the
far, far west. The Acadian dispersal continued
in earnest for thirty years, with later settlers
having to venture further and further west in
Spanish Louisiana.
The fact that this far west area was marginally
settled and loosely administered, and
even later became officially a “no man’s land,”
was perhaps a reason to select this land as a
place to live. Given the general hostilities
faced by both the displaced Acadians from
Canada and also by many of the French and
Creoles in their places of origin, the sanctuary
of distance was viewed as preferable to being
close to the centers of power. Some of the
refugees had escaped the terrors of the French
Revolution, or other continental strife to
seek new opportunities in what appeared to
be less dangerous colonial lands. Other early
colonists had been Caribbean Creole planters
escaping economic reversals and then the
outright chaos of the Haitian revolt. Being
physically far away from established centers
of power seemed the prudent thing to do.
At the time, the Southwest Louisiana
prairie and marsh lands were not perceived
as ideal for the production of indigo, cotton,
or sugar cane. Those cash crops were the
mainstay on the prime lands along the
Mississippi, and also on other rivers and
bayous of the State. These were the principal
crops that drove the southern economy and
encouraged the use of slavery as a means
of production.
The prairies and the marshes were viewed
as a challenge to settle and farm, and agricultural
production was difficult to get to
market, given the geography. The Calcasieu
River area simply did not support the sort of
plantation economy that had long been
established and was economically developing
along the other Louisiana waterways and
throughout the American South. This was not
the land of the cotton fields, the Greek-revival
plantation house, and rows of slave cabins,
the symbols of the antebellum Deep South.
Prairie and marsh lands were almost
impossible to cultivate with simple mulepowered
plows, and the prairies were
largely devoid of trees needed for fuel. The
area was perceived as providing some
rough grazing for livestock and range for
hunting, but the untamed grasslands were
considered a barrier and inconvenience to
development. The rangy, but resilient beef
HISTORIC SOUTHWEST LOUISIANA: A Story of Heritage, Industry and Louisiana Living
18

cattle and other livestock produced on these
prairies and marshes did find ready markets
in Opelousas, New Orleans, and in other
eastern Louisiana communities, and thus
provided the basis for a modest agrarian
economy in the region, but life on the
Calcasieu prairie in the early nineteenth
century was harsh, uncomplicated, and lonely.
At this time seasonal cattle drives to eastern
Louisiana and to Mississippi River markets
were created at least a century before the much
better-known Texas and Kansas cattle drives
of the 1870s and 1880s that characterize the
traditional cowboy culture of the American
Southwest. In some respects, large scale North
American production of livestock and moving
cattle to market was pioneered in this area.
The early town of Marion—selected to become
the first parish seat of newly-created Calcasieu
Parish in 1840—had a long-held reputation
as the first safe place where herds could be
forded and ferried across the Calcasieu River.
Cattle stations and ranches (called vacheries in
our context) were scattered along old Indian
trails, on the old Opelousas Road, and on the
few other east-and-west trails. The hospitality
of the trail depended on the marketability of
the cattle on it, and neighbors helped neighbors
for a price. A nickel a head was the standard
price for boarding and fording one head
of cattle at the Calcasieu River near Marion.
Many of the first Southwest Louisiana
pioneers, the LeBleus and the Barbes and
most other early French, Spanish, Creole, and
Acadian families were essentially small-scale
independent, entreprenurial ranchers. Few
had indentured servants or African-American
slaves. Many did not even have hired hands.
Most operations were very modest, and there
is very little evidence of the sorts of conditions
found in the plantation economy systems
of eastern Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama or
other Southern states. In many respects,
the first settlement patterns in Southwest
Louisiana more resembled later conditions in
the American West rather than contemporary
patterns of the traditional South. The farms
were small, range was open and unclaimed,
and farmsteads generally distant from each
other. In addition to the production and
grazing of livestock which provided some
cash income, most settlers hunted and fished,
and had small vegetable farms and poultry.
Except for metal products, textiles, and
gunpowder, they were largely self-sufficient.
Between the Louisiana Purchase and up
to the 1830s, there was a second wave of
settlers in the state and also in Southwest
Louisiana. This wave included relocated
Americans from the so called “Upland South
states” of Tennessee, Kentucky, western North
Carolina, northern Mississippi and Alabama.
Small and simple farmsteads like this one
were sprinkled all over Southwest Louisiana
and were used from the late eighteenth
century to the early twentieth century.
This model was still well maintained and
photographed in the early twentieth century.
The barbed wire fence would have been a
relatively recent addition, most of Southwest
Louisiana was open range.
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Above: Typical log cabin construction in
coastal Louisiana, however note that the
cabin is elevated on piers. Rural life in
Southwest Louisiana in the nineteenth
century meant life in such a cabin, miles
from the nearest neighbor. Self-sufficiency
was important, as was cooperation in times
of mutual need.
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Below: Early log cabins were often reused as
temporary camps or rural retreats.
COURTESY OF THE IMPERIAL CALCASIEU MUSEUM, SUSAN
REED, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR. IMAGE COPYRIGHT ICM.
Most settlers in this wave were second
or third-generation descendants of the
original English, Scottish, Irish, and
Scots-Irish who had pioneered those
areas of the American Southeast in prerevolution
colonial America. Early
Southwest Louisiana pioneer families
like the Perkins, Ryans, Iles, Cowards,
Dunns, Johnsons, and others can trace
family history to this second wave of
settlement from what had been the
southern colonies that formed the new
United States.
Some of the Upland South settlers
first came down the Mississippi River as
workers on flatboats or keelboats that yearly
floated down the river with cargo to the
docks in New Orleans. Upon arrival in the
city, the cargo of whiskey, corn, wheat, hides
and skins, beef cattle, lumber and other commodities
was sold or traded and the boats
were dismantled and likewise sold. Sailors
would either make the journey home by mule
(if the trip had been successful) or on foot.
Some workers chose to remain in a prospering
Louisiana or perhaps were forced to
remain due to a failed venture. A few chose to
explore opportunities in the wilder frontier of
western Louisiana, or passed through this
area on their way to then-Spanish Texas
where many Americans were being drawn by
opportunities and offers of free land there.
Some area families can specifically trace
their origins to men who fought alongside
General Andrew Jackson at the Battle of
New Orleans. Again, offers of free land and
a new start made some of these veterans
homesteaders in the relatively
unsettled areas
to the west of the
Teche Valley.
Additionally, a significant
number of early
Upland South settlers
came to this area having
first tried settling in
East Texas. Sometimes
called Texians, these
pioneers had been
promised both land and
opportunity by
American promoters in Spanish Texas. But
many Texian-Americans found little of either
in Texas, then a rapidly destabilizing colony
of Spain, soon to be in outright revolt. These
relocated Texians found new homes in farwest
Calcasieu, just inside that international
boundary, with some of them responsible for
founding the oldest still-operating public
graveyard in Southwest Louisiana, Big Woods
Cemetery, near the settlement of Edgerly.
Included in the wave of Upland South
settlers are the Bilbo and Ryan families who
came in the waning years of the official
“no man’s land” arrangement in Southwest
Louisiana. In fact, the Bilbo family purchased
the old Cantonment Atkinson site directly
from the United States government for their
home, farm and sawmill on the lake. Just
south of the Bilbo properties, Jacob Ryan
established and operated his farm, mercantile,
and sawmill. Division Street, supposedly,
marked the boundary between those two
farms which crafted the core of the new
settlement called Charley’s Lake, named for
the ancient original European settler, Charles
Sallier. Charley’s Lake, sometimes just called
“The Lake” was only one of several modest
settlements that slowly coalesced on the high
banks of the waterways and on the cheniers
of the marshy coast. Charley’s Lake would
be first organized as Charlestown, then
Charleston, and later re-organized as Lake
Charles in 1867.
Lumber was an urgently needed commodity
in a growing nation, and the ready availability
of cypress and pine along the Calcasieu
made for the rapid development of the area’s
HISTORIC SOUTHWEST LOUISIANA: A Story of Heritage, Industry and Louisiana Living
20

second big industry, that of timber and lumber
production. At first, rough sawyers felled
pine and cypress and dressed the timber
using pit saws for local use. Steam eventually
provided the mill power for this industry,
but the trees were still manually felled by
sawyers, branded as to the owner, and floated
to the saw-mill for processing into dimensional
lumber, siding, shakes and shingles,
and architectural pieces such as doors and
window sash. Calcasieu lumber was used to
build many of the older homes and buildings
in Southwest Louisiana, but from the beginning,
wood products were also shipped out
via shallow-draft schooner, primarily to
Galveston where it found a ready market, and
from Galveston, shipped to other Gulf ports
and even to the Caribbean.
Processing lumber from trees and shipbuilding
were the primary reasons for
the third distinctive wave of settlers, that of
the German and Frisian immigrants who
were escorted here by the Goos family.
Captain Daniel Goos encouraged and led a
large group of settlers from the northern
coasts of Germany and Denmark. The family
and their collateral relations, the Fitzenreiters,
the Moelings, and other pioneer families,
established the community of Goosport for
their sawmills, millwork shops, shipyard,
and associated enterprises. This immigrant
wave to Southwest Louisiana was part of the
first large-scale immigration of Germans and
northern Europeans into North America,
with many settling throughout the North,
Midwest and parts of the South, and even
in the new and short-lived Republic of Texas.
Today, evidence of those early Germans
exists in the names of streets in what is now
north Lake Charles in the area of the Goos
family enterprises: Fitzenreiter, Moeling,
Prater, Katherine, Goos, and other street
names which mark the original site of the
Goosport community and businesses. Names
of many of the pioneer families can be
read on the gravestones of the still wellmaintained
Goos Family Cemetery at the
head of Shattuck Street in Lake Charles.
The German immigrants and their descendants
were expert at building shallow draft
sailing schooners that could be navigated
along the bayous and rivers all along the
Gulf Coast. These thirty- to seventy-foot vessels
were ideal for slipping over the sandbars
at the mouth of the Calcasieu and other
coastal rivers at high tide and nimbly sailing
on both fresh and salt water. In addition
they were seaworthy craft for long hauls to
southern Florida, Cuba, and the Caribbean.
Before the Calcasieu was channelized for
large ocean-going shipping, the river below
Lake Charles was a twisting and winding
route. However, nimble boats and skillful
sailors could navigate its channel, odd
winds, and undependable currents. Gulf
coastal schooners were a significant means
of marine transport before steam and dieselpowered
vessels. These schooners, some fabricated
here and others in perhaps two dozen
coastal communities from Apalachicola to
Corpus Christi, connected towns and cities
from the Rio Grande Valley north and eastward
to Key West, from the coast of Louisiana
southward to the Yucatan and beyond.
In developing the Port of Lake Charles
in the first third of the twentieth century,
waterway connections were planned to the
new Intracoastal Canal that was designed to
skirt the entire Gulf and Atlantic coastlines.
(Interestingly, the principal champion for
the Intracoastal was one-time mayor of
Lake Charles, Leon Locke, sometimes called
the “father of the Intracoastal.”) But later, perhaps
a more significant action was to actually
straighten out the lower Calcasieu River, cutting
through a maze of horseshoe bends to
shorten the route and to deepen the channel.
If you look at a map of the area, you can
see the “islands” created by this process.
Channelization allowed for ocean-going
vessels to come up directly to Lake Charles’
city docks, and this one simplicity most
certainly encouraged the industrial growth
of the entire area. But it also allowed gulf
salt water to continuously and tidally ebb
and flow up the channel, an action which
eventually killed off the cypress that once
grew so proficiently in the river and lakes.
Very early images of Prien Lake, Lake
Charles, and Moss Lake show extensive
cypress and tupelo in the waters that were
fresh at that point, soon to become brackish.
CHAPTER 2
21

The Mermentau River also served as a
highway for commerce and transportation
of agricultural commodities. Here a barge
transports bales of cotton and fuel oil in
Lake Arthur in the early twentieth century.
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Significantly, channelization also allowed
for storm surge to affect populated areas
as much as forty miles from the coast, areas
that had been protected for millennia by
those twisty bends and ox-bows of the
early Calcasieu. Ironically, the very trees
that provided the impetus for the schooner
trade would be eventually destroyed by the
inevitable growth of the shipping trade and
major channelization improvements to the
Port of Lake Charles.
The African-American community was
the next major wave of immigration to this
area. While there were a few slaveowners
in antebellum Calcasieu, there were also
significant numbers of freed men of color.
It is probable that many of the freed men
of color had once been escaped slaves
from older developed parts of Louisiana
who sought freedom in the no man’s land
of Southwest Louisiana, at least during the
actual years of that unique arrangement.
There are accounts in the records of Red
River, Bayou Teche, and Mississippi River
plantations of slaves who “went west”
meaning that both literally and figuratively,
these resourceful men and women became
fugitives and relocated to this area. There are
several cases of very early development of
traditionally black churches in the area,
significantly prior to the Civil War. There
is evidence of entirely African-American
freedmen communities, the best example,
perhaps, being that of Mossville, the origins
of which may be as early as the 1840 establishment
of Calcasieu Parish.
In addition to the French, Spanish,
Creole, Acadian, Upland South, German,
and African-American cultures, Southwest
Louisiana also had early representatives of
HISTORIC SOUTHWEST LOUISIANA: A Story of Heritage, Industry and Louisiana Living
22

European and Middle-Eastern immigrant
groups including the Syrian and Lebanese,
Italian, Irish, Jewish, Danish, Dutch, Croats
and Hungarians. These small immigrant
groups migrated to the area throughout
the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
as part of the immigrant growth of the
United States. For many of these immigrants,
the Port of Galveston or the Port of
New Orleans was the point of entry into
the United States, rather than the traditional
immigrant entry point of Ellis Island.
Many immigrants were merchants, craftsmen,
or professionals.
In some cases, the selection of immigrant
entry point in Galveston or New Orleans
was made by the very practical considerations
of immigrants’ having family ties in the
South or by the existence of established
language communities. In the case of the
Lebanese and Syrian immigrants from the
French-speaking mandates in the Levant,
the selection of New Orleans as a port
of entry was made as much for the fact
that French was still a working language
in Louisiana as the availability of economic
opportunities in the state. Perhaps the
most well known of the area’s many
favorite sons, the world-famous surgeon,
medical pioneer, and educator, Dr. Michael
DeBakey, was first generation descended from
French-speaking Lebanese immigrants who
relocated to Southwest Louisiana in the late
nineteenth century.
Indeed, the area even became a new
home to a new wave of native-Americans,
specifically the Koasati-Coushatta tribe.
This tribal unit was physically relocated
here, having been separated forcibly from
the Creek Confederacy in Georgia and
Alabama. Intensive European-American settlement
in their traditional homeland
territories, and physical pressure by the
U.S. Army and state militia, forced the tribe
westward as part of the tragic “Trail of Tears”
resettlement in the early to middle part of
the nineteenth century. While the Koasati-
Coushattas are not, strictly speaking, native
to Louisiana, they are an important ethnic
and cultural component of Southwest
Louisiana and have been able to make this
land their own.
Baptizing day. The diverse spiritual and
ethnic communities of Southwest Louisiana
are deep and strong. Here is an image of a
grand day for baptisms in the Lake Arthur
area taken in the very early 1900s.
COURTESY OF THE IMPERIAL CALCASIEU MUSEUM, SUSAN
REED, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR. IMAGE COPYRIGHT ICM.
CHAPTER 2
23

HISTORIC SOUTHWEST LOUISIANA: A Story of Heritage, Industry and Louisiana Living
24

CHAPTER 3
I MPERIAL C ALCASIEU IS B ORN
Physically, from 1807 through admission to the United States in 1812, the Territory of Orleans
that would become the State of Louisiana was divided into nineteen civil parishes. The great
southwestern corner was organized into two political units, mother-parishes so to speak,
St. Landry and St. Martin. Two of the oldest communities in Louisiana, Opelousas and
St. Martinville served as the largest towns and seats of government for these parishes. Together,
the mother parishes covered almost twenty thousand square miles of bayou, marsh, prairie and
woodland. For most of the Imperial Calcasieu region, the parish seat was Opelousas and a visit
to the courthouse could mean an arduous trip of seven to twelve or more days on the trail. And
for early settlers, trips to the courthouse were essential to record land claims, to vote, to pay taxes,
or to seek justice.
On March 24 of 1840, the entire western half of St. Landry Parish was carved off to form
new Calcasieu Parish. The 5,000-plus-square-mile southwest corner of Louisiana had a western
international boundary with the Mexican province of Texas, an eastern boundary with St. Landry
and St. Martin Parishes, and a northern boundary with Rapides Parish. The parish seat was set,
by agreement of the justices of the peace, at Comasaque Bluff, a spot on the Calcasieu River that
had been used as a safe crossing for cattle for generations, and was relatively central to the
new parish. The name “Marion” was chosen for the new courthouse town-to-be. Streets and
lots were laid out and a modest “Court House” some sixteen-by-thirty feet was erected for
the quarterly sessions of the circuit judge. Modest accommodations were provided for the
land registrar, for the sheriff, and for the reeves who cleared roadways of loose livestock.
Justices of the peace and deputies patrolled the vast acreage of the diverse and wild Calcasieu
Parish and operated from their own private homes.
For twelve years, Marion served as the parish seat, but it never seemed to grow beyond the
simple task of hosting the courthouse and seeing to the seasonal cattle drives. However, the Ryans
and the Bilbos had long developed significant operations in the growing settlement of Charley’s
Lake. Ryan ran a mercantile and a sawmill (about where Chase Bank is located now in downtown
Lake Charles) and the Bilbos had successful farms, their own sawmill and even a
private graveyard to the north of Ryan’s land. In time, what had been those farms were merged
and subdivided into streets and lots that were sold to newcomers. What is now Division Street in
Lake Charles marks the line between the Bilbo farms and the Ryan enterprises that comprised
the little lakeshore community.
Settlers had also banded into small communities: LeBleu Settlement, Lisbon, Vincent, Bagdad,
Goosport, Walnut Grove, Deesport, Lockport, and Moss Lake all strung on the river; Leesburg,
Johnson’s Bayou and Grand Chenier along the coast; and Sugartown and Merryville in the northern
parts of the parish. By 1852, the Marion courthouse site was determined to be unsatisfactory.
Jacob Ryan, father of Lake Charles, and the area’s first trained lawyer, Samuel Kirby, petitioned to
relocate the parish seat to their community on the lake, where Kirby had donated a parcel of land
on the lake for parish use. Whether a barge was used, or a team of oxen, the Court House was
physically relocated to—and some still say, stolen by—Lake Charles.
That courthouse was soon replaced by four successively larger and more complex buildings.
The 1891 Courthouse was doubled in size by a 1902 addition that lengthened the building
that faced Kirby Street. This long-and-narrow Courthouse was shoehorned by North Court Street
and South Court Street, and bounded on the west by busy and crowded Front Street, which
characterized the working waterfront. (The stacked cornerstones of the double-courthouse still
grace the Historic Calcasieu Courthouse grounds on Ryan Street today.) This double courthouse
was the building that was leveled by the Great Fire of 1910.
The original Cameron Courthouse on
election day. The wooden courthouse was
constructed when Cameron Parish was
created in 1870 from the coastal wards of
Calcasieu Parish and that bit of St. Martin
Parish just east of the Mermentau River.
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CHAPTER 3
25

Above: Cattle drives to eastern markets and
later to rail heads were important activities
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
African-American cowboys played a huge
role in the development of the cattle
industry in Southwest Louisiana.
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Below: A mark of urban sophistication,
Lake Charles had an early streetcar system
that serviced all of the community and for a
time ran twenty-four hours a day and seven
days a week. The system could not compete
with automobiles and busses and was
discontinued in 1927. Many of the workers
were pensioned off with new automobiles
and business plans for taxi service.
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While Southwest Louisiana was not part
of the plantation economy that characterized
much of the rest of Louisiana, there was some
military activity in Imperial Calcasieu during
the War Between the States/American Civil
War. The Battle of Calcasieu Pass took place
in a horseshoe bend of the Calcasieu River
at Leesburg (now the Cameron Courthouse
area) and involved a successful surprise
Confederate attack on two United States
Navy Union gunboats that were blockading
gulf shipments.
Prominent in Texas Civil War lore, the
famous battles (and there were two) of
Sabine Pass were staged equally at the
southwest tip of Calcasieu Parish and the
southeast corner of Texas. Control of
the Sabine focused on the 1856 Sabine
Pass Lighthouse, which is physically in
Louisiana. The unique brick lighthouse with
flared buttresses is still at the far southwest
corner of the state, now near the epicenter
of the several LNG export terminals in
North America.
HISTORIC SOUTHWEST LOUISIANA: A Story of Heritage, Industry and Louisiana Living
26

There were also military maneuvers near
Niblett’s Bluff along the Sabine River as part of
this ongoing western theatre of war. Across
what is now Beauregard and Allen Parishes
was an active Confederate supply road that
connected the Red River ports to east Texas
militia. Popular lore reports that an unexpected
military encounter by scouting parties
from both Union and Confederate troops
near the Lake Charles and Westlake area
ended with a reconciliation barbecue hosted
by the Goos family. However, as this corner of
Louisiana did not have the target plantations,
military installations, factories, or mines,
military campaigns skirted much of Southwest
Louisiana and focused on targets elsewhere.
In 1857 and then again in 1861, the
little settlement at Charley’s Lake, (the town
that “stole” the Court House) incorporated
formally as the town of “Charleston.” One of
the first public actions of the young town
of Charleston was to establish a Protestant
burying ground, considered a necessity,
as the community had only one Catholic
cemetery and private family cemeteries.
Corporation Cemetery, at Moss and Church
Streets, is that Protestant burying ground
established by the young city, and it is still
city-controlled and maintained. By 1867,
after the war was done, dissatisfied with the
name “Charleston,” the young town reincorporated
once again, with the name Lake
Charles, either in honor of Charles Sallier, the
original European settler in the immediate
area, or in recognition of his namesake lake.
In 1870 the southern part of Imperial
Calcasieu had developed significantly in
population and commerce, and petitioned to
form itself into Cameron Parish, with a
courthouse to be located in Leesburg on the
lower Calcasieu River. The site is now also
called Cameron. In addition to the southern
fifthof the old Calcasieu Parish, a small
portion of St. Martin Parish (that part east of
the Mermentau) was carved off to help create
Cameron. Growth of the cattle industry,
fishing, the harvesting of oysters, trapping
and skinning, a new demand for feathers,
and a foray into citrus farming on a
large scale were important factors in the
development of the coastal parish. Cameron
has always had close relations with
Vermilion Parish and was actually connected
by roadway to Pecan Island and Abbeville
long before it was connected to Calcasieu
Parish by road.
However, Cameron Parish remains strongly
connected culturally, economically, and
socially to Calcasieu (and to the rest of
the parishes of Southwest Louisiana).
Particularly with Calcasieu, there is a unique
and significant relationship between these
Louisiana parish partners. That special
relationship includes one of the most tragic
connections there can be between the people
of two government units: Calcasieu Parish
hosts the mass graves of the unidentified
dead from the 1957 Hurricane Audrey
disaster that surprised and devastated
Cameron Parish.
Above: The Cameron Highway under
construction in the 1920s. The route
through the prairies and marshes had to be
painstakingly dredged to provide fill
and drainage.
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Below: The St. Clair House, one of many
turn of the century hotel and inn facilities,
was available for both travelers and for
boarding residents. As rail developed from
the 1880s and through the end of the
century, more and more facilities were
provided for travelers and for tourists.
COURTESY OF THE IMPERIAL CALCASIEU MUSEUM, SUSAN
REED, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR. IMAGE COPYRIGHT ICM.
CHAPTER 3
27

HISTORIC SOUTHWEST LOUISIANA: A Story of Heritage, Industry and Louisiana Living
28

CHAPTER 4
M ICHIGAN
M EN
After the Civil War in the period known as Reconstruction, the now-inland Calcasieu Parish
experienced a rapid revitalization of the lumber industry in particular, led by and financed by the
so-called “Michigan Men.” These entrepreneurs were called “Carpetbaggers” in many other parts
of the South, and carpetbaggers they were. The entrepreneurs bring new capital to finance mills
to process the pine, cypress and hardwoods that grew along the waterways. Many of the new
steam-powered mills were designed to run 24 hours per day, processing large-scale dimensional
lumber, railroad ties, shingles, siding, and millwork both for local use and significantly as the
finished commodity for trading, reviving, and expanding an economic engine that had begun in
the earlier part of the century.
The mills, working with ever diminishing forests, worked their way northward in Calcasieu
Parish expanding into Moss Bluff, Ragley, and Dry Creek, and then into the northern wards that
would become Beauregard and Allen Parishes. Most of the useable virgin timber was sawed up
by the 1930s. The last major industrial drive using virgin lumber in the parish was that of the
turpentine industry that distilled the product from the remaining stumps in the 1930s until the
middle 1950s, primarily from the industry’s principal base in DeQuincy, Louisiana.
To promote their mills and to flaunt their fortunes, some of the early Michigan Men constructed
large show-houses for their families on Broad Street and a few other streets in the historic districts
of Lake Charles. Some of these structures still exist today, and serve as evidence of the once
extensive sawmill heritage of the area. Most Michigan Man houses prominently display the
various specialty products produced by their mills to include custom millwork, windows, doors,
shingles, and board trims. Some houses include the specialty and rare woods products handled
by the mill companies including interior finish woods like curly cypress, fumed and tiger oak,
magnolia and holly parquetry. All of the mills, however, capitalized on the popularity and utility
of Calcasieu Longleaf Pine, a dense, strong and resilient wood ideal for both commercial and
residential construction, and particularly favored for factories, rail trestles, and warehouses.
Perhaps the most famous of the Michigan Man Houses, the Ramsay Mansion on Broad at
Ford streets, for a short time in the late twentieth century, operated as a bed-and-breakfast inn.
Guests of the inn reported stories of what appears to be four ghosts connected with the family
house: one of which was regularly seen reading in the paneled library, another whose hysterical
laughter was heard from the third floor, a third who opened and slammed the front door, and one
only noted by dogs who growled at empty chairs. One supposes that the builder and his family
entertained a variety of unusual company in the early years they occupied the house.
William Ramsay, the builder, certainly led an extravagant and richly textured life. While born
in Canada, he first entered the lumber business in Michigan, at first exploiting the northern pine
of that state. By 1880, when his interest in longleaf Southern pine began, he organized the
Bradley-Ramsay Lumber Company. He built the largest sawmill at the time in Lake Charles and
controlled eventually 150,000 acres of pine woods. He famously sent samples of the distinctive
Calcasieu Longleaf Pine to northern contractors and brokers, and promoted the wood as superior
for industrial construction, bridge building, and high-end millwork. Eventually he purchased
the adjacent Mount Hope mill as well, and added planing and shaping mills and even drying
kiln facilities in Goosport. In stock, he had in excess of 15,000,000 board feet of lumber to
sell anytime to anyone with cash. He eventually operated a railroad to open up additional
timberlands. He was a partner in many area businesses including the Majestic Hotel, banks,
construction companies (using his own wood products), mercantile establishments, and other
enterprises. In 1906, he sold out to the Long-Bel Lumber Company and retired to California,
where he passed away in 1909.
A view of the very modest beginnings
of the Mount Hope Lumber Company,
constructed by Michigan men who invested
capital in Southwest Louisiana just after the
Civil War. In time, the Mount Hope mill
expanded to include more than forty acres
of north Lake Charles and was the largest
mill in Southwest Louisiana.
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REED, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR. IMAGE COPYRIGHT ICM.
CHAPTER 4
29

Top, left: The Edgar Brown Mansion, an
early Michigan Man house. It is currently a
private residence.
COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR.
Top, right: The Nason Mansion, an early
Michigan Man house. It is currently a
private residence.
COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR.
Center, left: The Ramsay Mansion, an early
Michigan Man house. It is currently an
office building.
COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR.
Center, right: The Lock Mansion, an early
Michigan Man house. It is currently a
private residence.
COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR.
Right: The Williams Mansion, an early
Michigan Man house. It currently houses a
law office.
COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR.
HISTORIC SOUTHWEST LOUISIANA: A Story of Heritage, Industry and Louisiana Living
30

The Ramsay Mansion, along with other
Michigan Man houses on Broad Street and
the rich treasury of late nineteenth and early
twentieth century homes in the Charpentier
Historic District connect us directly with
the lumber industry so integral to telling
the story of Southwest Louisiana. These
houses are the important physical reminders
of that industry and of that time. Houses in
Lake Charles and many of the grand houses
in DeRidder, Sulphur, DeQuincy, Vinton,
Jennings, Welsh, and other communities are
testimony in wood of the era of timber as
the economic king of Southwest Louisiana.
Practically none of the sawmills, none of the
planing and shaping mills, none of the drying
kilns, and none of the window, door and sash
shops exist in any scale from those days.
In many cases, those facilities followed the
lumber, with some of the physical equipment
finally playing out in mills on the northwest
Pacific Coast.
At one time, such lumber enterprises lined
both sides of Calcasieu River and covered
most of Westlake and north Lake Charles.
In addition, huge lumber camps were to be
found all over the northern part of the
Calcasieu region. Just remnants remain of
these once grand lumber camps, but at one
time they were complete with housing,
mercantiles, commissaries, banks and lumber
processing mills. Occasional railroad spur
lines or river cuts where old logging roads
ended are sometimes spotted by hunters and
fishermen. From time to time sinker logs are
retrieved from the bottom of the Calcasieu,
timber long ago cut and floated, lost to the
saw, and lost to time, mute testimony to
the 150 years when lumber was king in
Southwest Louisiana.
DeQuincy Stump Mill. The turpentine
industry was able to extract turpentine and
other solvents from the stumps of harvested
pine trees. The turpentine industry shut
down when the final stumps from ancient
trees were processed in the 1950s.
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HISTORIC SOUTHWEST LOUISIANA: A Story of Heritage, Industry and Louisiana Living
32

CHAPTER 5
J EAN L A F ITTE AND S OUTHWEST L OUISIANA
A long, romantic tradition of oral history and substantial local lore exists about Jean Lafitte
and Southwest Louisiana. Legendary tales exist of his involvement and interactions with
Charles Sallier, Michel de Pithon, the Barbe family, Arsene LeBleu, and others who are documented
pioneers in the Imperial Calcasieu region. There are stories of Lafitte gold and treasure buried
along the Contraband Bayou, on Grand Chenier, and other various locations throughout
Southwest Louisiana. There are family stories of adventure and romance, perhaps the most
famous being various versions of “the amethyst brooch” tale.
While many of the tales are charming or thrilling, and while much of the popular lore is totally
unsubstantiated by documented or physical fact, it is certain that Jean Lafitte and his lieutenants
came to Southwest Louisiana as documented history exists to show that his activities on the upper
Gulf coast included regular forays in Southwest Louisiana waters.
However, Jean Lafitte’s early days (prior to 1805) and the time after his base in Galveston Bay
was burned and abandoned (1821) are highly conjectural. There is no agreement among scholars
as to his birthplace or even date of birth. Most likely, he was born to a family of Jewish leatherworkers
in Bordeaux on the southwest coast of France. However, there is also a good possibility
he may have been born in Hispaniola (Haiti), or even in New Orleans. It is most likely that
he was born between 1775 and 1780. For most of his career, he operated in tandem with his
brother, Pierre.
After the abandonment and burning of his operations in Galveston in 1821, there is relatively
little documented history connected with Lafitte’s later life. The most compelling evidence of his
death is in 1823 while pursuing a Spanish silver shipment in the Bay of Honduras. However, this
evidence is recorded in his obituary in the Spanish language Gazetta of Cartegena in Columbia.
Since Neuva Cartegena was the “nation” under whose flag Lafitte acted as a privateer for much of
his career, some historians believe that the obituary was a ruse intended to deceive authorities by
faking his own death.
Since most of the Lafitte activities were in varying degrees illegal and would have subjected
him and his operatives to execution if captured, during their long careers the Lafitte band did
not leave much in the way of incriminating evidence or documentation. There was literally
no objective media in those days and no investigative journalism of the man. As to recording
transactions, ships logs and other documentation were not kept for long periods by Lafitte, or at
least these documents have not yet been discovered by researchers. Records in New Orleans
and other ports list incidents and charges, but these records are essentially the complaints of the
officials and present nothing from the Lafittes themselves.
Cannily, the Lafittes managed to stay a step ahead of authorities, probably by means of
bribing or blackmailing lesser authorities. Enforcement of law was difficult for the colonial
administration of Louisiana and for the early American authorities. The Lafittes had wellestablished
operatives and procedures. For many residents of Louisiana and other Gulf coastal
settlements at the time, the Lafitte enterprises were a source of material goods and wealth.
Known as “the gentleman pirate,” Lafitte tweaked the nose of the establishment, and the
picaresque tales of derring-do were lagniappe.
Jean, and his older brother Pierre, are recorded as operating a blacksmith and warehouse in the
New Orleans French Quarter in 1805 and by 1809 there is solid evidence that these commercial
operations were just the front for an extensive smuggling network along the entire Gulf coast.
Some historians believe that this black market was an economic necessity by providing a range of
affordable goods to remote and underserved markets. The Lafittes provided the highly practical
solution of goods without tariffs, without borders, and without questions.
The bayous and coulees of Southwest
Louisiana provided great cover and
sanctuary for Jean Lafitte and his band
during the days of the no man’s land and
even after. It would take stout and brave
men to find their ways in the unmapped
tangle of waterways and woods.
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CHAPTER 5
33

In 1803, when Napoleon offered and sold
Louisiana to Jefferson, the international city
of New Orleans had been under the rule
of the French or Spanish for almost 100
years and had trading relationships with
Spanish Mexico, Latin America, France, Spain,
England, the new United States and with most
of the Europeanized world including African
colonies. Indeed, it was the aim of the Jefferson
administration to just obtain New Orleans
and its vital trade opportunities, rather than
the real estate bulk of the Louisiana territory.
Southwest Louisiana was not in the
Mississippi valley, as defined by geography,
trading patterns, or settlement, and was very
remote from the authorities in New Orleans
and even more remote from the major
Spanish administrative centers in Havana and
in Mexico City.
This very remoteness from the authorities
made this Southwest Louisiana area a haven
for a variety of legal and illegal activities, or
perhaps more properly stated, a variety of
activities that might be considered illegal
elsewhere. Simply put, Southwest Louisiana
was geographically un-governed, a land
where there was literally no “law.” Into this
vacuum of authority sailed Lafitte and his
privateer bands. This “no man’s land” served
as both market and sanctuary.
True pirates operated out of English or
French island colonies in the Caribbean
specifically to capture Spanish gold and silver
shipments from Mexico and Peru beginning
in the seventeenth century. Privateers using
“letters of marque” flew the flag of some
“parent nation,” England or Spain or even
the U.S. for example, to stop, seize and
HISTORIC SOUTHWEST LOUISIANA: A Story of Heritage, Industry and Louisiana Living
34

plunder goods from ships which flew
enemy flags. Plundered goods were generally
supposed to be delivered to the parent nation
for disposal.
While he claimed to be a privateer (after
1811, at any rate), Jean Lafitte did not deliver
goods to his “parent” nation and disposed of
all his goods through the Barataria or later,
Campeche networks for his own profit and to
pay his operatives. And while he occasionally
dealt in gold and silver, the bulk of the
goods carried by Lafitte ships was general
merchandise. Finished goods went to trade
outwards, and raw materials such as tobacco,
animal skins, lumber, food products, sugar,
and other commodities moved into dozens
of warehouses and safe houses. New Orleans
served as the major transfer point for
these goods moving both upriver and down.
The Lafittes are documented as playing a part
in transactions both above board and on the
black market in New Orleans, and in coastal
and inland markets.
After the Louisiana Purchase, more and
more Americans came to the city of New
Orleans. Governor William Claiborne was
charged by the Jefferson Administration to
consolidate American control of this vital
port. There was less tolerance for illegal
activities and more customs control was
exercised on the docks. A newly enacted
Embargo Act limited trade with Spain and
France. Within a few years of the Purchase,
the Lafitte brothers had to move their general
operations to a new base at Barataria Bay,
south of New Orleans, where they constructed
warehouses, a modest shipyard and even
housing for their operatives.
Sailing schooners plied the waters of
Southwest Louisiana and were just as agile
on the gulf as on inland waters. Jean Lafitte
would have seen the same 100 years earlier.
Here one of the last sailing schooners is
seen in Lake Charles, looking north from
Shell Beach towards the northern shoreline.
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CHAPTER 5
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The Lafittes provided a variety of lucrative
and desirable merchandise at much lower
prices than through official channels. In
addition to the occasional captured gold
and silver, the Lafittes also traded in guns,
ammunition, pots and pans, bolts of cloth,
nails, salt, sides of beef, wines and liquors,
leather goods, dishes, furniture, tools and
machinery. Lafitte also assisted with the relocation
of refugees from European countries,
from the eastern seaboard states, and from
Hispanola particularly, where French speaking
planters were escaping from the Haitian
Insurrection. For a fee, these refugees (or
escapees) were relocated to entirely new lives.
Some of the ancestors of pioneer families in
Southwest Louisiana may have this “transportation
connection” to the Lafitte brothers.
The early prominent settlers Charles Sallier
and Michel de Pithon were most probably
physically relocated (at different times) by
Jean Lafitte during his long relationship with
Southwest Louisiana. Sallier had been of the
minor nobility or landed gentry in France and
fought in the French Revolution. This gave
him good reason to be one of the earliest transplanted
Europeans to relocate permanently
in Southwest Louisiana. Michel de Pithon
supposedly served in the early armies of
Napoleon and came to North America
subsequent to his military service. It may also
be possible that Sallier and Pithon worked as
agents or receivers for Lafitte as well.
It is certain that Lafitte, while based at
Barataria, sailed into the rivers of Southwest
Louisiana seasonally if not more often.
Physically located on the gulf coast between
Barataria and Mexican Gulf ports, the
Calcasieu, the Sabine, and the Mermentau provided
safe and remote anchorage and resources
for ship repair and rigging. In addition, there
were several far-flung European, Creole, and
Acadian families who routinely traded with
Lafitte and probably provided sanctuary.
In particular the Calcasieu (the Rio Hondo
in Spanish Records) was known to be a safe
river with several wide lagoons (Calcasieu or
Big Lake, Moss Lake, and so forth) where fishing
was plentiful, where ship repairs could be
completed, and where temporary camps would
cause no great alarm. European settlement in
the area was sparse and, for these early pioneers,
the sight of a Lafitte ship was considered
a most fortunate boon with fresh supplies
and news of the outside world to be had.
Southwest Louisiana had an additional
value. The region was an actual “No Man’s
Land,” and thus served as official sanctuary
where the Lafittes could operate at-will and in
the open without being pursued by customs
officers or gunboats. Jean Lafitte knew
the area could serve to shelter him and his
activities when his operations continued to
garner the attention of the authorities.
Territorial governor (and later first state
governor) William C. C. Claiborne was
constantly vexed with the privateer and his
black market activities. After all, Lafitte’s
unregulated black market accounted for a
large percentage of trade, perhaps as much as
one-quarter, in the lower Mississippi valley
and upper gulf. When at one point he posted
a bounty of $500 for the pirate Jean Lafitte,
Lafitte famously responded by offering a
bounty of $1,500 for the head of the governor.
There has been much argument as to why
Lafitte chose to reject the British advances
before the Battle of New Orleans. He allied
with Andrew Jackson despite his contentious
relationship with territorial Governor
Claiborne. Lafitte and his crew fought alongside
Jackson’s militia and with Kentucky
riflemen at Chalmette and served honorably.
For their work at the Battle of New Orleans,
Lafitte and his men were actually granted
pardons for their all earlier activities.
However, Lafitte’s illegal activities continued
after the Battle of New Orleans. But the
scope of his empire was becoming curtailed
by competition from legitimate merchants, by
American customs regulations, and by much
improved law enforcement. In addition,
large numbers of American troops were now
permanently stationed in New Orleans to
preclude future invasions and presumably
eradicate black market activities.
Within a few short years operations in
Barataria became unsupportable, and Lafitte
was forced to move his base of operations
to the remote barrier island of Galveston in
what was then the unstable and collapsing
Spanish colony of Mexico. Called Campeche,
HISTORIC SOUTHWEST LOUISIANA: A Story of Heritage, Industry and Louisiana Living
36

the site was in full operation by 1817, with a
shipyard, warehouses, and living quarters on
the bay side of the island, not far from where
Galveston’s Harborside Drive is today.
Given the physical proximity of the
Campeche site to Southwest Louisiana, the
frequency of Lafitte’s visits to Southwest
Louisiana most likely increased. Several ships
used by the Lafittes recorded multiple trips
to the area. There were at least two supply
and distribution bases, called “baracoons,” in
Southwest Louisiana, one near the sheltered
mouth of the Contraband Bayou (not far
from the current city docks of the Port) and
another in western Calcasieu Parish on the
Sabine River between Niblett’s Bluff and
Orange, Texas. Both sites were used to house
operatives and human cargo as well, including
smuggled slaves. One of the rare actual
Lafitte documents recorded sales of smuggled
slaves captured on the seas being sold to
Jim Bowie and other planters from the Bayou
Teche and Red River regions.
In 1818 the Campeche operations were
attacked by native Americans, and later
that year a hurricane flooded the site. The
remaining Lafitte ships continued to operate
in the Gulf and boldly attacked and boarded
American vessels as well as Mexican and
Spanish ships.
Finally in early 1821, the USS Enterprise, a
fourteen-gun frigate delivered an ultimatum
to Lafitte to evacuate Galveston and cease
operations in the upper Gulf. Sensing that his
time on the upper Gulf was indeed limited,
Lafitte razed the remains of the Campeche
base, and he and what was left of his men
sailed away from Galveston to take refuge in
the Yucatan Channel.
In February of 1823, Lafitte attempted to
interfere with what appeared to be two heavily
laden Spanish merchant ships in the Gulf of
Honduras. The vessels turned out to be two
heavily armed Spanish warships that gave
chase. In the ensuing battle, Lafitte was
mortally wounded and was buried at sea,
according to the obituary that ran in the
Cartegena Gazetta in March of that year.
However, reports of his death may have been
exaggerated, as alternative histories tell of
continued Lafitte activities in the Arkansas
River Valley, in Illinois, in the American West,
and on various islands of the Caribbean as
late as the 1850s.
The two most persistent legends of Lafitte
in Southwest Louisiana are the tales of buried
treasure along area waterways and the
versions of the “amethyst brooch” incident at
the Sallier winter cabin site in Lake Charles.
Gold and silver were never the primary
commodities handled by Lafitte, however the
metals are certainly much more portable then
cargoes of pots and pans, gunpower, or
animal pelts. While it is likely that Lafitte
kept much of his ready wealth in gold and
silver with him, and while he may have had
caches hidden and spread out over the
territories he visited, no significant cache of
gold and silver treasure has ever been found,
or perhaps one should say reported to have
been found in Southwest Louisiana. Various
treasure hunters have also failed to find
gold in other areas frequented by Lafitte such
as on the Barataria coast, on the north shore
of Lake Pontchartrain, or in the Galveston
Bay area. Should treasure ever be found, it
most likely would be in the form of coins,
jewelry, or ingots in an iron pot coated
with waxed canvas or lined with lead. The
infamous “dead man’s chest” of common
pirate lore was very rarely ever buried.
The Amethyst Brooch incident is related in
Sallier and LeBleu family lore, and has entered
local mythology. In its telling, the young and
beautiful wife of Charles Sallier, Catherine
Lebleu Sallier, was allegedly discovered
having an affair with Jean Lafitte, or with one
of his lieutenants, at the Sallier winter cabin
located near where the Sallier Oak is today
on the grounds of the Imperial Calcasieu
Museum. In a fit of jealous rage, according to
the tale, Sallier shot at the couple. Catherine
collapsed, and Sallier ran away in remorse,
later to shoot himself in grief, according to
one version. But Catherine had not been
killed, her amethyst brooch had stopped the
bullet from even breaking the skin. She lived
on, continued to rear the six Sallier children,
and is supposedly buried in Sallier Cemetery
in Lake Charles, the long-time family resting
spot donated for public use by Severine
Sallier, the last of those six children.
CHAPTER 5
37

HISTORIC SOUTHWEST LOUISIANA: A Story of Heritage, Industry and Louisiana Living
38

CHAPTER 6
D EVELOPMENT OF I NDUSTRY
CATTLE AND RANCHING
The first industry in Southwest Louisiana was that of cattle raising and herding. Seasonally,
cattle drives to Opelousas and onwards to New Orleans (by barge, in some cases) are recorded
to have begun in the late eighteenth century and continued until at least the 1920s. While records
prior to 1820 can be conjectural, family records, brand records, bills of lading and bills of
sales show that cattle ranching indeed was the significant first activity of settlers on the
Calcasieu Prairie, the cheniers, and marshes.
For some landowners, the housing, feeding and fording of cattle belonging to Texas and west
Calcasieu ranchers was also a significant source of cash. Records show a toll fee of a nickel a head
as standard for temporarily housing and providing safe crossing of the Calcasieu River at Marion
or Old Town. Cattle drovers were a combination of rancher-owners, some were African-American
slave cowboys, and others were freedmen of color or Creoles. To some extent, the concept of
African-American cowboys is a southwest Louisiana creation, to which local modern trail rides,
horsemanship, and ranching can attest.
Cattle drive routes generally ran from west Calcasieu and southeast Texas territory northward
of Lake Charles to converge on more easily forded spots of the Calcasieu River near English
Bayou. The LeBleu family was one of the biggest landowners and ranchers catering to trail
needs of drovers. The pioneer LeBleu family had a presence between English Bayou and what
is now Lebleu Settlement as early as 1770.
In a practical sense, range cattle provided a means of cash support and security for most of
the early families on the prairies and the marshes. The cattle drives were followed by return
trips bearing textiles, household goods, and gunpowder from eastern markets. When Cameron
Parish was created in 1870 one factor in its early creation was the exceptionally large number
of landowners with brands and property demanding the convenience of having their own local
government for record-keeping, dispute management, and property records.
Cattle ranching continued to be significant throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, perhaps peaking in importance with the construction of the Swift Plant in the middle
1930s. The Swift Plant was not only a processing unit of the meat packing Swift companies,
but also conducted education and training for local ranchers on the most scientific methods of
breeding, stock management, and herd improvement. The Swift plant maintained demonstration
farms, and promoted new techniques for pest control, animal husbandry, and farm hygiene.
In the related area of dairy farming, local dairymen once
sustained three processing facilities for milk, cream and ice
cream. The now gone Borden’s dairy, once located at Ryan
across from Lock Park, processed local milk, and made cream
and butter, and famously ice-cream vended at their own popular
parlor. The locally controlled Guth’s Dairy operated a plant,
now closed on Hodges Street, and regionally marketed their
products using the tag line “your local cow.” On Highway 90,
Walker-Roemer, a Louisiana-based dairy processer, operated a
production facility for several decades as well, not far from the beef
processing Swift Plant. The local processing of dairy products,
as well as the local commercial herds of dairy cattle, were
ended in the 1970s with the availability of less-expensively
nationally sourced milk, cream, butter and other products.
Opposite, top: Construction of the
Swift Plant and at right is one of the show
barns. The facility was also a demonstration
site for improved beef production and taught
classes in animal husbandry and
stock rearing.
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Opposite, bottom: The impressive
Swift Plant was the logical economic
culmination of two hundred years of cattle
ranching in Southwest Louisiana. It was
designed to process hundreds of head of
cattle daily, however the market was not
sustainable and the facility was eventually
shuttered and then demolished.
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Below: Cattle drives and cattle roundups
have been part of Southwest Louisiana from
the earliest days of settlement.
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CHAPTER 6
39

Olmstead Shipyard on Contraband Bayou
providing safe haven for vessels during
Hurricane Delia. The local shipyards
provided sanctuary for these fishing vessels
in times of storm as part of the service they
provide to the fishing and shipping
industries.
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SHIPBUILDING
Early navigation and transportation on
the Calcasieu, the Mermentau, and the
Sabine were also an industry for the area.
Goods and supplies traveled easier by water,
and as early as 1852, fifteen to twenty fullyrigged
schooners were in sail on the lake and
on the rivers. Some of the schooners were
actually created of the cypress and hardwoods
harvested in the Calcasieu region.
Most were engaged in the coastal trade with
Galveston, Port Isabel, Corpus Christi,
Tampico, New Orleans, Pensacola, Brashear
City, and the Yucatan. The schooners carried
both passengers and freight, concentrating on
exporting hides, lumber, wax, salted beef and
beef-on-the-hoof, and bringing in finished
goods, textiles, gunpowder, machinery, lamp
oil, and ice.
Captain Daniel Goos and the influx of
German-speaking settlers from the Frisian
Coast of northern Europe gave a huge boost
to the crafting of coastal schooners using the
local timber resources. The Goosport shipyards
included sawmills that processed trees
into agile sailing craft. The schooners were
tuned to capture every bit of the fickle winds
on bayou routes, and were shallow but sturdy
draft vessels useful all along the gulf coast.
The Clooney Shipyard—probably the largest
at the turn of the century—but also the Parks,
Valverde, Calcasieu, Sweeney, LeeVac, Olmstead,
Burton and other shipyards on the Calcasieu
and the Contraband crafted and repaired vessels
of wood and, later, steel for use in the oil
exploration, fishing, barge transportation, and
recreational industries. On the Mermentau, Gulf
Island Shipyards continues the tradition of
quality ship construction as well.
HISTORIC SOUTHWEST LOUISIANA: A Story of Heritage, Industry and Louisiana Living
40

Above: Rivers helped transport people,
but could also be barriers. The Hazel was
the ferry connecting Lake Charles and
Westlake until the Old Spanish Trail bridge
was completed at the foot of Shell Beach
Drive in 1916.
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Left: Shipbuilding and fitting were
important industries fostered by the Port of
Lake Charles. Vessels could be readied for
the high seas, or for inland waters both for
transportation and for fishing.
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Below: Short line rail was used to extend
the range of the lumberman in seeking new
resources. Tracks, sometimes temporary,
were built into virgin territory to haul out
the famed Calcasieu Heart Pine.
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Opposite, top: Steam powered cranes
allowed for more capacity at area sawmills.
However, as the trees were harvested, the
industry moved northward into what
became Allen and Beauregard parishes.
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Opposite, bottom: An early view of one
of Lake Charles’ Michigan Man houses,
the Nason House. Known elsewhere in the
South as carpetbaggers, the “Michigan Men”
in Southwest Louisiana at least, revived the
lumber industry and commerce in general
with an infusion of cash and
entrepreneurial energy.
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TIMBER AND LUMBER
The immigrant Germans were expert
sawyers and prolific mill workers, boosting
the productivity of lumber and
timber enterprises by using steam-powered
engines. As early as 1870, the United States
Census reported eleven major steam-powered
engines and four water wheels in place
in Southwest Louisiana. Sawmills began to
work twenty-four hours a day as sawyers
felled, trimmed and branded trees, dragging
them to the river. At first, the water slowly
floated them to the mills which lined both
sides of the Calcasieu. It is reported that one
could walk from the Pujo Street docks to
Westlake by carefully balancing on the floating
logs contained in giant booms. Towards
the end of the lumber era, short-line rail provided
an alternative to water transportation.
Literally, the mills followed the lumber
northward in the region. Pike-men would
retrieve the logs, strip and rough-cut them,
sticker them for drying by air, or for kilndrying.
When dry, the timber was later
processed into siding, dimensional lumber,
railroad ties, shingles, millwork, and even
sash and doors. All this work was done on a
twenty-four hour basis, when lumber was
king, on the shores of the Calcasieu River and
its lakes to be shipped to market by steamer,
schooner, or rail.
Throughout the nineteenth century, lumber
was a major, if not the major, component
of the local economy. For at least six decades
it was the principle cash generator for the
area with most of that wealth coming from
dimensional lumber being shipped through
the Port of Galveston for use there or for
transshipment to other Gulf and Caribbean
ports. Such was the power and potential
of the lumber industry that after the Civil
War, carpetbaggers who came to Southwest
Louisiana invariably entered the lucrative
lumber industry.
To a great extent, these carpetbaggers
(along with many locals as well) resuscitated
the lumber business which had lagged for
market in the years during the Civil War. For
Southwest Louisiana, relatively untouched
by the Civil War, as a group, these investorentrepreneurs
are known as “Michigan Men”
rather than the more derisive term
“carpetbagger.” There are still a few Michigan
HISTORIC SOUTHWEST LOUISIANA: A Story of Heritage, Industry and Louisiana Living
42

Man houses along Broad Street and in other
areas of Southwest Louisiana. Each house, for
lumbermen at least, served as a showcase for
the products of the owner’s mill and acted as
a three-dimensional catalogue of the variety
of products available from the associated
mill. As further evidence of the power of
the sawmill era, the National Register-listed
Charpentier District in Lake Charles has some
forty blocks and 400 buildings that represent
the physical evidence of that lumber heritage.
Unfortunately, the virgin timber that fed
that industry was largely harvested out in
the 1930s, but significant lumber heritage
remains in towns like Longville, Reeves,
Ragley, Elizabeth, and Dry Creek where
the industry maintained significant presence
in the twentieth century. Some of these
communities were literally company towns
which paid workers in script rather than
cash money, maintained worker communities,
processing mills, commissaries and
even mercantile stores in the march up the
western side of Louisiana harvesting the
bountiful, but finite, pine.
The industry continues in the northern
part of southwest Louisiana with sustainableforestry
based tree farms supplying RoyOMartin
Enterprises, Boise Cascade and Temple-Inland.
CHAPTER 6
43

The expansion of short line and temporary
rail lines made it possible for the lumber
industry to harvest timber in new areas and
allowed the sawmills to follow the lumber
northward. Longville, Dry Creek, Elizabeth,
Luddington, and Graybow developed as
lumber towns due to these short line
railroads.
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RAILROADS
Morgan’s Louisiana Western Railroad,
which later became Southern Pacific, heralded
a new era in transportation beginning in
1880. The tracks were laid through the region
east to west directly connecting this once
remote area with New Orleans and with
the growing opportunities of the west. Soon
connections to Alexandria and to Shreveport
in the north were made with extensions of
the Watkins Rail line to Lake Charles, with a
planned terminus in Cameron on the eastern
shore of Big Lake. While that terminus in
Cameron did not get built, the Arthur Stilwell
financed Kansas City Southern line did, and it
linked a principal junction at DeQuincy with
the Missouri-Pacific line that connected Baton
Rouge with Beaumont.
Rail transportation, while signaling the
eventual demise of the schooner trade, actually
encouraged local networks that brought
goods to an ever expanding market. Lumber
began to be shipped by rail in all directions,
and the waterfronts of Lake Charles,
Goosport, Westlake, and Bagdad were filled
with rail lines, wharves, warehouses, ferries,
and schooners that brought in goods from
Cameron Parish for shipment by rail to
markets in New Orleans and in Houston.
Famously, there were markets for citrus and
for feathers, animal skins, and oysters in
addition to the beef cattle, lumber, sulfur,
and oil that had been the mainstays of the
local economy.
Rail transportation was significant in the
rise of wholesale and retail industries as
well as the primary passenger carrier. Rail
brought in new transplants, particularly
those individuals who relocated during the
time of the promotions. The North American
Land Company and Watkins Company began
in earnest with the introduction of the
north- south rail lines and continued through
the turn of the century. Rail lines connected
the Calcasieu region with the continent
and there were at least four passenger and
freight depots in Lake Charles alone, with
some twenty daily departures to points north,
east and west.
Other railroad towns with working depots
included DeQuincy—whose Kansas City
Southern Depot was one of two working
stops in that town—DeRidder, Sulphur,
Vinton, Oakdale, Kinder, Oberlin, Iowa,
Welsh, Jennings, and Lacassine. Railroad
HISTORIC SOUTHWEST LOUISIANA: A Story of Heritage, Industry and Louisiana Living
44

crews, by and large, were local, as well as
depot and terminal staff. For a time, repair
depots existed in Lake Charles and in
DeQuincy that offered significant employment.
As the automobile culture and better
highways crossed the region, the power of the
railroads began to decline, certainly in terms
of passenger transportation but also in the
movement of short-range freight. Long-range
freight is still the forte of rail, as even today
railroads transport the coal that fires the
Roy Nelson generating plant owned by Entergy.
As rail lines were merged or dissolved
away, fewer depots played any role at all
in smaller communities; now service was
provided and goods were moved by trucks or
vans. The passenger depots in all Southwest
Louisiana towns and cities ceased to be,
except for an Amtrak station in Lake Charles
that is served by the Sunset Limited. Many
sidings and lesser-used lines were abandoned
and removed, particularly those that once
served agricultural communities and lumber
towns. However, railroads still maintain
important roles in transportation and in the
development and leasing of real estate.
RICE
The successful establishment of rail lines
in the late nineteenth century brought new
opportunities for this once lonely corner of
the state. At the instigation of Jabez Bunting
(J. B.) Watkins, a land promoter and developer,
the noted agronomist and agricultural
reformer Seamon A. Knapp was persuaded to
relocate from the state of Iowa. Knapp
resigned as president of Iowa State College
to create and operate efficient and scientific
farming practices in Vinton, Louisiana.
Dr. Knapp was a practical farmer and an
expert educator, and a pioneer in the
scientific method of agriculture. He is
responsible for major changes in the
agricultural economy of Southwest Louisiana.
His innovative approach to the cultivation
of rice was revolutionary, with a systematic
approach to cultivation, harvesting, transportation,
and marketing of the product. In
addition, he promoted the use of advanced
machinery in the field, irrigation and qualitycontrol
through the use of demonstration
farms, the first practical use of that now
Harvest time in Welsh. The use of steam
powered equipment made for productive
harvests on the prairies of Southwest
Louisiana. Finally, the tough prairie grasses
were tamed for harvests of rice, cane and
eventually soybeans.
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CHAPTER 6
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The Port of Lake Charles is and was a
great rice port. In earlier days, bags of rice
were hoisted into ship holds bound for the
world. Upgraded processing has reduced the
manual labor of moving rice and reduced
the cost per hundredweight.
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standard practice. Within twenty years, an
entirely new industry had been crafted
that was perfect for the weather and soil
conditions of the Calcasieu Prairie. By the
turn of the century, rice had become a
leading industry of the region with one of the
largest payrolls. Even today, the cultivation of
rice is a principal factor in the success of
the Southwest Louisiana economy.
Jefferson Davis Parish has the largest
acreage in rice cultivation in Louisiana, with
Calcasieu and Allen Parishes not far behind.
Much of the production is dried and
processed locally for both domestic consumption
and for use abroad. Most rice cultivation
involves double-cropping with harvestable
crawfish, now a significant addition to farm
income. In addition, byproducts of rice
processing are being converted to biofuels
as an entirely new component of this everchanging
industry pioneered right here in
Southwest Louisiana by Dr. Knapp.
HISTORIC SOUTHWEST LOUISIANA: A Story of Heritage, Industry and Louisiana Living
46

SULFUR
The Union Sulphur Company introduced
and perfected the Frasch Method of mining
sulfur and commercial quantities were first
produced in 1896 at the Brimstone Mines,
just west of the city of Sulphur. By the turn of
the century, there was large scale production
of the mineral, hovering around four
thousand tons per day. Hermann Frasch had
engineered a method of sending superheated
water to melt sulfur deposits at a depth
of 1,000 plus feet and captured the melted
sulfur through a second set of pipes that
brought melted product to the surface. The
melted sulfur was allowed to cool and dry in
huge 100 by 400 foot pens fifty feet in
height. The cooled sulfur was crushed for
shipment by rail to the Union Sulphur port
on the Sabine River for transportation to
distant markets, or continued by rail to
markets all over North America. (The story
goes that the Union Sulphur Company had
British investors who insisted in using the
British spelling for the name of the element,
which gave the City of Sulphur its name.
The yellow element is actually spelled, in
America at least, sulfur.)
For a time, the brimstone mine site west of
Sulphur was known as the richest fifty acres
in the world. Frasch was known as the sulfur
king, and earned millions until his patent
expired in 1911. After the sulfur had been
largely mined out, the company focused on
extracting the petroleum deposits that surrounded
the site. Essential to the chemical,
medicinal and explosives industries, sulfur
had been a closely held Italian monopoly
until the successful extraction process in
Louisiana broke that monopoly. The discovery
and the extraction of sulfur in Sulphur
changed the playing field for the American
chemical industry. To some extent, the
activities of the Union Sulphur Company and
the brimstone mines created the American
chemical industry as we know it today.
PORT OF LAKE CHARLES
By the early 1920s, timber resources were
beginning to be recognized as finite and the
sawyers had to go further and further from
the mills that processed the wood. At first,
short-line rail allowed additional harvesting
in what would become Beauregard and Allen
parishes, however, it was evident that lumber
as an ongoing economic mainstay would
not be possible. In addition, while the
cultivation of rice continued to grow, and for
a time the national price of rice was set at the
docks of Lake Charles, that cultivation
expanded into Southeast Texas and eastward
into the central Acadiana parishes and even
into Arkansas. The successful geographic
spread of rice culture meant that farmers in
those new cultivation areas began to explore
A float at the parade for the opening of the
Port of Lake Charles in 1926.
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HISTORIC SOUTHWEST LOUISIANA: A Story of Heritage, Industry and Louisiana Living
48

alternatives to hauling rice to Lake Charles for
processing and shipment. New co-ops and
driers allowed independent regional
production with options to ship via grain
brokers in New Orleans and through the port
of Beaumont, Texas.
As rail progressed and as rice producers
moved their products to better established
port facilities, some far-sighted citizens
determined to establish a deep water port
near Lake Charles to serve their needs and
to recapture lost business traffic. Between
1921 and 1924, without any federal or
state assistance, the parish of Calcasieu
established engineering for a seaport that
would access the Sabine River and the
Intracoastal Waterway.
When completed, the new Lake Charles
Harbor and Terminal District, now popularly
known as the Port of Lake Charles, would
connect directly with the gulf though the new
Calcasieu Ship Channel. This new channel
was created by cutting through the bends and
bows of the Calcasieu River and by planned
and regular dredging to assure deepwater
access. No longer were ships limited by
sandbars at the mouth of the river or by
shallows and snags, or by the bends and
ox-bows of the old river. The new Ship
Channel shortened the distance from the
docks to the open gulf from over 75 miles
to just 33, which makes the Port of Lake
Charles the one nearest to the open gulf
waters. In addition, the port would promote
and manage the adjacent lands which were
made available for industrial development
such as factories and plants, warehouses,
highways, railroad and pipeline connections.
The port officially opened in 1926. Among
the first vessels to use the completed channel
were ships chartered by the local wholesaler
Kelly-Weber Company to deliver fertilizer
to their Westlake facility taking delivery at
their private wharves. The formal opening
of the Port on November 30 was a date of
great celebration with the largest gathering
in Southwest Louisiana since Armistice Day
in 1918. The Port had been conceived,
engineered and crafted by the citizens with
no financial assistance from the State of
Louisiana nor from the federal government.
This breath-taking development encouraged
the rice industry to construct the Lake
Charles Rice Milling Company, the largest rice
mill of its kind in the world, and a subsidiary
plant to convert the raw rice hulls into
chemically pure cellulose. Agriculture was
one of the first industries to take advantage
of the new opportunities offered by the
improved port facilities.
The establishment of the port helped
to industrialize the region. Even with the
world-wide depression, by 1933 Mathieson
Alkali Works was financed and constructed,
with production of ammonia-soda and
caustic soda in place by early 1935.
Mathieson encouraged the development of
additional factories and facilities including
improvements to utilities and transportations
and is credited as the beginning of the
industrial-petro-chemical economy.
The lumber industry, now in its ending
days as a primary major industry, used the
port to more efficiently ship their products.
The cattle industry was also boosted with the
development of a major new meat-packing
facility, the Swift Plant, which began
production in earnest in 1937. The facility had
a capacity of 8,000 head of cattle per day. In
addition, the facility provided demonstration
facilities for cattlemen, and scientific training
for best breeding and feeding practices and
used the port to export production.
OIL AND PETROCHEMICAL
Oil was first discovered in Louisiana in the
Jennings area in 1901, and a small refinery
was built in the eastern part of the parish with
local capital. In 1918 a small refinery was
constructed in Lake Charles, also financed
with local capital. Oil exploration and drilling
continued throughout the land region in the
first third of the twentieth century with major
finds in all parts of Southwest Louisiana. In
the second third of the century, advances in
offshore exploration encouraged platforms
throughout coastal and off-coastal areas.
In 1939 the Continental Oil Company
(CONOCO) decided to construct a major
new refinery to capitalize on these significant
discoveries of local oil and gas production,
Opposite, top: A postcard of the
early shoreline of Lake Charles showing
Front Street. This idealized image does not
show the rail lines, warehouses and working
waterfront that characterized the northern
edge of the waterfront but does show the
relative wilderness of the Shell Beach
shoreline prior to the routing of the
Old Spanish Trail.
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Opposite, center: A postcard of the City
Docks of the Port of Lake Charles shows
early ocean-going vessels tied up at the
nation’s newest port in 1927.
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Opposite, bottom: A postcard of Mathieston
Alkali Works on the western shore of the
Calcasieu River near Westlake.
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Above: Oil wells in a production field in
coastal Cameron Parish. Production is still
in place for many locations in Southwest
Louisiana and has expanded offshore as
well with onshore service facilities
throughout the region.
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Opposite, top: The early oil industry
focused on exploration and discovery of
productive fields throughout Southwest
Louisiana. These wells are from the Vinton
area and fortunes were made all over
Southwest Louisiana.
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Opposite, bottom: Oil was first discovered in
Louisiana just outside Jennings in what was
then Calcasieu Parish, and local money was
used to finance, build and run the first
modest oil refinery there.
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and to take advantage of the easy availability
of shipping by pipeline, rail and barge.
CONOCO’s Westlake facility opened in 1941.
On the heels of this major refinery coup,
Cities Service (now CITGO) opened what
was then the largest and most technically
advanced oil refinery in the nation in 1942
which provided employment for nearly
2,200 workers. In addition, CITGO operated
a newly constructed production plant for
butadiene, a chemical required for the
production of synthetic rubber. The plant
and the refinery used much the same raw
materials and allowed for economies of scale.
During the Second World War, the Lake
Charles area refineries worked twenty-four
hours a day for the war effort.
Firestone Tire and Rubber opened its plant
in 1943 for the manufacture of synthetic
rubber and allied products. Columbia-
Southern—owned by PPG—first leased a
magnesium plant operated by Mathieson,
and later expanded facilities into a major
chemical plant producing chlorine and
caustic soda. The cooperation of industrial
companies during wartime was noted by the
Pentagon in an administrative visit in late
1943 which stated that in Lake Charles,
they had “truly integrated the war effort”
and had “eliminated production bottlenecks.”
In 1944, an American-British-Russian
supply mission completed a two-day tour of
production facilities in Southwest Louisiana,
and their statement speaks volumes on the
cooperative nature of industry in the area:
“We witnessed today an extraordinary feat
of American ingenuity and industry. The
full conversion of a pine forest into three
great war plants including the largest aviation
gasoline refinery in the world, along with
synthetic rubber and ammonia plants. To the
management of these companies, we offer
congratulations in the name of the Allies.”
The two cooperating oil refineries jointly
opened CIT-CON, a technically advanced
plant that produced lubricating oil and paraffin
in 1949. The area has a reputation for
shared ventures beginning with that singular
CIT-CON partnership that capitalized on
the availability of raw materials, the ease of
shipment of raw materials and finished
products, a trained workforce, and ready
resources of land.
In the seventy-five years since the CIT-CON
venture, the region has seen dozens of
projects for major industrial development
and physical plants to include such players
as Hercules, Davison Chemical, Grace, Olin,
PPG, Axial, Himont, Westlake Polymers,
Westlake Chemicals, Louisiana Titanium,
Sasol, Phillips 66, and others. Southwest
Louisiana plays a vital role in the volatile and
ever-changing energy supply market, and
while the market players shuffle valuable
resources and production facilities, the
names sometimes change.
Within the last decade, the liquefied natural
gas import and export activities include major
infrastructure investments by Panhandle,
Trunkline, Chenier, Live Oak, Magnolia,
Cameron LNG and others along the Calcasieu
Ship Channel and on the Sabine. The region
has a reputation for innovation and dependability,
with its unique connections of pipeline,
rail and highway, and with a century’s experience
in exploration, production, delivery,
refining and engaging in joint ventures.
Literally, there has been and will be billions of
dollars of investment in the construction of
petrochemical and energy industries providing
for millions of dollars of payroll.
HISTORIC SOUTHWEST LOUISIANA: A Story of Heritage, Industry and Louisiana Living
50

CHAPTER 6
51

HISTORIC SOUTHWEST LOUISIANA: A Story of Heritage, Industry and Louisiana Living
52

AVIATION AND MILITARY
As early as 1915, the Association of
Commerce lobbied the area to compete
for one of 26 temporary Army Air Signal
Corps Training bases planned for possible
U.S. involvement in the First World War.
The miracle of manned flight was only
twelve years old and aviation had captured
the hearts and minds of most Americans,
including those living in Southwest
Louisiana. While America had not yet
entered the World War, most government
officials in Washington realized that it was
imperative for the country to be prepared
to possibly enter the conflict, or at least to
defend American interests in the war.
Such was the ardor of locals to capture
the attention of the military, that local lore
claimed that citizens here were building
what were touted as “aeroplane bungalows,” to
manifestly display that support. “Aeroplane
Bungalows” were a modern house style
that featured a single dormer over a broad
porch roof, resembling, if one believed the
hype, a cockpit and the broad wing of
a biplane. There are actually examples of
this house style with the targeted 1915-1916
construction date throughout the Lake
Charles historic districts.
Whether the local lore is to be believed or
not, the Army Air Signal Corps did indeed
construct a double-base, Gerstner Air Field,
Louisiana’s first military airbase. Gerstner
was a U.S. Army facility designed to train
aviators, navigators and flight instructors for
World War I. The double-base, so named for
its twin runways, was always intended to be
temporary and the facility was built nearly
overnight in old rice fields and pasture land
near Holmwood southeast of Lake Charles.
The site trained over 500 pilots, navigators
and flight instructors for the First World War
including Claire Chennault, Ernest Harmon,
Jimmy Doolittle, and Maxwell Kirby, who was
the last pilot to down enemy aircraft on the
Western Front.
Staff at Gerstner Field was credited with
creating three essential processes to military
aviation: air-ambulance service (created by
the necessity of having to rescue an injured
pilot in an otherwise inaccessible marsh),
ground-to-pilot communication using radio,
and aerial gunnery (known as aerial dogfighting).
The base was named (as twentyfive
of them were) in honor of Army Air
Service personnel who had perished in the
line of aeronautical duty. Lieutenant Fredrick
J. Gerstner was killed in 1914 in a plane crash
while training in California.
Just before the war ended in Europe,
Gerstner Field suffered the effects of the
severe 1918 hurricane, which damaged many
of its structures. After the War ended, much
of what was left of Gerstner Field was
auctioned off locally for barns, warehouses or
salvage. However, the undamaged officers’
club building from Gerstner Field was
purchased by the congregation of the Church
of Christ Scientist and relocated to a site at
the corner of Kirby and Ford Streets in Lake
Charles. (Later renovations included rotating
the structure to face Kirby Street, adding
the steeple and crafting the brick veneer.)
The building serves as a reminder of that
glorious era of aviation and military history,
a very rare bit of this now lost airfield.
With the rumblings of a Second World
War, the Parish Police Jury leased the relatively
new Lake Charles Municipal Airport to
the federal government to build the Lake
Charles Army Flying School. The airport
was then located on the eastern edge of the
city just south of U.S. Highway 90. Advanced
single-engine training continued until 1943,
when the facility was assigned to the Third
Air Force that established a tactical bomber
training school at the newly designated
Lake Charles Army Airfield. Assigned units
Opposite, top: The core facility of the
Columbia Southern Plant, later to be part of
the PPG industrial family, and later Axiall.
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Opposite, bottom: Cities Service Refinery,
when constructed in the 1940s, a modern,
engineered marvel in West Calcasieu.
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Above: Dignitaries at the 1958 conversion
of the Lake Charles air base to SAC status
as Chennault. The area has had a longtime
fascination with aviation beginning with its
successful 1916 efforts to land Gerstner
Field, where pilots and navigators were
trained for World War I.
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The Gordon and VonPhul Building, part of
the Pujo Street block of brick storefronts, is
typical of turn of the century retail on the
ground floor and professional offices above.
The building now serves as home of Pujo
Street Café with apartments above in
downtown Lake Charles.
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included B-26 Marauders and A-20 Havocs. At
the end of the War, the airfield was designated
as a permanent installation and housed the
47th Bombardment Group which flew A-26
Invaders. But in 1947, the airfield was closed
and returned to the City of Lake Charles.
The Korean War forced reactivation of what
was now called the Lake Charles Air Force
Base in 1951, with the 44th Bombardment
Wing assigned to the 15th Air Force. The
World War II facility was upgraded to SAC
Standards for the B-29 Superfortress and
continued improvements expanded runway
length, hangar space and officer and staff
accommodations. The base expanded to
include Boeing KC-97 Stratofreighters, significant
air-refueling missions, and advanced
jet aircraft. At this time, one of the longest
runways in the world was constructed to
accommodate scheduled activities.
In 1958, the Air Force Base was renamed for
the late Lt. General Claire Chennault, who had
trained at Gerstner Field over 40 years earlier.
Until 1963 the base served as a Strategic Air
Command (SAC) Base when it was officially
deactivated and returned to local control. The
facility, now Chennault International Airport,
currently operates general aviation and aviation
maintenance with such major tenants over the
last 45 years as Eastern Air Lines, Lockheed,
Boeing, Northrup-Grumman, Airbus, DHL,
Airborne Express, Aeroframe Services, AAR
Corporation, and Million Air. In addition, the
site provides for the impressive principal campus
of SOWELA Technical and Community
College, which includes aviation maintenance
and mechanics as part of their extensive catalog
of degrees and course options.
RETAIL AND WHOLESALE
The very earliest settlers relied on barter
for many of their goods, however luxury
items, gunpowder and textiles required a cash
basis for exchange. Real communities needed
real merchants and certainly by the middle of
the nineteenth century, mercantile enterprises
were solidly in place though out the region.
Perhaps the most entertaining and certainly
the most enterprising story of the mercantile
spirit is that of the late, lamented, local
department store Muller’s, which traced its
beginnings to Julie Muller in 1882. Julie was
born in Alsace, then a part of France, in 1854.
After the Franco-Prussian War, she emigrated
to New Orleans, married Isadore Muller,
and had a son Maurice and daughter Dora.
When Isadore suddenly died in a yellow fever
epidemic, the widowed Julie worked as a
successful dressmaker in New Orleans, and
using the newly opened Louisiana Western
Railroad, relocated to Lake Charles in 1882
with her children. She opened a shop on
Ryan Street and lived over the shop. She later
constructed a new two-story building and
her business expanded with the rapid growth
of the area. She married Simon Marx in 1891,
and together they had three children.
By 1913, her son Maurice Muller, who
inherited the business, built a modern threestory
building, then the largest in Southwest
Louisiana, with the first commercial elevator.
He expanded the lines carried, and for a time
Muller’s sold everything from corsets to caskets,
clothing, dry goods, shoes, rugs, jewelry,
curtains, and furniture. Adolf Marx, Maurice’s
half-brother, took command in 1930 and added
air-conditioning to the building, and then
expanded in 1943 and again in 1950, which
doubled its size. He also added the famous
moving stairs, the first regional application of
escalators. Muller’s also opened two branches,
one in the new Prien Lake Mall, and a location
in DeRidder. Finally in 1985—one hundred
HISTORIC SOUTHWEST LOUISIANA: A Story of Heritage, Industry and Louisiana Living
54

and three years after its founding—the store
was closed, victim of the general economic
downturn and at a time when it was unable to
compete with expanding national retailers.
Subsequently, the building was purchased and
renovated into lofts with ground floor retail and
is part of the revival and re-use of downtown
Lake Charles. The building is individually
listed on the National Register of Historic
Places, but the real testament of the power of
the department store is that to this day, former
employees still regularly meet and reminisce as
a group about the decades when Muller’s was
the place to shop in Southwest Louisiana.
Prior to the establishment of Ryan Street as
the center of retail trade in Lake Charles,
many businesses were located on Railroad
Avenue on the south side of the intercontinental
rail line that traversed the city. As
recently as the 1960s, that area had grocery
stores, bakeries, butcher shops, amusement
halls, vaudeville/movie houses, and drugstores.
Amazingly, practically none of this
intensely dense retail community remains,
save the Acts Theatre facility, which began its
life as a vaudeville house before becoming
a movie theater and later a performing space.
Also gone are local retail entities that were
once seen as major players in the growth of
the area. George Theriot Stores operated a
network of supermarkets and feed stores in
Southwest Louisiana, but closed operations
in the downturn of the 1980s. Abe’s, a small
network of three grocery stores, is also gone
except for a modest outlet on Highway 14. All
of the expanded branches of Gordon’s Drug
Stores are gone except for the relocated
original store now on Lake Street; for a
time, Gordon’s had five branches throughout
Lake Charles. West Department Stores, long
an intricate part of DeRidder history, having
been founded by a DeRidder area family,
closed after a long successful retail run, part
of a thirty-five store multi-state chain.
Central retail core areas also developed
in every community of size in Southwest
Louisiana. Evidence of historic commercial and
retail buildings still exists on Napoleon Street
and Huntington in Sulphur, on Horridge and
Center Streets in Vinton, Fourth Street and
vicinity in DeQuincy, Washington and Stewart
Street in DeRidder, East Sixth Avenue in
Oakdale, Main Street in Jennings, and Adams
Street in Welsh. The urban cores of these towns
were once filled with mercantile establishments—grocery,
hardware, and drugstores.
Most buildings were two story, generally with
professional offices for doctors, lawyers, and
accountants on the second, and third floors if
present. These uniquely created local enterprises
served their local communities. Once,
the merchants catered specifically to the wants
and needs of their own special and unique
communities of customers, today retail is oriented
to a more homogenous mass culture.
Particularly noteworthy for its longevity is
the Nichol’s Department Store in DeQuincy,
where the chain began in 1914. The DeQuincy
store, currently in a modern building on
the east side of the community, has a colorful
history with four other partner Nichol’s stores
in central and western Louisiana.
Wholesalers and the business of supplying
retailers were rarer in Southwest Louisiana, given
the wide empty horizons of the great Southwest,
however the story of the Kelly-Weber Companies
(now collectively known as the Powell Group)
stands out. The original founders who relocated
to the area from Kansas—drawn to the
Southwest Louisiana prairies by J. B. Watkins—
managed a wide range of businesses starting
with the Palace Grocery Store on Ryan Street
in Lake Charles. The company quickly began
to wholesale supplies and merchandise on a
grander scale, supplying other grocery and
feed stores in the entire region. A diverse
company, Kelly-Weber also operated farms,
rice mills, a significant lumber operation, a
shipping and fertilizer company, and eventually
insurance, business, and financial services.
A street-level view of the damage from the
hurricane of 1918 on Ryan Street in Lake
Charles. The wind damage was significant.
This storm also damaged facilities at
Gerstner Field, a flight training school for
World War I pilots and navigators.
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56

CHAPTER 7
J. B. WATKINS AND THE
S ELLING OF S OUTHWEST L OUISIANA
Perhaps no single person has literally sold more of Southwest Louisiana, both the idea of
“Southwest Louisiana” and the actual real estate, than J. B. Watkins of Lawrence, Kansas. Born in
Pennsylvania, reared in Virginia, and educated in Michigan, Watkins practiced his business
skills first in Illinois, and then operated a vastly successful real estate and financial company
headquartered in Lawrence, Kansas, with branches in New York, London and Dallas. By 1883,
the J. B. Watkins Land Mortgage Company had invested and bought one and a half million acres
of Southwest Louisiana to establish the North American Land and Timber Company. He built
and operated hundreds of miles of rail from Alexandria and points north to Lake Charles,
with unrealized plans to extend the rail line to Cameron on the coast. He actively promoted
and financed the sales of thousands of home sites, businesses, whole townships, and farms, and
operated dozens of supporting businesses in-house.
His hard-sell promotional energy combined direct-mail campaigns, broadside advertising,
cooperative enterprises with railroads and newspapers, testimonials from satisfied customers, and
recruitment and financing packages. Many mortgages were handled through his own national
bank. Colorful testimonials sometimes exploded into near–religious fervor with extravagant
claims of multiple bountiful crops per year, temperate, frost-free climate, limitless land and
limitless opportunity. He enticed thousands of Midwesterners, from Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska
and South Dakota to Southwest Louisiana lured by these promises of mild winters, fertile fields,
and explosive opportunity.
The fact was that Watkins offered real opportunity for many Midwestern farmers and small
businessmen. Some were first- or second-generation immigrant settlers who saw a chance to start
afresh after lean years, or in response to the harsh winters of the Midwest. Sometimes the notion
was to allow the family farm to remain undivided by relocating “excess” sons and daughters to
new “southern pastures.” Some of Watkins’ newly converted settlers left towns with paved streets,
schools, developed transportation, and libraries, to relocate to the still lonely prairies of
Sweetlake, Iowa, Kinder, Oberlin, Edna, and Klondike where they would begin afresh and anew.
The new settlers brought technology and expertise to the mostly undisturbed prairies of
Southwest Louisiana and within one generation had largely converted the virgin prairies and
range land into productive farms and pastures.
Watkins was one of the first successful, totally-integrated real-estate moguls, with similar, though
smaller, operations in place in Texas and Kansas. His real estate activities presaged the Florida landbubble
of the 1920s which used many of the same techniques. In 1911, he cashed out his interest
in the North American Company to concentrate on enterprises elsewhere. Communities that grew
along the Watkins rail line like Kinder, Oberlin, Oakdale and Iowa can credit their founding to the
work of this prolific real-estate genius. Watkins died in 1921 and is buried in Lawrence, Kansas.
But his promotional activity had generated yet another major wave of settlement in Southwest
Louisiana, this time drawn from the American Midwestern stock of the descendants of Scots-Irish,
Scottish, and German immigrants. The Wittlers, the McFillens, the Rocks, the Knapps, the Kings,
the Powells, and many other locally prominent families are descendants of those Midwesterners
enticed to Southwest Louisiana by Watkins.
These Midwestern farmers and ranchers were able to tame the long-grass prairies using a
combination of modern steel plows and steam-powered tractors. Harvest was simpler using new
combines, and rail provided the ready transportation to market. Powered pumps made marginal
land arable and productive. The Midwesterners had been using these production processes in the
burgeoning Midwestern fields for generations and brought the upgraded technology with them.
Opposite, top: The Watkins National Bank,
located at the corner of Hodges and Broad,
provided financing for the activities of the
North American Land Company.
COURTESY OF THE IMPERIAL CALCASIEU MUSEUM, SUSAN
REED, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR. IMAGE COPYRIGHT ICM.
Opposite, bottom: Transplanted Midwestern
farmers brought the technology to both
drain marshy prairies and provide
irrigation by constructing canals beginning
in the 1880s.
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For a time, the world’s largest rice mill was
in Lake Charles and the price of American
rice was set on its docks. In time, with
improved transportation, the rice industry
spread throughout the coastal south.
However, rice production still plays an
important role in the area economy.
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The efforts of a transplanted Iowan,
Seamon A. Knapp, assured that agriculture
could and would play a much expanded role
as an economic generator. Farmers were able
to get improved product yield, control pests,
and get those crops to market timely using
the newly developing railroad connections.
The Midwestern settlers naturally gravitated
to truck farming, ranching, and the cultivation
of sugar cane and cotton. However, their
particular success with growing rice was
such that by 1912, the national commodity
price of rice was determined at the docks
in Lake Charles. Within ten years, the growth
of the rice industry required construction of
what was then the largest rice mill in the
world in the city.
Much of the credit for the individual
agricultural successes of these Midwestern
settlers is given to educator and agronomist
Dr. Knapp, who first developed the concept
of agricultural experiment stations and
practical demonstration farms here in
Calcasieu. Beginning in 1886 after he was
invited to Louisiana by Watkins, Knapp
concentrated his first efforts in the Vinton
area. His “best practices” approach found
great success for the regional farmers, and
by 1902 he was promoting his scientific
agricultural practices nationwide. His efforts
led him to Washington, D.C., where he vastly
improved the state of American agriculture
using models from his native state of Iowa
and from his adopted home of Southwest
Louisiana. He also helped to create the
4-H movement for youth in America.
Knapp lead the charge for agricultural
improvements and essentially established the
scientific cultivation of rice in Louisiana, but
also his improvements lead to increases in
productivity for cotton, for beef and dairy cattle
and for the multitude of truck crops,
including the cultivation of citrus. J. B.
Watkins had assured his transplanted
Midwesterners that citrus would grow in the
prairies and marshes of Southwest Louisiana,
and that his rail lines could transport the precious
produce to willing markets in the
Midwest and the North. And, for a time, this
was actually the case with Cameron and
Calcasieu generating a sizeable marketable citrus
crop. Unfortunately, a series of devastating
freezes destroyed the crops and nearly the
entire industry at the very turn of the century.
HISTORIC SOUTHWEST LOUISIANA: A Story of Heritage, Industry and Louisiana Living
58

The Watkins line was but one north-south
railroad that connected this area to the rest
of North America. Other railroads serving the
area to points north, were the Iron Mountain-
Missouri Pacific Company, and the Kansas
City-Southern railroad that came south from
Shreveport, in its quest for Port Arthur and
the gulf.
Two sets of transcontinental lines were
built through Imperial Calcasieu, Missouri-
Pacific (and related lines) at the DeQuincy,
Louisiana latitude, and the other through
the busy Lake Charles latitude (Louisiana
Western, Southern Pacific, and related lines).
Transcontinental raillines were mostly
completed by the 1880s, although short-line
railroads continued to be built until the
1940s and even later for special business
needs, for logging in remote areas, and to
service agriculture.
During Watkins’ promotion of the area,
railroads not only connected communities,
but also, in some cases, promoted the
building of new communities on adjacent
railroad-owned land to provide both a
market and destination. Many communities
can trace their founding or can attribute their
rapid growth to the development and sale of
railroad-owned property. Indeed, Watkins
Railroad limitations for the use and sale of
alcohol on properties sold by them have been
held as valid on deeds for some 100 years
after the original purchase agreement. And
various communities, Welsh for example,
required the railroad to build a station in
their young community or face relocating
already built tracks to outside a rather
expanded incorporated area. Jennings was
famously began by a Southern Pacific contractor
as part of that railroad’s planned pattern
of settlement. Even Lake Charles, which predated
the railroad, grew four-fold in the
twenty years following the completion of
the main lines through the center of the city.
At one point, there were four railroad
stations or terminals that served passengers
and freight in Lake Charles. Throughout
Southwest Louisiana, passenger and freight
depots in practically every community
offered connections and schedules to every
Kelly-Weber Warehouse on Ann and Pine
Streets. Close to the Kansas City-Southern
Line Railroad Station, the rail-serviced
warehouse is still a feature of downtown
Lake Charles, albeit now serving as a
popular restaurant.
COURTESY OF THE IMPERIAL CALCASIEU MUSEUM, SUSAN
REED, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR. IMAGE COPYRIGHT ICM.
CHAPTER 7
59

Right: Unloading oranges at the docks in
Lake Charles. Sailing vessels transported
oranges to Lake Charles from Cameron for
shipment by rail to major markets. The
citrus industry boomed for a time, until
unseasonal weather destroyed the crop.
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Below: Stronger steel plows designed to cut
through sturdy prairie grasses were brought
in, as well as additional steam-powered
farm machinery, by settlers recruited by the
Watkins companies.
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other community linked by rail transportation
northward and to both coasts. At the
height of rail, there were as many as twentyeight
daily trains vying for transportation
business in Southwest Louisiana. For much
of the end of the nineteenth century and
through and just after the Second World War,
rail provided the necessary transportation
services for business, commerce and industry,
and rail was by far the primary mode
of transportation for people, certainly for
middle to long distance. It is easy to
conclude that the train erased the barriers of
space and location, and served to open
Southwest Louisiana to opportunities and to
expanded ventures.
HISTORIC SOUTHWEST LOUISIANA: A Story of Heritage, Industry and Louisiana Living
60

Left: Rail agents on duty. Railroads allowed
the area to grow and prosper with many
trains bringing in new residents and
opportunities. This 1915 era shot shows
dapper railroad agents at what was a repair
station for the Kansas City Southern.
COURTESY OF THE IMPERIAL CALCASIEU MUSEUM, SUSAN
REED, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR. IMAGE COPYRIGHT ICM.
Below: Calcasieu Sawmills also provided
essentials to the expansion of rail. Note the
stack of locally produced railroad ties to the
right of this engine. Railroads used their
local environments to extend their services.
COURTESY OF THE IMPERIAL CALCASIEU MUSEUM, SUSAN
REED, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR. IMAGE COPYRIGHT ICM
CHAPTER 7
61

HISTORIC SOUTHWEST LOUISIANA: A Story of Heritage, Industry and Louisiana Living
62

CHAPTER 8
F EU-FOLLET AND H ISTORIC C EMETERIES
Burial customs of pioneer families varied based on the national origin of the family. To some
extent, even today family customs dictate the disposition of remains. For descendants of
British and Irish origin, the common trend was/is burial underground. For the French and
Spanish, and for that matter, for Creoles and Acadians, the trend was to bury in brick or stone
(and later concrete) tombs, generally at ground level. For Italians, shared family mausoleums
were common and expected. Ancient cemeteries in Southwest Louisiana provide interesting
lessons in the pioneer origins, as most early cemeteries display a combination of all three burial
customs, demonstrating that even in death, or particularly in death, certain beliefs remain firm.
Cemeteries abound in Southwest Louisiana, by some counts there are over 250 documented
sites of burial. Some are small family sites that may not have seen burials in 100 years while other
sites have been operating and receiving new “tenants” for almost two centuries.
The most ancient cemetery in the region is Old Antioch/Big Woods cemetery near Edgerly in
far western Calcasieu, established prior to 1830. The Sugartown Cemeteries were established not
much later. In the 1850s and 1860s, Bagdad (on the west shoreline of the Calcasieu north of
Westlake), Old Catholic, Goos Family, Sallier, Corporation, and Bilbo (to name the most familiar
in Lake Charles) became the final resting places of many pioneer families.
Architecture at ancient cemeteries can be most instructive particularly if the cemetery has been
cared for. Cemeteries that date from the period of park-like development from the 1870s through
the First World War were planned with regular avenues, landscaping, fencing, and an overall
serene and garden-like atmosphere. There are good examples of this sort of planned facility like
Greenwood in Jennings, Woodlawn in DeRidder, and Orange Grove/Graceland in Lake Charles.
The planned cemeteries show a wide range of funerary architecture with some tombs lavishly
displaying the wealth, heritage, occupation, and family history of the interred.
Cemeteries can also tell of the hardships of early life here, and are witnesses to what was important
to the deceased and the deceased person’s family. There is nothing more moving than to read, for
example, of the death of multiple members of a family all lost to the same epidemic buried in
the same small area, or the loss of a mother and her child in childbirth. Religious symbols, Masonic
or Eastern Star symbols, veteran markers, Woodman of the World monuments, or even a marker
of granite made to look like a camera with its tripod, give a personality to the interred and an
insight to what made that particular individual different or special in his or her own terms.
Sometimes, cemeteries offer odd connections or unusual juxtapositions of situations for visitors
who pay attention. In Jefferson Davis Parish, named for the Confederacy’s only president, in the
heart of the Deep South, in the largest cemetery, Greenwood by name, the largest monument
is one to the Union War Dead. The GAR or Grand Army of the Republic is memorialized in
Greenwood by a twenty-foot obelisk.
In fact, in more than one cemetery in Southwest Louisiana, you can see the distinctive GAR
star, marking the grave of a Union veteran of the Civil War, next to the concrete “house” marker
of the UVC, or Confederate veteran. In a few cases, the grave may display both symbols for
the simple, yet complicated reason that the interred may have fought on both sides. Obviously,
it was a complicated war with complicated results.
Some of the cemeteries in Southwest Louisiana mark the sites of now lost churches or progenitor
family sites. Bilbo Cemetery in Lake Charles was established by the Bilbo and Lawrence families
on the patch of land they bought for their family farm and enterprises. Goos Family Cemetery
is on the highest elevation of the area settled by the Goos family and their collateral families.
Other cemeteries mark lost communities, like Bagdad Cemetery which marked the center of one
of Westlake, Louisiana’s earlier communities.
Jennings Southern Pacific Station.
Many Southwest Louisiana towns had
strong railroad connections and most had
landmark stations and depots.
A few remain.
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It is still a tradition to care for ancestor
graves in Southwest Louisiana, with maintenance
days generally occurring in the late
spring or in October. Cemetery censuses
exist for most if not all the cemeteries in
Southwest Louisiana and are a valuable asset
for genealogists and family historians.
Ghost lights, known in French south
Louisiana as feu-follet, are seen and reported
occasionally even today in many of our most
ancient graveyards. The phenomenon has
been seen at Sallier Cemetery, but also at the
ancient Big Woods Cemetery, at LeBleu
Cemetery, Old Catholic Cemetery, and at
Bilbo Cemetery, and in cemeteries in the
Sugartown area of Beauregard Parish. The
phenomenon is described as being luminous
orbs of colored lights, generally blue or
green, that bob and weave, then mysteriously
disappear. While scientists scoff that the ghost
lights are due to atmospheric inversion and
escaping methane gas, many natives swear
that the ghostly apparitions in these hallowed
spots are the dearly departed welcoming
in new arrivals—the equivalent of leaving
“the lights on” to say “hello and come on in.”
And in another unusual case of learning
one’s history at a cemetery, the mass graves
of unidentified Hurricane Audrey victims
are located at Highland Memorial Garden and
at Combre Memorial Park in Lake Charles.
Simple markers outline the resting places of
at least 300 unidentified bodies from that
single disaster. Hurricane Audrey claimed
over 550 persons in 1957 and most likely
actually claimed even more. There was no
documentation of the many seasonal and
casual workers in Cameron who were not
numbered, but who may be listed only as
missing. Hurricane Audrey has the distinction
as being the deadliest storm in North
American between the 1938 Great New
England Hurricane and Katrina in the
hideous 2005 hurricane season.
HISTORIC SOUTHWEST LOUISIANA: A Story of Heritage, Industry and Louisiana Living
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An aerial view of the devastation of the community of Cameron post-Audrey in 1957, centered around the courthouse area. Note the large number of houses and structures that once were
part of this coastal community.
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CHAPTER 9
T HE S TREETCAR AND U RBAN L IFE
Beginning with the completion of the mainline railroads through Southwest Louisiana,
Lake Charles had a streetcar system, one of only five Louisiana cities to have such an upscale
civic amenity. (New Orleans is the only city to have streetcars today.) Beginning with mule-driven
cars, the lines were soon electrified and expanded citywide, to have, at the system’s demise, five
full routes that reached from Cessford Street in the north, to Gulf Street in the south, and from
Lake Street to First Avenue.
In addition to the Gulf States Utility-run streetcar system, the so-called “Dummy Line”
streetcar was operated independently by the Watkins railroad until after the turn of the century.
The Dummy line connected the Watkins terminal near Enterprise Boulevard with the downtown
streetcar routes along Broad Street, the two streetcar systems serving the entire young city.
In the increasingly densely built and busy city, streetcars provided consistent and regular
service, for a time, running twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week. The lines connected
homes with workplaces, schools, churches, commerce and business, and even places of
amusement. The streetcars were running at the time of the Great Fire of 1910 and provided
transportation both for residents fleeing the fire and for firefighters.
After the fire, in an effort to grow the city, the streetcar services expanded lines in all directions
encouraging development in new neighborhoods like Margaret Place. Additional lines extended
along south Hodges Street area, and up Kirkman Street to better serve the area around
the Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd, and up into the community of Goosport with its
shipyards, lumber mills, and warehouses.
Streetcars were a boon to developing Lake Charles. Without ownership of a horse and carriage,
all personal transportation was limited to the distance one was able to walk. Streetcars enabled
mill and plant workers to get to work and school children to get to school. (Central School
and each of the three ward schools were built next to streetcar lines.) Streetcars served to
connect shoppers to businesses, connected patients with the new sanitarium of St. Patrick’s
on South Ryan, connected patrons to railroad depots and ferry landings, and even provided
opportunities to visit amusement and entertainment sites. Barbe Pier, constructed over the
cooling waters of the lake and famous for its dances, theatrical exhibitions, and socials, was at the
end of the South Ryan line, and an early fairground was at the end of the Hodges Street extension.
Ryan Street famously had two lines running through its business corridor from Railroad Avenue
to the South Ryan-Miller Avenue split.
But by 1925, the entire streetcar system here, like
streetcar systems nationwide, was facing stiff competition
from motor cars, independent busses, and truck traffic.
After the death of J. A. Landry, the streetcar utility’s
greatest civic booster and stockholder, the system folded in
1927. Conductors and car-men were pensioned off with
brand new Ford motorcars and a business plan to establish
taxi services. While most of the rolling stock was sold off,
the last streetcar in Lake Charles served as the home of
a diner-styled café located near Iris and Bilbo Streets.
Occasionally, streetcar rail-tracks are unearthed when
repairs or new construction is undertaken in downtown
Lake Charles. A short length of the Ryan Street double
tracks was unearthed when the new bridge was constructed
on Pithon Coulee only recently.
Opposite, top: Barbe Pier, an amusement
site built over the cooling waters of Lake
Charles, served as a venue for speakers,
dances, concerts and exhibitions. This 1907
view captures the impressive building from
the shoreline.
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Opposite, bottom: Part of the working
waterfront here is the Lake Charles landing
for the ferry Hazel. This was part of a
series of wharves, ferries, roads, rail, and
docks that connected the residents of
Southwest Louisiana with the world. It was
only a short walk to any of the four train
stations in Lake Charles.
COURTESY OF THE IMPERIAL CALCASIEU MUSEUM, SUSAN
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Below: The Dummy Line Streetcar.
In addition to the Lake Charles streetcar
line, the Dummy Streetcar ran along Broad
Street from the lake to the Watkins Railroad
head near First Avenue. School children
used the Dummy Line to get to the new
Lake Charles High School, which was “way
out on Boulevard” in the day. Here, the
Dummy Line was photographed at the
corner of Broad and Ryan.
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HISTORIC SOUTHWEST LOUISIANA: A Story of Heritage, Industry and Louisiana Living
68

CHAPTER 10
T HE G REAT F IRE AND THE
E ND OF I MPERIAL C ALCASIEU
Many real estate abstracts in four parishes of Southwest Louisiana begin with words to the effect
“on April 23, 1910 a great conflagration destroyed the Calcasieu Courthouse.” For property owners,
the loss of the courthouse and its records provides an interesting sidelight of the practical nature
of reconstructing real estate records. However for some, this disaster marks the real division
between the early agrarian Calcasieu, the wild frontier of marsh, pine, and prairie, equally a product
of the wild west and the deep south, and the modern Calcasieu, oriented toward business, industry
and commerce, increasingly urbanized, and willing to explore opportunities for its future.
Disasters are not strangers to people who live along the Gulf Coast. Particularly in the nineteenth
century, this region suffered though and recovered from various hurricanes, epidemics, economic
failure, regional crop loss, invasion and war. But the 1910 Fire affected not only the development
and shape of the land, to some extent, it altered the geography of the mind. The romantic nineteenth
century concept of the independent man, resourceful and self-reliant converted sharply to that of
the independent community (or society), resourceful and self-reliant. Perhaps the best case in point
is that of the decision to rebuild on the ashes of the fire, but to rebuild bigger, better, and safer.
Prior to 1910, Lake Charles had developed on the street layout of the old Bilbo and Ryan
farms. In downtown, tightly-packed wooden buildings lined busy, alternately dusty and muddy
streets. Horses, carriages, and delivery wagons navigated with the streetcars on the few brick
streets that defined the central business core, then whipped up clouds of dust on rutted dirt, shell
and gravel roads that lead south, north and east. Downtown, false-fronted wooden buildings
leaned on each other, with a few brick structures offering a sense of permanence.
Rail lines etched the waterfront and radiated off busy Railroad Avenue, its reputation as “Battle Row”
nightly renewed by the mill rowdies, roughnecks and railroad men who frequented its establishments.
Honest citizens, the newspapers, and preachers from the pulpits repeatedly called out to regulate
the nightly rowdy behavior at the many social halls and gaming parlors of Battle Row and on the
Boulevard on the eastern edge of town.
The long thin double-courthouse, an 1891 vaguely Greek-revival building with a 1902
addition that doubled both its size and length, faced Kirby Street. The parish jail faced the
working waterside at Front Street, with purpose-built wharves, warehouses, tanneries and rail lines.
There were ferry landings for travel to points west, to Cameron, and to the waterside communities
of Bagdad and Goosport.
The Borealis Rex had its berth on Front Street at the water. The Rex had been built in 1888 for
use on the upper Mississippi River. The second-hand steamer had been fitted out as the deluxe
overnight round-trip ferry between Cameron and Lake Charles. Beginning in 1905, she carried
passengers and freight—everything from groceries to cattle and everyone from preachers to salesmen
on her three-times-a-week run. The Rex was much more regular and much more accommodating
then any of the schooners that sailed that route.
The smaller ferry-steamer Hazel transported passengers and freight to Westlake and to Bagdad
several times daily. Both ferries were working the day of the fire, and both survived. The Hazel ended
its services in 1916 when the bridge at the foot of Shell Beach Drive was constructed, and the Borealis
Rex’s career ended in 1930 when the lucrative mail contract was won by a speedier gas-powered vessel.
Ironically, later that year the new gravel road that connected Cameron to Lake Charles was finally
completed over the marsh. The Rex was abandoned and forgotten at its dock of the ferry landing, the
boiler and other metal parts finally being donated to World War II scrap drives. The great turning
wheel was salvaged and is at the Imperial Calcasieu Museum, and is shown as part of the official seal
of the City of Lake Charles. But both vessels were on the water on the day of the Great Fire in 1910.
Opposite, top: The Hazel at its Westlake
dock. Before the Hazel, travelers had to
chance dangerous rope ferries to cross
the Calcasieu. The ferry locations are
memorialized by the names of some of
them, for example Dunn Ferry, Anthony
Ferry and Goos Ferry roads, however there
were many more that crossed the Calcasieu,
the Sabine and the Mermentau. Note the
sizable stash of fuel on the dock.
COURTESY OF THE IMPERIAL CALCASIEU MUSEUM, SUSAN
REED, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR. IMAGE COPYRIGHT ICM.
Opposite, bottom: A postcard of the Borealis
Rex, the ferry that connected Lake Charles
with Cameron. The Rex was built for trade
on the upper Mississippi, but found a new
life transporting passengers and goods from
the rail road center of Lake Charles to
coastal markets in Cameron.
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The Chicken Thief Bunch. A rare image of
denizens of infamous Battle Row, Railroad
Avenue in Lake Charles where the Irish and
Italians met the Germans and the
Americans in a nightly “discussion” for
dominance of this wide-open area of bars,
amusements, brothels and saloons.
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On that April day, the fire was intense with
dry winds that fanned the flames. The fire
was reported to have been started by a stagehand
burning trash behind the old Williams
Opera House. The parched wind dispatched
burning embers skyward, and flames quickly
ignited wooden shingle roofs. The heart pine,
rich with resin, and the cypress burned hot,
and the winds ignited spot fires all over the
city, with some degree of destruction in nearly
forty blocks north and east of downtown.
Seven entire downtown blocks were lost to
ashes, including those with the courthouse,
the jail, city hall and fire station, Catholic
school, convent, and church, and a large
number of businesses including hotels,
shops, and offices. The line of destruction ran
from the waterfront to Hodges Street and
from Iris Street northward to Division Street.
The Majestic Hotel, constructed five years
earlier with updated features including electric
fans in every room and its own private
water system, directed its staff to continuously
stream water on the adjacent buildings and
surrounding its brick structure located at the
northwest corner of Bilbo and Pujo Streets.
Jets of water were poured on the roofs and
facades of its neighbors. This action was credited
in saving the original Carnegie Library,
the Calcasieu State Bank Building, the Gordon
and Von Phul Drugstore Building and the
glazed brick Gordon Annex directly east of the
drugstore. The Gordon Building (now housing
Pujo Street Café) and the glazed tile building
(which once housed Rosa Hart’s Three R’s
Bookstore) still stand and serve as testament to
the generous actions of the hotel staff.
In 2010, at ceremonies commemorating the
Great Fire held at Pioneer Square in front of
the 1911 historic city hall and the historic
Calcasieu Courthouse—both brought into
existence as replacements for their earlier
counterparts—fascinating stories were told
of the Great Fire as experienced by family
members who were affected by the fire.
One particular story tells of the workaday
activities of people living at the time. An elderly
gentleman provided the story of his father
who had been delivering cleaned items from a
laundry by bicycle at the time of the Fire.
Being a young man, he was fascinated by the
excitement of the event, and hastily left all of
his parcels of clean clothes on the porch of
one of his customers, unwilling to be encumbered
by the bulk on his bicycle. He rode to
the fire, and spent the day watching the blaze
being fought. Later he returned to the house
to resume his task, and was flabbergasted that
the house, the porch and his parcels had been
consumed by the vicious flames. He lamented
HISTORIC SOUTHWEST LOUISIANA: A Story of Heritage, Industry and Louisiana Living
70

his bad fortune at not caring for his charge,
but bucked up to take his licking at the hand
of the laundry operator who would surely
have words to say, if not actual blows to inflict
on the hapless youth. As he slowly winded
his way to where the laundry had been, his
concern turned around. The laundry had also
burned to the ground.
While the Great Fire of 1910 destroyed
property and disrupted lives, this was but
one of the many historical challenges that the
people of Southwest Louisiana have had to
face. There have been many other disasters
including floods, financial panics, epidemics,
and hurricanes, certainly prior to 1910, and
unfortunately, even after. Disasters are no
strangers to us in Southwest Louisiana, but in
the case of the Lake Charles Great Fire of
1910, there was a subtle but important shift
in the community’s and in the region’s
approach to recovery.
First, in a practical sense, the Fire leveled
the past architectural mistakes, specifically
those closely-packed wooden buildings,
utilitarian, work a day, even false-fronted,
built with long obsolete nineteenth- and even
eighteenth-century building technology. The
decision to rebuild was tempered by a modern
consideration for security, safety, permanence
and beauty. To do this, the selection of architects
was pivotal, setting the stage for the
future, to afford a safer, more beautiful, and
more modern city, reflective of a more mature,
more confident, and more thoughtful society.
The prestigious New Orleans firm of Favrot
and Livadais was selected by the city, by
the Parish Police Jury, and by the Catholic
congregation for the design of their impressive
replacement structures. That firm was
grounded in the long architectural heritage
of Western Europe, but was also proficient
and expert in up-to-date engineering, safety
considerations, public aesthetics, and the
use of both new and traditional materials.
They selected three compatible but different
style palettes for these three commissions
based not only on how the structures would
be used, but also on how they would be
perceived. The results provided Southwest
Louisiana with perhaps its three best pieces
of civic architecture.
A symbol of Calcasieu Parish, and a
traditional personification-in-stone of good
government and elevated justice for all, the
Historic Calcasieu Courthouse is the prime
example of this architecture of recovery. The
building was re-sited slightly southward, the
city agreeing to eliminate South Court Street
to provide for more spacious grounds, for
aesthetics, but also to physically separate the
structure with larger grounds from other
buildings in the case of fire. The courthouse
styling is of a traditional raised Palladian
design with a handsome copper dome and
distinguished by symbolic details. While
at first resembling a classical renaissance
structure, there are subtle construction
details that identify it as a building of the
twentieth century. It is the fifth building to
serve as the point and symbol of government
for Calcasieu Parish since the first wooden
courthouse from Marion was rolled into place
in 1852 by the team of Ryan and Kirby.
So why is this building so important? It
is evidence in stone of the determination to
rebuild, to state clearly and without question
that citizens then and now value the community,
and that they value each other. It is
evidence that as a society, we are determined
to work to build a permanent focus on justice
and truth. This building is an effort to model
The Calcasieu Parish Courthouse,
along with the 1902 annex showing its
tower, is the building that burned to the
ground in the Great Fire of 1910. The loss
of the building and most of the civil and
criminal records within, gave new life to the
movement to create the last three Louisiana
parishes: Allen, Beauregard and Jefferson
Davis, from the bulk of old Imperial
Calcasieu Parish.
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A street-level view of the Great Fire, looking
south, on the left the Calcasieu State Bank
and the Gordon Building. This early view
shows gawkers on Ryan Street. The fire
later consumed most of seven downtown
blocks and affected many other buildings
throughout the young city.
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that shining city on the hill—not perfect yet,
but a work in progress.
The important decisions had been made
by a then-stunned but recovering Police Jury
and city officials to remain in place, to
rebuild, and to rebuild better. Modern fire
codes, setbacks, suitable fireproof and fireresistant
materials, much improved water
and fire protection were all part of the
rebuilding process. Particularly for the affairs
of the court and the parish, it was important
to instantly organize a reconstruction of
documents and records from bits, and copies
and scraps and notes, many of which had
been held in private land title services.
However, a large percentage of property and
civil records were reconstituted from the
collective memory of survivors.
Improvements to the operation of the
parish and the city included a prudent scientific
review of security, fire safety, and area
logistics. Transportation improvements were
implemented almost instantly—including
expanding the streetcar lines to assist in the
development of the area and to reduce the
need for what had been a relatively compact
city of wood. There was even an effort to
modernize city government with the introduction
of the business-like commission form
rather than the alderman-mayor form for Lake
Charles city administration. The commission
form operated on a basis of expertise, goodwill
and equality, rather than on what was
perceived to be a pork-barrel ward system
where civic improvements focused on certain
areas of cities rather than on the whole.
Daringly, the city and the parish actively
solicited the establishment of aviation training
facilities, a new, bold, and most un-traditional
activity. Aviation was a brand new and daring
technology only recently invented by the
Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk. Only five
years after the Historic Calcasieu Courthouse
opened, the Army Air Signal Corps built
Gerstner Field to train pilots and navigators
for World War I. Hundreds of new businesses,
ventures, enterprises and industries were
encouraged in the new modern Calcasieu
where the old and tired had been literally
burned away.
HISTORIC SOUTHWEST LOUISIANA: A Story of Heritage, Industry and Louisiana Living
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In many respects, the old rural and
agrarian Imperial Calcasieu Parish had also
matured and even changed politically. To
a practical extent, the Fire and loss of
continuity allowed for a significant change
in the political geography. The more distant
rural areas of “Imperial” Calcasieu Parish
viewed the Fire as an opportunity to chart
their own unique futures on the ashes of
the old parish.
Prior the Fire there had been some serious
political activity to establish new parishes
from the nearly 4,000 square miles of
Calcasieu Parish. For many seeking convenience
and practicality, the Fire provided
the additional political capital to encourage
the creation of new parishes. Boundaries and
responsibilities were negotiated in a series
of general conventions. On January 1, 1913,
“Old Imperial” Calcasieu Parish became
our current Calcasieu Parish with Allen,
Beauregard and Jefferson Davis created as the
final three of Louisiana’s sixty-four parishes.
The architecture of recovery was not only
the visible architecture of new grand
buildings and spaces, beautiful bricks and
stone, but it is also an approach to life
itself. Recovery was possible only with
self-determination, and with the allowance
for progress and change within boundaries of
acceptable and measureable possibilities.
The architecture of recovery for Southwest
Louisiana focused on rebuilding after the fire,
taking that opportunity to improve on the
old, to solve local long-standing problems, to
correct local conditions, and to negotiate
challenges. The Fire allowed and encouraged
the entire region to become modern in
approaching government decisions on a
local basis. It was rational, prudent, scientific,
and businesslike.
This was also the methodology that
allowed for the manifest community and area
improvements after the great storm of 1918,
the floods of 1953, Hurricane Audrey in
1957, and most recently Hurricane Rita in
2005, and Hurricanes Ike and Gustav. The
seeds of how this area viewed and handled
and recovered from that early 1910 disaster
had been firmly planted. Recover and restore
were the watchwords, rebuild prudently and
better, for surely, it is indeed worth the effort.
The destruction of the Great Fire of 1910
looking southwest from the tower of the
Calcasieu State Bank. The Bank, the
Gordon Building and Annex were “saved”
by the streaming of water from the Majestic
Hotel’s private water system.
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HISTORIC SOUTHWEST LOUISIANA: A Story of Heritage, Industry and Louisiana Living
74

CHAPTER 11
L EISURE, RECREATION, AND
H OSPITALITY
Any history of Southwest Louisiana must examine the areas of leisure, recreation and
hospitality in order to better provide a picture of what makes the area a great place to live and
to work. Since the days of agriculture and through the years of industrialization, the area’s
workers have had a variety of pastimes, some of which have developed into their own
significant industries.
Hunting and fishing evolved from necessary survival aspects of early life on the marshes,
prairies and woodland, to today’s specialized active sports. Hunting and fishing are very
nearly bred into the DNA of the area. Both locals and tourists avail themselves of the rich
opportunities of hunting and fishing camps, tournaments, and the several seasons that offer sport
(and for most, a source of consumable game.) Hunting and fishing today are a big business for
the area, both as a unique part of homegrown culture, but also as a wider basis for action-based
tourism. There is at least one significant manufacturer of duck and water fowl calls, Faulk’s,
a family enterprise for several decades. Active hunting clubs, hunting leases, fishing rodeos,
guide services, and vendors of equipment are only part of the economic package supporting
hunting and fishing.
Hunting and fishing has also been integrated into the wider community with connections to
ecology and conservation efforts, nonprofit social services supported by fishing and hunting
fundraisers, and even cuisine and cooking that use the unique game and fish of the area. The vast
wild areas remaining in Southwest Louisiana offer unique opportunities to commune with an
earlier, simpler America.
Boating, water sports, and swimming are also directly connected to our unique history and
heritage. Access to the abundant resources of fresh and salt water meant that many families had
and cared for vessels from the very first settlement of the area. Beginning with simple pirogues
and bateaux, thorough the age of sail and steam, and even currently, ownership and use of boats
is a right, if not a duty of many who live in Southwest Louisiana.
At first, boats provided the essential means of transportation, and, as roadways were cut
through and paved, boating became more and more of a social pastime. But even as late as
the 1930s, ferries were essential to connecting large parts of Southwest Louisiana not otherwise
connected, and privately-owned boats were essential for many families who lived on lakes
and rivers. For many, the family boat was just as essential as the family buggy had been or the
family car would be.
For most of the two centuries of settlement in Southwest Louisiana, a day on the water meant
a day of relaxation and renewal. Popular areas for day excursions included watering holes
as widespread as Lake Arthur, Holly Beach, Niblett’s Bluff, the Ouiska Chitto, and the Shell Beach
at Walnut Grove in Lake Charles. There were hundreds of other spots that provided contact
with water where farmworkers, factory workers, shop girls and families could while away the
hours on their hard-earned days off.
Another popular venue for recreation was the saloon-halls, vaudeville theatres and so-called
opry houses that proliferated throughout the area in the nineteenth century and the early days of
the twentieth. While much is known about examples in Lake Charles, particularly the Williams
Opera House (where the Great Fire is known to have started), there were examples of gathering
places throughout the region that served to nominally enlighten, or at least certainly entertain,
the local population. Places of assembly that offered entertainment went by a variety of names
in the day: saloons, dance halls, vaudeville, honky-tonks, some offering gambling on the side,
music perhaps, light-and-slide shows, and early moving pictures. And in most cases they offered
alcohol, either legally or behind the counter.
Opposite, top: Fishing and hunting camps
are still popular in Southwest Louisiana.
In the early days, a few hunters could bag
dozens if not hundreds of birds. Ducks and
geese on display, the quarry of a 1930-era
hunt at Illinois Plant near Lacassine Bayou.
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Opposite, bottom: Homemade culture.
Brass bands were all the rage at the turn of
the last century, and nearly every town of
size had one or more supported by the
community and called on for music at
appropriate times. Unfortunately, the
numbered guide to the gentlemen musicians
is not available.
COURTESY OF THE IMPERIAL CALCASIEU MUSEUM, SUSAN
REED, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR. IMAGE COPYRIGHT ICM.
CHAPTER 11
75

Particularly during the boom years of the
lumber industry, civic leaders and preachers
railed against the saloon industry. While large
parts of Southwest Louisiana were nominally
“tea” or “dry,” there were places where alcohol
was served as a matter of course. In Lake
Charles, most complaints made to law officers
were about Battle Row, that portion of
Railroad Avenue where many saloons catered
to the workers of the sawmills, shipyards and
railroads. A fair number of complaints were
also heard about the Boulevard area just east
and south of famed “Battle Row” where there
were allegations of houses of ill-repute, some
houses of which catered to all races and
tastes at a time when most of the South was
strictly segregated.
To some extent, the concept of “work hardplay
hard” continued into the automobile
age, and the “entertainment” industry of
saloons and bars continued with a string of
nightclubs, dance halls, and honky-tonks
along Highway 90 throughout its length,
and in a selection of other sites throughout
Southwest Louisiana, mostly in out-of-theway
areas just off main highways.
These nightclubs flourished through the
depression when industrial construction
began in earnest and continued throughout
World War II when essential war industries
were in full operation. The nightclub era
peaked during the Cold War era when
Chennault SAC Base was still active, however
many of the principal nightclubs played out by
the 1970s, or changed their modes of operation.
One area historian observed that for
nearly 160 years, sheriffs of Calcasieu Parish
ran on a general platform of “cleaning out the
gambling halls and the honky tonks” and in
1995 when the gambling halls became legal—
gaming casinos—they (folks running for sheriff)
would have no platform at all in the future!
As to the performing arts, the earliest
examples of professional troupes providing
music hall and vaudeville entertainments
coincided with the establishment and growth
of those saloons, dance halls, and opry houses.
Professional performing and music troupes
are recorded as booking in the area as early
as the 1880s when rail connected this part of
Louisiana to the rest of the state.
New Orleans has and had been the
southern capital of entertainment and many
acts played in Southwest Louisiana, being on
the most direct route to Texas venues. The
area had a long history of providing one
last venue for major legitimate theatrical and
musical performances, generally on Sundays
when blue laws prevented entertainment
productions for profit in Texas.
Acts would close in New Orleans on
Saturday, travel on early Sunday trains to
perform that afternoon or evening in Lake
Charles venues such as the Arcade, the
Masonic Temple, at the Auditorium, the
Elk’s Home, and other established landbased
venues, or even at Barbe’s Pier where
the main hall was blessed by being over
the cooling water on hot summer evenings.
But even small-time professional performers
found ready audiences in the variety of
nightlife in roadhouses, bars and night clubs
throughout the region.
While professional troupes provided rare
opportunities for entertainment with local
house bands making up the gaps, live music
was, for the most part, a family-grown or
perhaps a church-inspired event. Particularly,
the African-American churches were strongly
musically focused with both choral and
instrumental elements prominent in fellowship
and worship. Skills honed in church
choirs and orchestras made for great musicianship
and a high degree of proficiency.
Perhaps the best example of such musical
virtuosity is the late Nellie Lutcher, who even
as a child played piano for New Sunlight
Baptist Church on Sundays. Once as a young
girl she filled in for a sick pianist and
played brilliantly for the great Ma Rainey and
her band on one Saturday concert tour
though Lake Charles. Nellie went on to
great fame in California, had a successful
singing and recording career, and managed
the Musicians’ Union in Los Angeles. She
credited the church with her introduction to
the world of music.
In the late 1940s through the 1960s,
Ball’s Auditorium on St. John Street in Lake
Charles was on the so-called Chitlin Circuit
and hosted performers such as Otis Redding,
Ruth Brown, Fats Domino, Ray Charles,
HISTORIC SOUTHWEST LOUISIANA: A Story of Heritage, Industry and Louisiana Living
76

Sam Cooke, James Brown and other African
American musical greats. The site, which had
been established as a training school, evolved
into a performing space for national acts
and also for local performances as well. After
its heyday, the facility gradually deteriorated
with fewer bookings and uses, and what was
left of the building was razed in the 1990s.
Locally produced music was created as a
fusion of cultures and influences. Southwest
Louisiana, a salad bowl of Cajun, Creoles,
African-American, relocated upland southerners,
Germans, Texans and so many other
distinctive sounds, is the crucible where
these different elements were and are converted
into entirely new musical types.
Instruments were added, melodies were
modified, rhythms changed, blending and
bending musical boundaries.
Many early solo artists and local bands
performed at road houses and dance
halls as part of the continuum of coastal
South Louisiana music. This coastal South
Louisiana music was and is distinct and
different from that of the rest of the South.
Local recording companies, especially Eddie
Schuler’s Goldband label, captured this
energy and creativity in early records, many
of which found regional, if not national fame.
If there is a regional recognized sound, it
is indeed a wide and impressive one, with
such standouts as the Hackberry Ramblers,
Jo-El Sonnier, Queen Ida, Boozoo Chavis,
Lucinda Williams, Marcia Ball, and dozens
of other artists with ties to the area and who
created the special South Louisiana sound.
This process continues to the present day
with Wendy Colona and Eleisha Eagle, whose
music is very much derived from their
Southwest Louisiana heritage.
The first foray into area theater arts were
the skits and plays performed by students as
part of school assignments as early as the
turn of the twentieth century and recorded
in notes and diaries. But for all practical
purposes, amateur dramatics began with the
redoubtable Rosa Hart, whose early exposure
to theatre and the wider world of culture in
New Orleans, encouraged her and a handful
of local citizens to create the Lake Charles
Little Theatre in 1926. Still recognized as one
of the first community theatres in America,
Little Theatre was a proving ground for
many firsts in Southwest Louisiana culture
and society: the first racially integrated cast,
the first organized community orchestra,
the first public gallery display of art, the
first cooperative town-and-gown productions
with Margery Wilson’s Bayou Players of the
then McNeese College, the first broadcasts of
live dramatics as radio readers’ theatre. Other
community based theaters, dance troupes,
the current symphony, and other cultural
institutions throughout the region followed
and continue to provide a rich tapestry of
offerings for participants and for audiences.
Festivals of one theme or another populate
the calendar of Southwest Louisiana and
focus large quantities of energy to having
fun. The convention and visitors bureaus
promoting the area have catalogued and
promoted these festivals. In Calcasieu Parish,
the bureau has concluded that this corner
of the state is indeed the festival capital of
Louisiana with as many as three regional
festivals in play any given weekend. Most
are harvest festivals of one sort or another
such as the Mayhaw Festival in Starks, the
Fur and Wildlife Festival in Cameron, or the
Watermelon Festival in Beauregard Parish,
designed to acknowledge and to celebrate
the indigenous products of the area.
Other festivals are heritage-based such as
the Marshland Festival of Hackberry, the
Bon-Ton Festival in Sulphur, the Cajun
Food and Music Festival, the Cal-Cam,
Jeff Davis, Allen and Beauregard Parish Fairs,
and even Contraband Days. Contraband,
the largest festival in the state in terms
of events and days scheduled, purports to
reenact the very earliest privateer and pirate
connections of the region, complete to a
walking-of-the-plank for the mayor of the
city as its opening event.
Specially crafted festivals like the Arts
and Crab Festival, Beer Festival, Downtown
at Sundown, and the Louisiana Railroad
Festival in DeQuincy, encourage and enlighten
the communities sponsoring the event,
promote local activities for residents and for
visitors, and help celebrate holidays and
heritage. There are very few communities
The Arcade Theater was the venue
for many touring shows and concerts.
The theater was at the rear of the Miller
Building and an open-air arcade ran from
Ryan Street to the box office and theater
entrance at the rear. The entire complex
was lost in a fire in 1985; it had been listed
on the National Register of Historic Places
in 1978.
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COPYRIGHT MSU ARCHIVES.
CHAPTER 11
77

Rescue buses for Hurricane Audrey search
and rescue are lined up at the Port of Lake
Charles in 1957. The local disaster with its
massive loss of life and property made
national headlines for months; recovery
continued for decades.
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COPYRIGHT MSU ARCHIVES.
in Southwest Louisiana that do not have
a signature festival event, and most communities
have at least seasonal events that
offer true local color, flavor and fun.
Mardi Gras, one of the earliest European
customs to have been celebrated in Louisiana,
is a huge seasonal project for many residents
of the area. Many communities celebrate publically
with masking in the streets, parades,
banquets, balls and pageants, traditions that
are similar to other areas of the coastal South
(New Orleans, Lafayette, Mobile, Galveston)
that celebrate Mardi Gras.
In Southwest Louisiana, however, these
activities are further augmented by what is
a unique throwback to medieval France,
the courier-de-Mardi-gras, commonly called
the “chicken runs.” This rural component of
Mardi Gras goes back through the earliest
French and Spanish settlers to continental
European models where masked men
(now masked men and women) on horseback
(and now on four-runners) scour rural areas
to negotiate for chickens or sausage, or other
foodstuffs for a community-wide gumbo to
be held later in the day. In French-speaking
rural areas of Southwest Louisiana, the
chicken runs are community events with
spectators following the masked gangs to
watch their antics, the masking, and the other
hijinks of this pre-Lenten merry-making.
In more urban areas, private organizations
called Krewes manage and deliver Mardi-
Gras with a series of private balls and
pageants for themselves and guests, and later
with public parades. For some Krewes,
the Mardi Gras season continues nearly yearround
with private events and preparations
going on behind the scenes. There are over
seventy recognized krewes in Southwest
Louisiana according to the Mardi Gras
Museum of Southwest Louisiana, a glittery
repository of Mardi Gras splendor.
Louisiana as a “brand” is highly recognized
and appreciated worldwide, and except for
Louisiana music, perhaps no other facet of
Louisiana culture is more appreciated and
recognized than the state’s cuisine, much of
which is based on the rich pantry of coastally
obtained foods. Here in Southwest Louisiana,
there is no exception to the rule that you can
eat well here in Louisiana. From the gumbos
and court-bouillons of the Cajuns, to the hopping
john and fritters of the up-land south, to
German pies, pastries, and cakes, to barbeque,
and tacos, and to the full seafood pantry of
the coast, the menus of southwest Louisiana
are a true United Nations of tastes and flavors.
Restaurants offer a veritable banquet of
local cuisine. Many seafood restaurants
offer seasonal delicacies like freshly boiled
crawfish or crabs, or oysters on the half-shell.
Many other restaurants have international
twists using items from the local pantry,
dishes like shrimp nachos, crawfish enchiladas
or Vietnamese bun with blue crab.
A few restaurants source local products
for their daily fare, items like okra, mirleton,
creole tomatoes, sweet corn, bell peppers,
honey, strawberries and citrus.
Most recently, specialty products are being
crafted locally using Louisiana ingredients
and inspiration; the principal offerings being
boudin, tasso, sausage, cracklins and other
meat products available for both local and
national consumption. Another set of interesting
developments are the crafting of
award-winning rums using Louisiana sugar
and molasses at the Bayou Rum distillery
near Lacassine and the commercial brewing
of beer at two sites, Crying Eagle and
Rikenjaks, both in Lake Charles.
Organized sporting events began early in
the area with evidence of sporting teams being
fielded from sawmills and other early employers
in the late nineteenth century. Baseball,
particularly, was an early favorite of the area,
HISTORIC SOUTHWEST LOUISIANA: A Story of Heritage, Industry and Louisiana Living
78

and in 1905, Lake Charles fielded the Creoles,
who played in the semi-pro South Texas
League, and later the Gulf Coast League. The
fascination with semi-pro baseball continued
up until the late 1950s with area teams named
the Newporters who played for the Cotton
States League, the Lake Charles Explorers, the
Giants, the Lakers, and the Skippers, teams
who played at various times in the Evangeline
League, and the Lake Charles Lincoln Giants
who played in the Negro leagues.
Part of the regional passion for the game
may have been due to the early influence of
the great baseball manager Connie Mack who
wintered his first Philadelphia Athletics team
at the Majestic Hotel in Lake Charles for several
seasons early in the twentieth century. He
worked and practiced them on various ball
fields in Lake Charles and allegedly had
operatives in the city and region that scouted
talent for his championship teams. The popular
American pastime may have been engrained in
the psyche of Southwest Louisiana at the very
moment of its crafting on the national scene.
Certainly, there is distinct interest in baseball
that encouraged an early native son of
the area. Baseball Hall-of-Famer Ted Lyons
played professionally for the Chicago White
Sox for years. Born in Lake Charles, he lived
a large portion of his early life in Vinton
(his home there is on the National Register)
and he retired here, passing away in 1986 at
the age of eighty-five. The proficient and
brilliant player had his jersey (number 16)
retired by the White Sox and he is a wellregarded
national icon of the sport.
To a great extent, the commitment to
baseball (and softball) continues to this day
with the sport being played by many of the
high schools in the area, by McNeese State
University, and with Sulphur’s impressive
parks system providing the venue for
statewide tournaments and exhibitions for
both baseball and softball.
Strong and visceral support for high school
football is the common factor of fall in
Southwest Louisiana with teams fielded at all
levels of school size and scope. Pitched battles
and rivalries exist throughout the area. On
many Fridays in fall, the local football stadium
is the only place to be, and for some communities,
the stadium capacity exceeds the entire
official population count of the town in which
it is located. Such is the fervor for the game
that many events are arranged, including
marriages, to avoid conflicts in scheduling.
McNeese State University football occupies
the focus of many a Saturday evening in
the fall, and there is still ample regional and
alumni support (and attendance) for games
of the University of Louisiana—Lafayette,
LSU, Tulane, Southern, Louisiana Tech and
other state and regional colleges depending
on circumstances, current game venues and
rivalries. Tailgate parties (sometimes extravagant,
and always fun) at various college
stadiums throughout the drivable range of a
Saturday afternoon is a local tradition of the
fall season. Southwest Louisiana particularly
showcases its hospitality at McNeese home
games with a smorgasbord of pre-game parties
in season.
A fondness for baseball and softball is a
longtime characteristic of Southwest
Louisiana proven by this image of a ball
team in all its glory taken in the early part
of the last century.
COURTESY OF THE IMPERIAL CALCASIEU MUSEUM,
SUSAN REED, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR.
IMAGE COPYRIGHT ICM.
CHAPTER 11
79

HISTORIC SOUTHWEST LOUISIANA: A Story of Heritage, Industry and Louisiana Living
80

CHAPTER 12
H ORSE R ACING, GAMBLING AND G AMING
A natural, expected result of the strong horse culture of Southwest Louisiana is the sport of
horse racing, both thoroughbred and quarter-horse, most surely practiced on an informal basis
since the very earliest days of settlement. In the practical sense of an established racecourse with
rules and regulations, the region offers Delta Downs, established as a six furlong track in 1973,
just west of Vinton.
Currently, the thoroughbred season begins in November, with a quarter horse season
beginning in April. In the 1990s with state changes in the gambling regulations which allowed
the installation of slot machines on established horse tracks, Delta Downs began to improve
the quality of its meets, encouraging higher stakes horses to run. The facility includes a series of
hotel and restaurant options, as well as exhibition barns of draft and miniature horses.
The native-American Koasati-Coushatta tribe operates the impressive Coushatta Casino Resort on
tribal lands just north of Kinder, Louisiana. Opened in 1995, the facility is the largest casino-resort
(100,000 square foot gaming floor) in the state and it is one of the largest employers (with over
2,600 employees) in the entire region. The economic impact is significant for Allen and Jefferson
Davis parishes, and the facility is only part of the wide economic reach of the Tribe in the region.
In the Lake Area, there are three casino resort facilities. On the western shore of the Calcasieu
River is the Isle of Capri Casino Resort and Hotels, and on Prien Lake and the eastern bank of the
Calcasieu River are the L’Auberge Casino Resort and, the newest, the Golden Nugget Casino Resort.
These full-feature casino resorts come complete with extensive pool facilities, luxury hotels,
golf courses, restaurants and shops. They cater to a wide range of customers and patrons, from the
high rollers who fly in, or who yacht into the private docks of the facilities, to the casual visitor
just needing a meal. The facilities were specially designed and constructed to resort standards
and are comparable to gaming properties in Nevada, New Jersey or the Mississippi Gulf Coast.
Isle of Capri opened in 1995, the impressive L’Auberge du Lac (Now L’Auberge–Lake Charles)
property opened in 2005, and the splashy Golden Nugget opened in 2015. Prior to these big three,
Players Casino–Lake Charles and Harrah’s–Lake Charles operated sequentially from an already
existing hotel base just off Interstate 10 on the north shore of Lake Charles. The hotel and casino
facilities there were significantly damaged by Hurricane Rita in 2005. Harrah’s decided not to
reopen, and to release their coveted fourteenth Louisiana Casino license. Flooding from Hurricane
Gustav and Ike further damaged the hotel property, which eventually had to be demolished.
The ensuing chase for this last of the casino licenses freed by the departing Harrah’s was
near-decade long with many soap-opera style twists and turns of fate. That final license was
eventually captured by Tillman Fertitta for his Golden Nugget property. The Lake Area casinos
employ about 7,000 workers directly. Some wags claim that the demographic of the Lake Area
changes every weekend when sizable populations of Southeast Texans, including huge numbers of
Houstonians, congregate to play on the gaming floors of Southwest Louisiana casinos, dine in the
dozens of new restaurants, or otherwise enjoy the facilities and activities in a leisure-driven economy.
One of the most ironic and unusual observations about the effect of gaming on the local
economy has been made by social historians with the continuous informal comparison of
Lake Charles and Lafayette, longtime community rivals and Interstate 10 neighbor cities.
Long known as the Hub City of Acadiana, Lafayette was and is the logical business focus for
a resident population of nearly 700,000 people today within a fifty-mile radius. Lake Charles is
the business focus for perhaps 200,000 people within a fifty mile radius. Discounting retail,
wholesale and residential construction, the basis for which is absolutely population and demand
driven, the cities are good comparables and have long been both partners and rivals in the scope
of business and industry.
CHAPTER 12
81

Opposite: Delta Downs, established as a six
furlong track in 1973, is just west of Vinton.
For decades, Lafayette boasted of its party
atmosphere and its accommodating prodevelopment
attitude, and lauded its slightly
superior laissez-faire approach to business.
This attitude was in comparison to the commonly
perceived perception of a protestant
and prim work-a-day, fairly remote and slightly
rusticated Lake Charles, with of course, a nice
port but not much else to work with.
Several years ago, the citizens in Lafayette
parish denied all forms of gaming within
their parish—even taking the step to evict the
well-established and long-running Evangeline
Downs to a site outside of the jurisdiction. In
relative contrast, prim, restrained, rusticated
and protestant Lake Charles and Southwest
Louisiana allowed gaming (in many cases
with some fair rancor). That decision changed
Southwest Louisiana to the extent that
within a mere twenty years, the industry and
its allied hospitality component provides
employment for nearly a quarter of the workforce
and an investment of well over a billion
and a half dollars in gaming infrastructure.
This has provided Southwest Louisiana
with a unique amalgam of agriculture,
petrochem, manufacturing, technology,
aviation, LNG, retail, wholesale, healthcare,
education, and gaming/hospitality. To some
extent, this diverse base of underpinning
industries allows the Southwest Louisiana
area to better buffet the daily ups-and-downs
of the world economy. While the price of oil
most certainly affects the day-to-day economy
of Lake Charles, it does so somewhat less than
that of Louisiana as a state. However, the daily
price of oil absolutely controls the entire
economy of Lafayette—perhaps even more so
than ever since they voted to excise gaming as
a possible industry.
It is significant that the twenty-year old
gaming/hospitality sector in Southwest
Louisiana is now a primary industry for the
area and that at least one other primary
industry, that of LNG import/export, is
nearly as young. For many economic
observers, the creation of these two totally
different and yet significant primary industries
being literally created from scratch
in one geographic area in a mere two
decades is a true miracle of growth, planning,
and enterprise.
HISTORIC SOUTHWEST LOUISIANA: A Story of Heritage, Industry and Louisiana Living
82

CHAPTER 12
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HISTORIC SOUTHWEST LOUISIANA: A Story of Heritage, Industry and Louisiana Living
84

CHAPTER 13
I SSUES D OWN THE R OAD
The aftereffects of Rita and Katrina have galvanized the entire gulf coastal economy, development
plan, and history. A large percentage of infrastructure being planned or built all along the coast
specifically deals with the effects of water, access to water, drainage, and storm surge. This affects
development along the actual coast in Cameron, but also all along the watersheds of the Calcasieu,
the Sabine and the Mermentau and their tributaries, in essence all of Southwest Louisiana. The same
water that provides opportunities for industry and shipping, for recreational fishing, swimming, and
boating, has been and can be a killer and a destroyer.
Just after the storms, a series of community meetings were held throughout the Louisiana gulf coast
cities and towns that had been affected. Complicated issues were raised and discussed: coastal erosion,
storm surge protection, replenishment of depleted delta, protecting the ecology of the coast, discussing
responsibilities and placing blame. The roles of local government, state and federal government, insurance
companies and the financial markets in underwriting growth were all minutely examined and debated.
In a few locations, Lake Charles being one, experts from throughout the world came to offer
observations, workable solutions, and alternatives in a process called the charrette. The work of the
charrette was to discover the new Gulf Coast status quo. The charrette was to explore, to investigate,
and to plan what would be the alternatives, how those alternatives would be funded, and how to
position priorities in an ever-changing menu of possibilities.
The results in Southwest Louisiana were mixed. Voters in the parish refused to tax themselves to fund
additional infrastructure improvements, however voters in the City of Lake Charles did. Infrastructure
improvements in the City of Lake Charles were broad and far-reaching. However, the most visible
and most visited improvements were those to the string of parks along the lake, the marina, various
playgrounds, and streetscape. Improvements included communication and utility upgrades on Ryan
Street, traffic calming, new interconnections with I-10, all of which has encouraged private investment
and entrepreneurship. But built into these visual improvements are storm-worthy upgrades, new
drainage, and grade changes including a subtle levee at the civic center to restrict lake-surge flooding.
Another productive and positive development post-Rita was the creation of the Southwest
Louisiana Economic Development Alliance. This was crafted by combining the Chamber Southwest
with a regional parish partnership to work area-wide, rather than just parish by parish. From a very
practical perspective, the five-parish region serves as the commuter-shed for many jobs, and to focus
on the region delivered a strong clarion call for unified development and planning. One of the first
concrete results of unified planning was the establishment of the SEED Center on the campus of
McNeese State University to serve as a “one-stop economic generator” and new business incubator.
Within ten years of the hurricane year of 2005, this fresh vision of the region working together resulted
in Southwest Louisiana leading the nation in announced industrial projects and in new startups, at the
same time experiencing new entrepreneurship and small businesses at an unprecedented degree.
The focus of Rita’s fury, the parish of Cameron has rebuilt higher and more inland, relocating
and strengthening resources north of the Intracoastal Canal, and rebuilding parish facilities to
much higher storm surge standards closer to the coast. The parish is struggling daily with how to
best provide day to day services, education, housing, and retail to coastal communities.
In Jennings, DeRidder, Oakdale, Kinder and other communities, there has been a new prideful
stock-taking of what it means to live in Southwest Louisiana. There have been efforts to revitalize
historic downtown areas with major improvement projects underway on DeRidder’s historic
courthouse and in Jennings Main Street and city hall. Sulphur area residents supported major new
work on the Brimstone and Henning facilities and Heritage Square Park. Even grassroots efforts
like farmer’s markets in Kinder and Oberlin help local economies and instill pride and community
spirit, significant efforts to continually improve the quality of life in Southwest Louisiana.
McNeese State University.
CHAPTER 13
85

CHAPTER 14
G REAT L ORE AND R ANDOM S TORIES
DeRidder, Louisiana, is known for its
hanging jail.
The Graybow Riot of 1912 took place between unionized timber workers and the owners of the
Galloway mill located just west of DeRidder. On Sunday July 7, a group of timber workers led by the
notorious Charles “Leather Britches” Smith had been demonstrating at a corporate mill in Bon Ami,
and on the way home, strayed to the closed mill. There, tempers flared, words were exchanged, and
then a violent confrontation left four dead and fifty wounded in a fifteen minute exchange of gunfire.
Fifty-eight of the men were eventually tried on charges from inciting a riot to murder,
none were convicted. (This series of trials was held in the Calcasieu Courthouse, one
of the last to be tried from what would become Beauregard Parish.) Wanting better
working conditions and better pay, the Brotherhood of Timber Workers—part of the
International Workers of the World—had long been negotiating with the Southern
Lumber Operators Association, but failed to gain any ground in the three years prior
to the Graybow Riot. The Graybow Riot lead to additional blacklisting and strikes later
that year at the Merryville mill, and many historians believe that a distinctly anti-union
bias was a result of the incident. The lumber unions remained virtually powerless as
the industry eventually felled what remained of the virgin pine of Southwest Louisiana.
Baptist Meadows, the neighborhood surrounding St. Louis Catholic School on Bank
Street in Lake Charles, is the location of one of the quirkier stories in America.
In 1899 the Baptist Church in Louisiana established an orphanage and farm in
Lake Charles (complete with dairy barns and pastures) to care for homeless children
and to teach them useful crafts including printing, baking, and the farming of chickens
for eggs and meat, and cattle for milk and butter. Long after the Baptist Orphanage left
Lake Charles, taking their orphans, caretakers and cows from the complex they ran
here for twenty-six years, there were ongoing reports of the sounds of cows mooing
balefully in the still early mornings in the area. There are reports of this strange
phenomenon actually causing people to move.
Perhaps the oldest remaining brick structure in Southwest Louisiana is the Sabine
Pass Lighthouse, authorized by Congress in 1849 and constructed between 1855 and 1857. Its
unusual shape with the buttresses radiating from the tower, and its distinctive black and
white horizontal stripes make it an unmistakable landmark at the very southwest tip of the state.
The light was extinguished in 1861, but returned to service in 1865. Even unlit, the lighthouse
was used for observation by both Confederates and Union soldiers in the battles of Sabine Pass.
The light was deactivated permanently in 1952, and the site has since lost its keeper’s dwelling
and all accessory buildings to fires and vandalism. The property was donated to the Cameron
Preservation Alliance in 2001. Now visible from Chenier Energy’s LNG Terminal, there are
plans for selective restoration and for an interpretation center to tell the story of this resilient
symbol of Southwest Louisiana.
One of the Bel family houses on Pine at Moss Streets in Lake Charles has a family tale of strange
doings on its long porch. The effect causes porch rockers to move—even on perfectly still days.
Occasionally, even today, the rockers will move on their own accord, sometimes gently sometimes
agitatedly. It is told that one of the original ladies of the house would rock there while waiting
for her men-folk to return from the sawmill that they ran at the river. Above the porch, on the
top of the house, is a widow’s walk—unviewable from the street—where she would climb to
check on the mill and on her men-folk, when not rocking furiously for their return. The story
continues that her concerns were indeed valid, as the Bel sawmill was located on the north side
of infamous Battle Row that was Railroad Avenue. She was concerned that her men folk might
not have the courage to skirt the temptations of the dives and doxies that populated that quarter.
HISTORIC SOUTHWEST LOUISIANA: A Story of Heritage, Industry and Louisiana Living
86

Perhaps the most interesting, and certainly
the most extravagant and lurid of the
stories in Southwest Louisiana is that of the
goings-on in the elegant classical Calcasieu
historic courthouse itself. Since the late
1940s there have been reports of blinking
lights, electric equipment abruptly starting
and stopping, occasional raucous laughter,
and whiffs of the smell of burning hair and
of strong old-fashioned flowery cologne.
The unusual phenomena in this centuryold
building have been attributed to one
of the most notorious inhabitants of this
august precinct, one Annie McQuiston
Henry, better known as “Toni Jo Henry,”
whose series of sensational trials ended
with her electrocution here in 1942. The
one and only woman electrocuted in
Louisiana, was put to death here in
Lake Charles.
There are still inquiries about “the Toni Jo
Henry trials” periodically. The materials are
part of the court record and can be visited
right now at the courthouse. There have
been film adaptations, and a recent book
by author Norman German, Savage Justice,
uses the characters and the basic plot, but
essentially fictionalizes the situation, using
much of what was popularly perceived about
the young woman born Annie McQuiston,
and who was put to death as Toni Jo Henry.
After a rebellious youth, the young woman
known as Annie McQuiston, but who wanted
to be called Toni Jo, found a way to escape
her family by eloping with Claude “Cowboy”
Henry, a down-and-out boxer who made a
living as a small-time crook and strongarm
enforcer for racketeers. She always
claimed that Henry had helped her kick her
cocaine habit. In 1939, “Cowboy” was tried
and sentenced to fifty years in Huntsville
prison for shooting an ex-lawman in a
San Antonio bar.
Toni Jo vowed to free her man. On
Valentine’s Day in 1940, she and a friend
of hers named Finnon “Arky” Burks were
hitchhiking from Huntsville, where they
had been visiting with Cowboy. The young
couple was picked up by Joseph Calloway,
a Houston salesman, allegedly on his way
to meet a customer in South Louisiana.
The prosperous Calloway was driving a new
powerful roadster and he unfortunately
became the object of the couple’s nefarious
plan. They would steal the car and cash,
rid themselves of Calloway, and use the car
to rob banks and stores in an effort to free
Cowboy by bribing guards at the penitentiary
and otherwise bankrolling his escape.
The two pulled a gun and kidnapped
Calloway, forcing him to drive to a lonely
rice field where he was stripped—Toni Jo
claimed that Calloway “had good-looking
threads and was about Cowboy’s size”—and
then he was tortured and shot between
the eyes. Toni Jo and Burks then drove to
Arkansas, where they were to make plans to
rob banks to finance the escape. However,
when Burks abandoned Toni Jo on the
road to Camden, Arkansas, she contacted
family in Shreveport and said she had killed
a man near Lake Charles. Her family pushed
her strongly to turn herself in. By then
there was the report of the lost car and the
missing Calloway. She succumbed to the
authorities, and helped them find Calloway’s
body. Burks was eventually found, and the
two were hauled to Lake Charles for a series
of spectacular trials that galvanized the
entire country for years.
Toni Jo made an early use of the social
defense that she had been a victim of
childhood abuse, drugs, prostitution, and
alcohol. She made use of her beauty, flirting
with attorneys, newsmen, even the judge.
She alternately played the vamp, the little
lost girl, the seductress; the press corps
called her “the Tigress.” She knew how to
manipulate the media and had fans nationwide
that sent her gifts, money, and
well-wishes. Many believed her to be
innocent and the victim of circumstances.
She was held in a specially constructed
cell on the top floor of the courthouse
and afforded particular considerations like
comfortable furniture and rugs for her cell,
access to cosmetics and special meals, and
even a pet dog.
The first two courtroom trials in historic
Courtroom A were declared mistrials, but
the third effort was upheld and Toni Jo
was prepared for her execution by the
CHAPTER 14
87

The final resting place of the infamous
Toni Jo Henry, whose sensational trials
were held in the Calcasieu Courthouse.
Her execution by the electric chair in
1942 was followed by another execution of
her accomplice Finnon Burks on the
courthouse premises.
COURTESY OF MCNEESE STATE UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES,
CARE OF FRAZAR LIBRARY, PATI THREAT, ARCHIVIST.
COPYRIGHT MSU ARCHIVES.
brand-new electric chair. It would be the
first and only electrocution for a woman in
Louisiana. Cowboy, still in prison during the
time of the trials, somehow escaped with a
wild plan to kidnap the judge in an effort to
ransom his bride. Luckily, he was captured
in Beaumont and taken back to serve even
more time in a Texas prison.
The Louisiana electric chair (called Ole
Sparky even when brand new) was brought
onto parish facilities near the courthouse. At
that time, executions were conducted in the
jurisdiction in which the crime was committed
to serve as a lesson for the local criminal
class. Gulf States Utility Company brought
in additional generators, so as to assure that
the process would be successful, since an
execution of this nature had never been
tried here before. Until Toni Jo’s execution,
hanging was the customary penalty for
capital crimes, and courthouse records clearly
show multiple hanging sentences practically
every court session until the 1940s.
Prior to the execution, Toni Jo requested a
Catholic priest from Immaculate Conception
Church across Ryan Street from the courthouse
to instruct her in the Catholic faith and
to take her confession. She later reported to
a deputy-jailer that “she couldn’t understand
how she had fallen so low since she had
been brought up a good Methodist.”
On the day, Toni Jo’s hair was cut very
short by a civilian barber chosen by lot—the
regular jail barber could not bring himself
to shave her head as he had long ago
succumbed to her charms. Toni Jo had made
arrangements to dispose of her possessions
kept in the cell. Her puppy was taken by
a niece, costume jewelry and clothes went
to well-wishers, she left a letter for
Cowboy, still in a Texas prison. As reported
by journalists, the woman “looking frail
and small, was lead to the chair and
strapped in.” The witnesses, including the
sheriff, a few parish employees, a priest,
a doctor, a few journalists, and members of
the Calloway family, reported that the lights
“flickered and grew bright then flickered
again, and the strong scent of burned hair
was detected, mingled in with that of her
floral cologne.”
Toni Jo was buried in Orange Grove
Cemetery. A pure white marble headstone
marks the location and on the stone is carved
“Our Toni Jo.” Her death-chair confession
that she alone pulled the trigger did not
keep Finnon “Arky” Burks from his date with
the chair four months later also here in
Calcasieu Parish.
By 1942, when Toni Jo met her fate, the
sensational crime with its lurid details had
been displaced by the daily reports of World
War II. Toni Jo had literally disappeared
from the headlines, but she has not faded
completely from regional popular memory.
She still lives, in a way, for some folks who
visit and use the courthouse. Many report the
blinking lights, smells and electrical hi-jinks
as evidence of her mortal saga in the historic
building where so much of her history was
recounted, and where her fate was sealed.
HISTORIC SOUTHWEST LOUISIANA: A Story of Heritage, Industry and Louisiana Living
88

COURTESY OF CHAMBER SOUTHWEST LOUISIANA.
SHARING THE HERITAGE
Historic profiles of businesses, organizations,
and families that have contributed to the development
and continued growth of Southwest Louisiana
Schlesingers Wholesale ..................................................................90
Port Aggregates, Inc......................................................................94
Westlake Chemical Lake Charles South Vinyls Complex ......................98
Raleigh Newman .........................................................................102
Hampton Inn, Lake Charles ..........................................................106
Calcasieu Parish Police Jury.........................................................110
First Federal Bank of Louisiana ....................................................112
Darrell’s....................................................................................114
McManus Construction, LLC.........................................................116
Lundy, Lundy, Soileau & South LLP ...............................................118
The Bel Group/Bel Commercial, LLC ..............................................120
Steamboat Bill’s..........................................................................122
Veron, Bice, Palermo & Wilson, LLC..............................................124
Lake Area Medical Center ............................................................126
HD Truck & Tractor, LLC.............................................................127
Landry Supply, Inc......................................................................128
Caraway Pharmacy .....................................................................129
Ally-Gator BookBites Publishing House...........................................130
Calcasieu Parish Public Library ....................................................131
SHARING THE HERITAGE
89

SCHLESINGERS
WHOLESALE
Above: Frank T. Fertitta.
Top, right: Barbara Ann, daughter
of Anthony and Bea Fertitta with
Johnny Roventini, the famous Philip Morris
Bellhop, 1950.
Below: Johnny Roventini, Barbara Ann,
Bea Fertitta, Delores Tuminello (sister of
Anthony, Sr.) with three representatives from
the Philip Morris Company, 1950.
Frank T. Fertitta survived the Great
Depression and saw firsthand, the havoc
the stock market wreaked on families
everywhere. “But it was through faith and
the Grace of God that he fought many
changing variables in what he started as
a family-owned business, which has prospered
for generations later,” says President
Anthony Fertitta, Jr., his (grandson).
Because of that rough financial period
in American History, Frank had given much
thought as to how he might prevent such
hard times in the future. In the early 1940s,
he entertained the idea of a family-owned
business that would support and secure his
family’s livelihood in the future in Louisiana.
Frank’s father, Tony Fertitta, along with
his three brothers had come to the U. S.
from Cefalu, Italy, on the Island of Sicily, and
settled in Leesville, Louisiana, where they
owned grocery and hardware stores. Frank
was the first cousin to Vic and Anthony
who the Vic and Anthony’s Steakhouse of
Houston and the Golden Nugget in Lake
Charles, Louisiana was named.
Frank was born in Leesville August 18,
1898, and moved with his family to
Beaumont, Texas, as a young man. There, he
worked in sales for many years as a route
salesman; and felt that he had gained a lot
of experience that would position him well
in a business of his own. In truth, he had
gained exactly the type of experience for
what he hoped to accomplish in his future.
He was associated with a relative-owned
business, Texas Coffee Company, at different
times. At one time, he launched a small
candy-making business where football
suckers, peanut patties, and a variety of
other candies were made. The candy was
made by two Swedish immigrants and sold
by Frank to customers along his truck route.
It was then that Frank became acquainted
with A. W. Schlesinger, a businessman,
philanthropist, and owner of Schlesingers
Wholesale, a candy and tobacco wholesale
HISTORIC SOUTHWEST LOUISIANA: A Story of Heritage, Industry and Louisiana Living
90

in Beaumont, Texas. Frank approached
Schlesinger about opening the Wholesale
business in Lake Charles. A deal was made
and Schlesingers in Lake Charles opened its
doors in September 1946. Schlesinger was
a silent partner remaining in Beaumont.
Frank and his wife, Margaret, and daughter,
Delores moved to Lake Charles from
Beaumont, opening the store on a prayer.
At that time, Anthony Fertitta, Frank’s son,
was at Langley Field, Virginia, training with
the Army Air Corps. He became a bombardier
on a B-24, and was just days away from being
sent to Japan to bomb enemy submarines
stationed in caves along the coast of Japan.
A crew of B-24s had already been painted
black for the night missions when the
U. S. dropped the atomic bomb. So, when
WWII drew to a close, Anthony returned
to Beaumont in October 1945 with an
honorable discharge from the Army Air
Corps, what later became known as the
U. S. Air Force.
The new business kept the original
Schlesinger name because it already had an
established customer base and were wellknown
for their products.
Anthony married Beatrice “Bea” DiGiglia of
Lake Charles in May 1946. At the time the
business opened in Lake Charles, Anthony
and Bea were still living in Beaumont.
Anthony had returned to his pre-war job at
Texas Coffee Company. In July 1947, Anthony
and Bea moved to Lake Charles so Anthony
could join his dad in working for the business.
Originally, the majority of items sold were
candy and tobacco, but gradually other items
were added to the inventory. The company
began carrying everything from Mardi Gras
supplies, cold drinks, oil products, to paper
goods, and everything in between.
During the 1950s, a cigarette vending
machine business, Automatic Cigarette Service
was acquired. It was also run by Anthony.
Later, the company incorporated and became
Schlesingers Wholesale & Automatic Cigarette
Service, Inc. The company was located in
the Old Colletta Building at 1832 East Broad
Street next to what used to be Hokus Pokus
Liquor. It was there that Hurricane Audrey
hit in 1957. The building took a bad hit
from the storm. There were leaks through the
ceiling. After the storm subsided; however,
with prayers and faith, the leaks ended up
between the aisles of merchandise and
nothing was lost to water damage.
In the early 1970s, at the same location,
Office Manager Antoine Migues received a
phone call in the middle of the night saying
the warehouse had just been destroyed by
a tornado and he should go to check it
out. Migues rushed to the location to find
the building was intact, with the tornado
taking a course from west-to-east, leveling
parts of Broad Street businesses right up to
Schlesingers, and then, lifting as it got to the
warehouse, only to touch down again just
east of the business to finish its destructive
path. Again, it was faith and prayers that saw
Schlesingers survive once again!
The family-operated wholesale business
was a fun place to work in the early days
because the business was run without
legislation. There were always tobacco representatives
in the warehouse, sometime three
at a time. All wholesalers got a 3.5 percent
discount on all products bought from the
manufacturers. “Competition was always
there,” says Anthony, Jr., “but everyone was
on the same playing field. However, in
November of 1998, the Tobacco Master
Settlement Agreement (MSA) was entered
Above: Anthony Fertitta, Sr., top row,
far left with his B-24 Bomber crew.
Below: Frank T. Fertitta and his son,
Anthony D. Fertitta.
SHARING THE HERITAGE
91

Above: Frank T. Fertitta.
between the four major tobacco companies—
Philip Morris, Inc., Brown & Williamson,
Lorrilard, and R. J. Reynolds. The Attorneys
General for forty-six states settled their law
suits against the tobacco industries. In
exchange, the companies agreed to cease
certain tobacco marketing practices, as well as
to pay them for some of the medical costs of
caring for persons with smoking-related illnesses
in the MSA. The original participating
manufacturers agreed to pay a minimum of
$206 billion over the first twenty-five years of
the agreement. This radically changed forever
the way businesses in the tobacco industry
would be run. With a tremendous debt placed
over the heads of the major players in the
tobacco industry, it was not long before it
trickled down the ranks. Tobacco companies
had reduced their workforce, imposed new
costs to customers, and passed a lot of the
responsibility of paying the debt on to the
wholesalers and retailers, as well as the consumer.
That was the start of many changes
affecting the way Schlesingers did business,
and it still affects our business practices today.
Frank, who started the business with
Schlesinger, eventually bought out Schlesinger’s
share. Later Schlesinger died. Frank, representing
the first generation of his family in the
business, passed away in 1969. Anthony D.
Fertitta of the second generation, began working
in 1947, and retired in 2007; and, later
died July 8, 2011. Anthony D. Fertitta, Jr.,
of the third generation, began working summers
as a youngster in the late 1960s; and
began full time in 1973. Today, he is president
and manager of the organization.
In the early years, Schlesingers offered
work for many families who raised their
children while working there, and have since
moved on. Matt Badolato, Matthew Rideau,
Antoine Migues, Rabbit Manual, Allen Carrier,
Allen Desomeaux, Floyd Stutes, Lee Gerard,
and Craig Gerard, to name a few. Felix Stone
was bookkeeper for many years. Grandsons
Patrick and Sean Diamond also worked in
the business during their teen years, valuing
the experience even today. Many employees
worked for Schlesingers for more than forty
years. Craig Gerard, former office manager,
retired in December 2014 with 46 years of
service. Mathew Rideau, who had worked
for the company 56 years (since he was 11),
passed away October 18, 2013, while still
employed. “We owe a great deal of appreciation
to all of these people who were like
members of our family. In many ways, they
were,” says Anthony, Jr.
In the late 1970s, Schlesingers Wholesale
relocated to a new building at 1002 Highway
14 where it remains today.
Route territories have been expanded over
the years, and the company now covers a
sixty to 100-mile radius of the Lake Charles
area. Today, the business has a total of eight
employees: Nick Flowers, 2000; Sam Moreau,
HISTORIC SOUTHWEST LOUISIANA: A Story of Heritage, Industry and Louisiana Living
92

2004; Alex Lasher, 2010; Brady Stutes, 2012;
Seth Sonnier, 2013; Joseph Surface, 2014;
Anthony Fertitta, Jr.; and Sandra Fertitta,
wife of Anthony, Jr., came on board in 2016.
The company services schools, restaurants,
casinos, bars, fast stops, churches, spas, and
retail. It also sells to locals for parade candies,
beads, and throws. In September 2016,
Schlesingers Wholesale marked its seventieth
anniversary in business.
The business is still owned by the Fertitta
family. While Anthony, Jr., is president and
manager, Mrs. Anthony Fertitta, Sr., vice
president, Donna Fertitta, vice president/
secretary/treasurer; stockholders, Barbara
(Diamond) Fertitta and Michael J. Fertitta.
It will remain that way for the foreseeable
future the Fertittas credit their success to
a lot of hard work, prayer…and their faith
in God.
Top, left: Left to right, Anthony Fertitta, Jr.,
Anthony Fertitta, Sr., Bea Fertitta and
Sandra McComb Fertitta.
Top, right: Anthony Fertitta, Jr.
Below: Left to right, Anthony D. Fertitta, Jr.,
Barbara Fertitta Diamond, Bea, Donna M.
and Michael J. Fertitta.
SHARING THE HERITAGE
93

PORT
AGGREGATES,
INC.
Right: Excavating ponds on the
Le Triomphe Golf Course in Broussard,
Louisiana, when Andrew Guinn was in the
construction business.
Below: Concrete crushing/recycling yard.
Andrew Lee Guinn, Sr., was born June 6,
1949, the second oldest of six children to
Loyd George Guinn, Sr., and Marcelette
Lejeune Guinn. Loyd became a dragline
operator, after returning from a tour in the
Navy during World War II, while working
for John I. Lejeune, Marcelette’s brother.
John had a construction company in
Jennings, Louisiana. Loyd bought his first
dragline in 1948 and operated his one
dragline business until he died in 2001.
Marcelette owned a beauty shop and retired
after Loyd’s death.
Andrew’s first work experience was working
on a farm in Mound, Louisiana, which his
father managed. He was employed at $3 per
day, working from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. during the
summer months, and on Saturdays during
school months.
He picked cotton, operated a combine to
cut soybeans and wheat, and helped roundup,
sort, brand, and turn bull calves into
steers. He also learned to operate bulldozers
and sharpened his skills as a dragline operator,
which his father taught him before they
moved to the farm.
Andrew attended one year at University of
South Louisiana (USL) in Lafayette, Louisiana,
and upon returning from active duty at Fort
Ord, California, in 1970, married Belinda Marie
Leger. Belinda would later succumb to cancer,
passing away in 2008. Together, they raised
four children, two girls—Dawn and Holly,
and two boys—Drew and Adam. After a few
construction jobs, he was offered a position
working at Gulf Coast Aluminum as a shift
foreman in the Anode Storage. His employment
there was an experience he will never
forget, but after a year, he felt the need to join
the self-employed of this great country.
Interstate 210 was under construction and
Andrew approached the contractor, Rimmer
and Garrett from Rayne, Louisiana, and
asked if they would hire him to help load
trucks. After Henry Rimmer and Thomas
Garrett agreed, Andrew then approached the
Calcasieu Marine National Bank to talk to
Henry Conner. Andrew had saved $700 from
both the Army pay and his time at Gulf Coast
Aluminum, and asked the bank to loan
him $7,000 to buy a Model L Insley Dragline.
He told the bank about the agreement he had
reached with Rimmer and Garrett. Conner
asked a lot of questions, and in the end,
he loaned Andrew the money. That was the
start of Andrew’s business, and eventually,
Port Aggregates, Inc.
Andrew worked as an independent sole
proprietor until late 1972, when he and his
older brother, Loyd George Guinn, Jr., who
had also been a sole proprietor since 1969,
decided to join forces and that business
became known as Guinn Dragline Works.
With a lot of hard work the little company
grew, and in 1976 it incorporated changing
the name to Guinn Brothers, Inc. The company
operated as a construction company
only until 1979 when, after building the
Port of Mermentau Facility, it opened its
own aggregates yard in that facility. The new
company was called Port Aggregates, Inc.,
a name Andrew originated, and was a
wholly-owned subsidiary of Guinn Brothers,
Inc. Port Aggregates, Inc. was the first
aggregates company in South Louisiana to
import crushed stone. The stone source was
from Arkansas, and was barged down to
Mermentau and used as a substitute for
oyster shell.
HISTORIC SOUTHWEST LOUISIANA: A Story of Heritage, Industry and Louisiana Living
94

The period from 1980 to 1984 was a
difficult time for Guinn Brothers, Inc., and
Port Aggregates, Inc. The oil patch had dried
up and there was very little work in the
area. The company had a small spud barge,
which stayed busy in the Morgan City area
during the crash. It was about the only thing
making money at the time.
In 1984 a friend of Andrew’s, Toby
Warren, called wanting to build a golf course.
The company accepted the challenge, and
the golf course, Le Triomphe in Lafayette,
Louisiana, was built.
Also in 1984, Guinn Brothers, Inc., was
awarded a $4,500,000 contract to excavate,
widen, and deepen the channel, and build
three bridges over Flat River, near Barksdale
Air Force Base in Shreveport.
George and Andrew also bought a ranch in
1975 in Northeast Texas, where they raised
Red Brangus Cattle. In 1982,
George decided to move up to
the ranch and Andrew oversaw
day-to-day operations of
the companies. He remained
vice president until 1987,
when George decided the
businesses were doing well
enough for him to take early
retirement. He and Andrew
worked out a spin-off of
Port Aggregates, Inc. from
Guinn Brothers, Inc., and the
companies were split.
Andrew became the owner of
Port Aggregates, Inc,. with two of
his younger siblings as minor
shareholders. After a period of
time, the siblings left and started
their own businesses.
From 1987 to 1989, Port
Aggregates, Inc,. opened aggregates
yards in Milton, Abbeville,
and Lake Arthur, Louisiana, in
addition to the main yard in
Mermentau, Louisiana.
In 1989, Port Aggregates, Inc.
opened a yard in Westlake,
Louisiana, North of the I-10
Bridge. In 1990, Port Aggregates,
Inc., closed the yards in
Abbeville, Lake Arthur, and Milton and
opened a yard to start receiving ships from
Vulcan Materials Company in the Industrial
Canal, south of Lake Charles.
In 1993, Port Aggregates, Inc., signed a
long-term distribution contract with Vulcan
Materials Company to receive limestone from
Above: Bulk Terminal Limestone Facility in
Westlake, Louisiana.
Left: Ceremony when Vulcan PAI reached
first 10,000,000 tons. Left to right, Andrew
Guinn, president of Port Aggregates, Inc.,
and Dan Sansoni, president of Vulcan Gulf
Coast Division.
Below: The limestone yard located in
Mermentau, Louisiana.
SHARING THE HERITAGE
95

the Yucatan Peninsula and working with the
Lake Charles Harbor and Terminal District,
set up a ship receiving facility south of the
I-10 Bridge.
Port Aggregates, Inc., grew at a modest
pace from 1993 until 1999. In 1997, Port
Aggregates, Inc., named James Marshall
Maddox, Sr., as its chief financial officer
(CFO). His financial advice and participation
in the everyday work and decisions of the
company played a major role in the company’s
growth and success.
In 1999 the company opened a concrete
precast plant in Jennings, Louisiana. The
plant was opened to build precast bridges,
pump decks, and oilfield platforms. By this
time, the company was employing more than
fifty workers.
In 2000, Port Aggregates, Inc. opened its
first concrete plant in Jennings to service its
precast plant, which had grown to having a
need of over 15,000 cubic yards annually.
In 2004 the company was challenged with
many successful opportunities. The biggest
item was the purchase of Harless Limestone
and all its properties. The effort invited the
opening of two new concrete plants in the
Lake Charles area, one on Goodman Road
and one on the Bayou D’Inde Road, which
was part of the Harless acquisition. In 2005,
Port Aggregates, Inc. bought out Decker
Concrete in Deridder, Louisiana. A new concrete
plant was built at the Ellender location
near Hackberry, Louisiana, with the site also
being part of the Harless acquisition, to pour
the first phase of the Cameron LNG plant
along with three LNG holding tanks. In 2007
the flagship of the concrete operation was
built in Scott, Louisiana. The plant was a dual
central mix/dry batch unit capable of producing
450 cubic yards per hour on the central
mix side and 200 yards per hour on the dry
batch side. In 2010, Port Aggregates, Inc.,
bought Heck Industries’ South Leesville
Concrete Plant. This purchase gave the
company its seventh plant site. With this
plant site, Port Aggregates, Inc., moved into
the role of a major concrete supplier in
Southwest Louisiana. On the limestone side,
in 2004, Port Aggregates, Inc., purchased
Harless Limestone in Sulphur, enabling the
company to expand its Grey Stone market
and add an additional 300,000 tons annually.
In 2012, Port Aggregates, Inc., took on the
largest acquisition in its history buying all
the Angelle Concrete assets west of the
Mississippi River, except for the Port Allen
Barge Receiving Facility. This move was a
challenge for the company both in the
management of assets and employees.
Port Aggregates, Inc.’s, staff took it well;
and two new divisions were created. PAI
Ready Mix, LLC and PAI Material Handling,
LLC were formed as wholly-owned subsidiaries,
with all the plants and mixer
trucks put into Ready Mix, and all the supply
The concrete precast plant located in
Jennings, Louisiana.
HISTORIC SOUTHWEST LOUISIANA: A Story of Heritage, Industry and Louisiana Living
96

tractor trailers moved to PAI Material
Handling, LLC. This acquisition facilitated
Port Aggregates, Inc., in becoming the largest
Ready Mix producer in Louisiana, pouring
more than 500,000 cubic yards of concrete
annually. The company, taking the Angelle
Concrete assets, shut down redundant
facilities and modernized others to make
Port Aggregates, Inc., one the most efficient
and modernized Ready Mix Companies in
the industry. Three divisions were created in
the Ready-Mix side of the company:
• West Division with plants in Lake Charles,
Sulphur, Ellender, Lake Charles Airport,
and Kinder;
• East Division being Scott, Abbeville, New
Iberia, Lafayette Airport, Point DeMouton,
Opelousas, Ville Platte, Crowley, and
Jennings;
• In 2014, Port Aggregates, Inc., purchased
the Falco Lime Facility, located on the
Intracoastal Canal near Ellender, and has
furnished lime throughout the Lake Charles
market and to various mega-projects; and,
• North Division being Alexandria, Marksville,
Many, Leesville North, Leesville South,
Oakdale, and DeRidder.
On May 3, 2013, Andrew married Kelley
Hunter Hemphill, daughter of Federal Judge
Edwin Hunter and Mrs. Shirley Kidd Hunter.
In 2016, Andrew was elected to the
National Ready Mix Concrete Association
(NRMCA) board of directors, and appointed
to the legislative affairs committee for the
NRMCA. In 2016, Andrew also sat on the
boards of the Louisiana Chemical Industry
Alliance (LCIA) and the Louisiana Motor
Transport Association (LMTA), where he
was a member of the executive committee,
and the Legislative Affairs Committee of the
Louisiana Chemical Industry.
Port Aggregates, Inc., is a major player in
the mega projects taking place in the Lake
Charles area, both in the Aggregate and
Ready Mix markets. Its mission is to be
the best construction material supplier in
Louisiana, safely delivering quality products
and service with honesty and integrity.
The corporate office of Port Aggregates,
Inc., is located on West Prien Lake Road in
Lake Charles. In total, there are twenty-four
locations throughout the state. The company’s
revenue is $110 to $150 million per year,
and it has grown from fifty employees to
more than 250 full time employees. The
company owns 157 trucks to enable it to
provide fast and safe delivery to its clients.
Top: The Ready Mix Plant located in
Scott, Louisiana.
Above: Ready Mix concrete trucks at the
new Lake Charles Airport Plant.
SHARING THE HERITAGE
97

WESTLAKE
CHEMICAL
LAKE CHARLES
SOUTH VINYLS
COMPLEX
Above: An aerial photograph from August
1947—two months before Southern Alkali
Corporation began producing liquid chlorine
and caustic soda at the plant in
Lake Charles.
Below: An aerial photograph of the facility
in 1967. The new units for producing vinyl
chloride monomer (VCM) at the chemical
complex went on stream.
Axiall joined the Westlake family of companies
on August 31, 2016, bringing approximately
1,200 individuals at two Lake Charles,
Louisiana facilities. The Lake Charles South
Vinyls plant is the larger of two plants and
dates its history to the 1940s. Following are
some of the complex’s industrial milestones.
In the beginning, lead operators were
asked to design a plant that would produce
240 tons of chlorine a day. As reference
materials, they only had three or four books,
including a chemical engineering textbook,
plus a couple of pencils, two pads of paper
and a slide rule. With those materials, the
plant, known today as the Lake Charles South,
was designed in a home in the Maplewood
subdivision in Sulphur, Louisiana.
Critical shortages of caustic soda and
liquid chlorine threatened to slow down
the nation’s war efforts in the early 1940s. A
$46 million facility was built in the Lockport
area of Lake Charles for a government defense
magnesium plant, operated by the Mathieson
Alkali Works, or what is today known as
the Olin Corporation. World War II ended in
September 1945 and the government decided
to shut down the magnesium plant project.
By March 1946, Southern Alkali Corporation
leased a major portion of the governmentowned
plant in Lake Charles from the
Reconstruction Finance Corporation for
about $18 million, and began converting it
for the manufacture of chlorine and caustic
soda. On October 7, 1947, Southern Alkali
Corporation’s plant began producing liquid
chlorine and caustic.
Facility expansion started in the 1950s:
Southern Alkali Corporation announced plans
to build a large liquid chlorine unit at the
facility on July 18, 1950. The $4 million
project expanded the chlorine and caustic
soda production unit by twenty-five percent.
It was designed to make the facility the largest
liquid chlorine plant in the world.
The following year brought more changes.
On September 18, 1951, the name of the company
changed from Southern Alkali Corporation
to Columbia Southern Chemical Corporation.
Columbia Southern ran the facility successfully,
and by February 1955 the company produced
its 1 millionth ton of chlorine. This was
a milestone for the Lake Charles facility. The
millionth ton was loaded into a 1-ton cylinder
and placed at the gate entrance to remind
employees of their noteworthy accomplishments.
At the end of 1955, Columbia Southern
announced a $2 million expansion of power,
chlorine and caustic production. Construction
began in 1956 and was completed in about
one year.
Columbia Southern celebrated the plant’s
tenth anniversary in 1957. A Fourth of July
picnic was scheduled for employees to
celebrate the milestone, but was canceled
days before when the eye of Hurricane Audrey
passed just west of the plant on June 27.
Due to prior warnings about the impending
storm, the plant kept operating
through the 110 mph winds.
The 1960s were a decade of
booming expansion for the Lake
Charles facility. On March 6,
1960, construction for an ethylene
dichloride plant with costs
upward of one million dollars
began. This marked the plant’s
first entry into chemicals based
on ethylene. The plant began
operating in September.
HISTORIC SOUTHWEST LOUISIANA: A Story of Heritage, Industry and Louisiana Living
98

At the beginning of 1961, Columbia
Southern Chemical Corporation became the
Chemical division of Pittsburgh Plate Glass
Company. In July, plans were announced for
construction of a multimillion dollar sodium
chlorate plant at the facility, which went into
production later that year. Pittsburgh Plate
Glass Company also announced an expansion
project for tri-ethane, with an associated cost
of approximately $1.2 million. Plans for a
methyl chloroform plant were announced in
October 1961 and the plant was completed
the following year. Also in October, the
sodium chlorate plant began operation. The
multimillion dollar unit, which took eight
months to complete, produced 15,000 tons
of sodium chlorate each year.
Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company also facilitated
a hydrogen chloride expansion with
costs upward of $400,000, and the Starks
brine field expansion, a $1.4 million project.
Construction of a new multimillion dollar
organics plant, perchlor-trichlor, which
produced chlorinated organics, wrapped up
in 1964.
Later that year, the production of perchloroethylene
and trichloroethylene became
a reality through use of a new process developed
in laboratories at Lake Charles South.
In March 1965, Pittsburgh Plate Glass
Company purchased the Riverside Generating
Station from the Gulf States Utility Company.
This purchase bolstered the electrical power
supply at the facility.
In October 1965, Pittsburgh Plate Glass
announced plans for a second multimillion
dollar vinyl chloride monomer (VCM)
plant to be built at Lake Charles South.
Construction began immediately, and production
began at fifty percent in 1967.
Plans to construct a $15.6 million silica
pigment production unit at the chemical
complex were announced in June 1966.
Construction on the new unit began immediately
and production began in 1968. Around
this time, the company announced plans for
yet another expansion project: Pittsburgh Plate
Glass planned to build a $37 million mercury
cell caustic-chlorine power plant at the facility.
The new mercury cell plant became one
of the largest capacity single-circuit units in
the world. This unit expanded caustic soda
production by seventy percent at the facility.
In 1967 the facility had a few things to
celebrate. The new units for producing vinyl
chloride monomer at the chemical complex
went on stream. The same year, the complex
celebrated its twentieth anniversary. The
celebration began with the dedication of a
glass sundial in front of the administration
building, which is still there today.
More growth and change came in 1968.
In April, Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company
changed its name to PPG Industries. On
September 24, the operations phase of
the new silica pigments plant began. In
November 1968 the plant began manufacturing
caustic soda beads, the first new
form of anhydrous caustic soda in more than
thirty years.
The mercury cell chlorine unit began operating
at Lake Charles South on February 2,
1969—the fourth major project to begin
operation in four months. It produced more
than 600 tons of chlorine and 650 tons of
caustic soda each day. The fifth major project
to begin operations in a five-month period
was completed a few weeks later, when
the oxyhydrochlorination plant started
production. By the end of 1969 the production
of vinylidene chloride monomer began—
the fourteenth product produced at the
facility and the seventh major project to be
completed during a fourteen-month period.
Above: In 1967 the facility celebrated
its twentieth anniversary. The celebration
began with the dedication of a glass sundial
in front of the administration building,
which is still there today.
Below: A workman inspects new chlorine
production units (left) similar to those
that would replace the outdated units
(right) at the PPG plant in Lake Charles.
The modernization of the chlorine
production units was completed in 1983.
SHARING THE HERITAGE
99

Right: The facility celebrated its thirtieth
anniversary in 1977 with a picnic on site.
The marching band from McNeese State
University attended the event and
performed for the PPG employees,
their families and friends.
Below: In 2015, Axiall and Lotte Chemical
Corporation of the Republic of Korea
finalized a joint venture agreement to
construct an ethane cracker near the
Lake Charles South facility. The ethane
cracker, along with a separate Lotte plant,
is scheduled for completion in 2019.
The photo is an aerial shot of the land
just west of the Lake Charles South facility
where the ethane cracker will be built.
In September of 1970, PPG announced
plans to double the chlorine and caustic
soda capacity at the site. In spring of 1971,
PPG announced plans to triple production
capacity of the two solvents, with construction
scheduled for completion in late 1971.
PPG celebrated the facility’s twenty-fifth
anniversary in 1972.
In 1973, PPG announced plans to construct
a $4 million pipeline to deliver
ethylene from suppliers in Texas to Lake
Charles South. The eight-inch line ran
about forty miles from Orange, Texas, to
Lake Charles, and had a capacity to transport
1 billion pounds of ethylene per year.
On July 18, 1974, PPG approved construction
of a new plant that would double
the facility’s daily production of chlorine and
caustic soda. The $150 million facility,
completed in 1977, is known today as the
C-Caustic and C-Chlorine plant.
In 1975, PPG announced plans to build
a new solvents plant at Lake Charles South,
which went on to double its capacity over
the next three years.
In November 1977 the production of
chlorine and caustic soda at the site doubled
by means of a two-phase multimillion
dollar expansion, which also added 250
new employees to the payroll.
On March 21, 1978, the first phase of the
chlorine plant addition was completed,
and by July, PPG began the second phase of
the chlorine expansion project. Construction
of a VCM plant with costs upward of $100
million began in August and was completed
by late 1980. The new plant produced
500 million pounds of VCM per year. On
December 15, the new trichloroethane plant,
Tri-Ethane II, began production.
In late 1984 the first phase of a five-year,
multimillion dollar expansion of capacity
for high-purity silicas at Lake Charles South
began. In 1985 a $55 million expansion
project for Power House C began.
In 1990, PPG announced plans to build
an unloading facility at Lake Charles South
to allow the import of ethylene from deep
sea markets worldwide. The plant
used ethylene in the manufacture
of ethylene dichloride and VCM.
On June 8, 1995, PPG and
Condea Vista Chemical Company
officially announced a business
partnership, joining forces to
expand PPG-VCM’s plant at Lake
Charles South. The expansion
project cost approximately $64
million and was completed in
time for the fiftieth anniversary
of Lake Charles South in 1997.
The RS Cogen, a $242 million
cogeneration power plant, began
full-scale commercial operation
in 2002, powered by the lowestcost
and most efficient fuel
available. This was also the year
Lake Charles South celebrated its
fifty-fifth anniversary.
HISTORIC SOUTHWEST LOUISIANA: A Story of Heritage, Industry and Louisiana Living
100

On September 24, 2005, Hurricane Rita
made landfall Southwest Louisiana. The
entire PPG chemical facility shut down
ahead of the storm’s arrival. More than 160
employees rode out the storm in hurricaneproof
buildings. The plant experienced
only minor damage and was able to
resume operations two weeks later, but the
surrounding community was significantly
impacted by the storm.
In May 2007 the mercury cell plant, which
began production in 1967, was shut down
and retrofitted with new membrane chlorine
and caustic production technology.
Two years later, in April 2009, PPG began
a wetlands restoration project that produced
more than twenty acres of wetlands below
the I-210 bridge in Lake Charles.
In January 2013, PPG merged its commodity
chemicals business with Georgia
Gulf Corporation to create a new company—
Axiall Corporation. In August of that year,
the PPG logo on a large ethyl-dichloride
(EDC) storage tank at the south end of the
plant was replaced with the Axiall logo,
which was visible from the I-210 bridge.
Two years later, on December 17, 2015,
Axiall and Lotte Chemical Corporation of
the Republic of Korea finalized a joint
venture agreement to construct an ethane
cracker near the Lake Charles South plant.
The ethane cracker, along with a separate
Lotte plant, is scheduled for completion
in 2019.
In the beginning, lead operators were
told to design a plant that would produce
240 tons of chlorine per day. Today, seventy
years later, Lake Charles South produces
approximately 3,747 tons of chlorine per day.
On August 31, 2016, Westlake Chemical
Corporation and Axiall Corporation merged
together through an agreement where
Westlake acquired Axiall for approximately
$3.8 billion. The combined company became
the third-largest chlor-alkali producer
and the second-largest PVC producer in
North America.
Above: The Lake Charles South facility
has experienced much growth and
development since 1947. Here is an
aerial shot of the facility in 2016,
almost seventy years later.
Below: One of the major projects of 2016
is wetland creation in Lockport Marsh.
The new wetlands can be seen from the
I-210 bridge. Here, a Canadian Goose
swims among the freshly planted
oyster grass.
SHARING THE HERITAGE
101

RALEIGH
NEWMAN
Left to right, Dud, Clarence Patin Faulk
and Raleigh Newman.
My name is Raleigh Newman and I was
asked to write my life’s story, I accepted, the
following is my life’s story.
GOAL #1—I was born in Big Lake,
Cameron Parish, Louisiana, on April 30, 1930.
I was raised by my grandparents, Poleet and
Francis Hebert Faulk, momma and papa. This
was marsh country in the middle of the Great
Depression. There was no electricity, no radios,
and no cars. The only jobs were school bus
driver and ferry boat operator. The men at
Big Lake were duck hunting guides, alligator
hunters and/or trappers. Money was scarce and
opportunities were few. At that time, the vast
majority at Big Lake could only speak French.
At the age of nine or ten, I recall seeing
momma and papa going to bed “with the
chickens” and getting up “with the chickens,”
seven days a week, to try to put food on the
table; many times we were short. I said to
myself, ‘I’ll never be a burden to them.’ This
was my first lesson on work ethics and I
tried to learn it well. Assistance from the
government was unknown and did not exist
at that time.
The Faulks were the greatest duck callers
that I ever knew. My goal was to be a really
good duck caller. My passion was and still is
duck hunting. I was a nonsmoker, had plenty
of lung power and I was lucky enough to live
near Clarence “Patin” Faulk, the greatest duck
caller of all time.
To achieve my goal, I practiced long hours
for years and spent a lot of time at Patin’s
house. I became a really good caller. At an
early age, I won the Louisiana State Champion
contest, the Regional at Beaumont, Texas, the
International Duck Calling Contest at Crowley,
Louisiana, and the World Champion Goose
Caller at Missouri Valley, Iowa. At that time,
duck calling contests were a really big event;
there were probably 20,000 people at Crowley
for the International.
In December 1959, I received a phone call
from someone in New York stating that
because I was both the world champion goose
caller and duck caller, I was invited to appear
on To Tell the Truth, a popular game show. I
agreed, thinking it was a joke and told my
wife about the call. To our surprise, I received
a letter several days later, containing airline
tickets to and from New York.
On To Tell the Truth, three men, including
myself, stood up and stated, “My name is
Raleigh Newman.” The four panelists, Don
Ameche, Tom Poston, Kitty Carlyle and Bud
Collyer asked questions in order to determine
who was the real Raleigh Newman. When the
panelists voted, one panelist stated number
three (which was me) “seemed to really know
HISTORIC SOUTHWEST LOUISIANA: A Story of Heritage, Industry and Louisiana Living
102

what he is talking about, but he appears too
young.” No panelist picked me as Raleigh
Newman, so I won $1,000. Dedication and long
hours were the reason I achieved my first goal.
Not long after returning home from that
event, my wife, Nell, noticed a small lump in
her groin. She made an appointment to see
her doctor. I offered to cancel my fishing trip
to accompany her, but she said she would be
okay alone. When I returned from my fishing
trip, she told me the doctor wanted to talk to
me. I will never forget the doctor telling me,
“Your wife has two weeks to live.” I spent
hours and days in the library learning all
I could about cancer. I found an article by
Dr. Krementz and others at Tulane Medical
School. They had developed a technique
known as perfusion treatment, whereby the
patient would have his/her vital organs sealed
off and the cancer-killing drugs would be
applied to the cancer cells in an attempt to
cure the cancer.
That treatment was delayed because Nell
had contracted hepatitis from treatment at
Touro Hospital. Neither of us had ever smoked,
yet by the time they did the treatment, the
cancer had metastasized in her lungs.
The doctors eventually performed a hemipelvectomy,
amputating her leg, hip and part
of her pelvis. Six weeks later she was standing
on her good leg doing her housework without
taking any pain medicines. She was truly a
remarkable woman.
“A drowning man will grasp for a straw.”
This is what we did. We tried different treatments
from other sources, some of which were
not recognized by the medical profession.
GOAL #2—was to rid Nell of her cancer.
We did not totally succeed, but maybe we had
some success because our doctors, cancer
experts, informed us that the usual life span
after being diagnosed with spindle cell sarcoma
is two months. We were blessed to have her
with us for two years after being diagnosed.
A strange thing happened to me the day
before Nell died. Our pastor came to our
home and told me “Raleigh, if you and Nell
have anything to say to each other, go talk to
her now, because tomorrow, she will be gone.”
It was the matter of fact way that he said it to
me. I thought, how can this man be so sure
since we had highly qualified cancer doctors
and they did not know when she would die.
Nell and I had already had many conversations
about life and death. When I finished
the 4-12 shift at Cit-Con, a great place to
work, we would drive to the airport, look at
the moon, talk about God, and life. “If I could
just live to see my children grow up; if I could
just take a deep breath....”
Nell and I lived within our means and did
not owe money to anyone except her medical
bills. After her death, I was advised to file for
bankruptcy; even my banker, Jim Ferguson,
so advised me. I declined. I felt if they had
advanced my wife’s medical treatment in an
attempt to save her life, then I would repay
them. I worked two jobs for almost two years
to pay the medical bills.
Nell’s death on June 16, 1963, left me
with our two wonderful children, Mary Ellen
(now Montgomery), age thirteen, and Chuck,
age eight, (now deceased). It also left me with
a strong need and desire to grab hold of
something serious to help me cope with Nell’s
death. Two close friends, Larry Roach and
Nathan Cormie, both excellent lawyers, strongly
urged me to go to law school since I had
done fairly well at school. I agreed and enrolled
at L.S.U. Law School in the spring of 1964. I
always believed that if you cannot find justice
in the courtroom, where will you find it?
SHARING THE HERITAGE
103

GOAL #3—I wanted to do well in law
school. When I entered, Professor J. Denson
Smith (also known as “Big Red”) told the
freshman class, “Look at the man on your
right and the man on your left because neither
will be here next year.” That comment was the
incentive I needed to do my best.
When I enrolled, I had married a lady with
two children. I already had two children and we
then had a third child, Johnny Newman. I supported
six people, since my mother had persuaded
Mary Ellen to go live with her during my
years at L.S.U. While at L.S.U., I did not borrow
a dime nor did I owe anything when I graduated
three years later at the age of thirty-seven. I held
three jobs. I planted and worked a huge garden
and picked over 100 pounds of tomatoes a
day and traded most of them for staples. After
my freshman year, I summarized law school
courses, printed these summaries, called “poop”
sheets and sold them for ten dollars each. I
also worked part time for the Department of
Education and as a part time insurance adjuster.
I found a nice, but old, unoccupied house
on Highland Road where the owner agreed to
let me live rent free as long as I was in school
if I would install a sewer system, clean it up
and paint the house inside and out. This I
readily agreed to do.
Looking back, it is hard to believe I worked
and studied an average of fourteen hours a
day, seven days a week. This allowed me to
achieve my goal at L.S.U. I was voted “Order
of the Coif” for my achievements, served on
the Law Review, awarded the Phi Kappa Phi
scholastic award, and won the Moot Court
Trial Finals. Some years later, I was voted into
the L.S.U. Law School Hall of Fame.
GOAL # 4—After graduation, I opened a
private practice in Lake Charles as a sole
practitioner. I tried almost every case I had
in order to gain valuable trial experience.
My goal as a lawyer was to help the poor. I
successfully represented them and handled
numerous cases without charging. Making
money was not my main objective, although I
did pretty well.
I have always been a strong supporter
of the working class. I believe there has to
be an accommodation between labor and
HISTORIC SOUTHWEST LOUISIANA: A Story of Heritage, Industry and Louisiana Living
104

management. Our workers are entitled to safe
working conditions and a ‘liveable’ wage. The
worker should be productive and perform a
day’s work for a day’s pay. They should try to
promote their employers’ best interest. If they
cannot do that, they should not work for him.
During the 1970s, construction unions
and nonunion multiple crafts were having
problems. Several union business agents were
criminally charged when the Jupiter plant was
breached and an employee inside Jupiter was
killed. I had not been out of law school very
long and when the above happened, Harlan
Duhon, business agent for the Electricians
Union, asked me to represent him. I agreed;
all defendants were tried at the same time.
Although there were many other lawyers who
specialized in criminal defense, I was chosen
to argue our case to the jury. They were all
found not guilty and acquitted, which helped
save the construction unions.
GOAL #5—Once I became a lawyer, I really
began to appreciate and realize the extent that
Southwest Louisiana is truly a place of real
opportunity for those who choose to seek to
fulfill their goals. My goal was to build the best
fishing and duck hunting lodge in Southwest
Louisiana. I built Black Lake Lodge, which
soon became one of the best, if not the best,
top water bass fishing places in the country.
My secret was not to allow any Florida bass
in my marsh. Florida bass do not bite well in
hot weather, but Louisiana native bass do.
Black Lake Lodge had more and bigger
crabs; and, people came from all over and filled
pickup trucks full of huge crabs. I knew if you
raise saltwater crabs in freshwater you would
have huge quantities of crabs, and they will be
much larger than the same crabs raised in
saltwater, so I controlled my water accordingly.
I also had close to 150,000 mallards, pintail
ducks and speckled belly geese on this marsh.
I pumped the marsh dry several times in order
to get rid of the excess salt in the ground. I then
controlled the water depth and salt content.
GOAL #6—It was always one of my goals
to make it possible for the middle class to
build decent homes in quality subdivisions.
So I developed East Park and Crestview
Subdivisions in Lake Charles with the help
and support of my beautiful wife, Barbara Ann
Fielder. Both subdivisions had huge lots.
I could have cut each lot into three or four
lots and sold the smaller lots for more money
than I sold the larger lots for. At Crestview, a
beautiful area with high elevation, I sold lots
nearly an acre in size with all the utilities for
$18,000 a lot or so to make it possible for our
middle class to be able to build fine homes on
a lot they could afford. I did the same thing at
East Park Subdivision, where beautiful homes
were built on large one acre lots.
In conclusion, what I am trying to convey
to our citizens is that we are all blessed to live
in Southwest Louisiana, an exceptional place
of opportunity where each and every person
can seek and reach his own personal goals.
What we do with this opportunity is up to
each and every one of us.
Each one of us is free to seek his own goals,
but we all must understand that it will take
real dedication and hard work from each
one of us to reach our goals. Success and
achievement of your goals come with a price.
To make sound decisions in reaching our
goals in life, we must base our decisions
on facts and apply common sense. Without
common sense, you are only an educated fool.
Three times a week, I visit Highland
Memory Gardens where my wife, Nell, my
two sons, Chuck and Johnny, are buried. All
died in their thirties. This brings home the
need to do those things that you consider
your goals. Life is short, life is precious, and
time is of the essence.
Raleigh Newman.
SHARING THE HERITAGE
105

HAMPTON INN,
LAKE CHARLES
Anyone looking for great lodging and a lot
of exciting ventures in Lake Charles need
look no further than the Hampton Inn at
3175 Holly Hill Road.
The eighty-two room hotel accommodates
up to 600 in its meeting room, making it a
perfect host for receptions, corporate and
civic gatherings. After a company’s business
session, visitors to the city offer a lot to do—
including the biggest casino market in
Louisiana. If risk-taking at the casinos is
not what they want to do, there are other
venues to attract them. The Hampton Inn
provides free shuttle service to the two top
casinos—L’Auberge and Golden Nugget.
First-time visitors to the area will find the
strong Creole and Cajun culture fascinating.
Lake Charles is home to several museums
and art galleries with the largest Imperial
Calcasieu Museum featuring a permanent
historic exhibit with artifacts and an art
gallery. Its grounds are home to the Sallier
oak tree, estimated to be about 500 years old.
Nearby, is the USS Orleck Naval Museum, a
naval destroyer from 1945 that is open for
public tours as a veteran’s memorial and
museum. Visitors will find it located on the
river in North Lake Charles. The Isle of Capri
and Kinder Coushatta are just thirty minutes
away. Kids will enjoy the Children’s Museum
HISTORIC SOUTHWEST LOUISIANA: A Story of Heritage, Industry and Louisiana Living
106

of Lake Charles and Prien Lake Park where
one can experience a boat ride or enjoy a
Friday night movie.
Downtown Lake Charles and Charpentier
Historic District offers small town charm
and history complete with a relaxing carriage
ride to enjoy the sites and scenery. Just about
anything a guest would want is right at hand
at the Hampton Inn.
The Hampton Inn at Holly Hill Road offers
all the amenities of quality lodging facilities
preferred by business executives and families
traveling through the city who want overnight
or week-long lodging. The hotel has a business
center with computers, printers, free
wireless Internet and fax to assist professionals
who must communicate with clients and
home office while away from home.
SHARING THE HERITAGE
107

HISTORIC SOUTHWEST LOUISIANA: A Story of Heritage, Industry and Louisiana Living
108

Room accommodations include single and
two king-sized beds, with some as adjoining
rooms for families and others who want to be
connected without hall entrance. Each room
features Clean and Fresh Hampton Bed ® ,
coffee service, a small refrigerator, LCD television,
microwave, iron, ironing board, and hair
dryer. Guests are invited to work out in the
publicly-accessed gym that is open twentyfour
hours a day to accommodate a guest’s
schedule; or, an indoor swimming pool for
swimming laps. Every morning guests are
treated to a free, hot breakfast of eggs, cereal,
waffles, yogurt, juices and coffee or tea. If they
are in a hurry, Hampton Inn will even prepare
an “On the Run breakfast bag for guests,
available Monday through Friday. The hotel
also features a Suite Shop ® , which stocks a
variety of snacks, drinks and chilled meals.
The hotel is handicapped accessible with
closed captioned television, wheelchair ramp,
and wide doors for easy ingress and egress.
Hampton Inn at Lake Charles even guarantees
guests’ satisfaction. With all the festivals
such as Contraband Days and Mardi Gras
to please them, if they are not 100 percent
happy with the lodging, the hotel does not
expect them to pay.
SHARING THE HERITAGE
109

Above: The Calcasieu Parish Government
Building is located at 1015 Pithon Street
in Lake Charles. It houses the Calcasieu
Parish Police Jury as well as other
government departments.
CALCASIEU PARISH POLICE JURY
The Calcasieu Parish Police Jury, comprised
of fifteen jurors (with one serving as president),
is the governing body for Calcasieu
Parish. The Mission of the Police Jury is to
consistently and efficiently provide the highest
quality of services to the people of Calcasieu
Parish in a manner that is responsive to the
will and the needs of the citizens.
The duties and responsibilities of the
governing body have changed greatly since
the organization was first formed in 1840
from the Saint Landry Parish, one of the
original nineteen civil parishes established by
the legislature in 1807.
The river from which the parish derives
its name is shown on older maps as “Bayou
Quelqueshue” and sometimes as Calcasieu.
Calcasieu, which means “crying eagle” in the
Attakapas Indian language, is said to have
been the name of the local chief who gave a
peculiar cry resembling an eagle as he went
into battle.
On August 24, 1840, representatives of six
wards, which later became five parishes, met
to organize the new parish. The first jurors
were David Simmons, Alexander Hebert,
Michael Pithon, Henry Moss, Rees Perkins,
and Thomas M. Williams. There was no courthouse
or other public buildings at the time, so
the jury convened in the roughly-hewn home
of Arsene LeBleu near present day Chloe.
The original Jury’s first challenge was
selecting a “parish town” to serve as the seat of
government. After considerable deliberation,
the jury deadlocked between Centre, Faulks’
Bluff, and Lisbon. The president broke a tie
by voting in favor of Comasaque Bluff.
Also at that first meeting, the jurors took
the easy route in approving a slate of parish
laws—they simply adopted all the laws
then in force in Saint Landry Parish. The
Jury also appointed a parish constable, a
parish treasurer, two parish assessors and an
operator for the ferry at Buchanan’s Crossing.
The accessors were allowed two months to
assess all of the property in the parish.
When the seat of justice was relocated to
Lake Charles in 1852, Sheriff Jacob Ryan
loaded the log cabin courthouse onto an
oxen-drawn wagon and moved the small
building through the piney woods to its new
location. The parish boundary was reduced in
1870 when Cameron Parish was cut off from
the south portion of Calcasieu. These limits,
which remained until 1912, comprised an
area of more than 3,600 square miles and
made Calcasieu the largest parish in the state.
For this reason, it was often referred to as
“Imperial Calcasieu.”
A new courthouse was completed around
1853 and this structure was replaced by
a colonial brick building erected in 1891.
An annex was added to the building in 1902.
However, the courthouse was destroyed
during a disastrous fire that burned most of
downtown Lake Charles on April 23, 1910;
and, many of the parish records were burned
or damaged.
A new courthouse was built on the old site
in 1911 and is now listed in the Federal
Register of Historic Buildings. The magnificent
brick and terracotta structure is a replica
of the famous Villa Copra in Italy. The dome
atop the courthouse is of solid copper.
In 1912 the three Parishes of Allen,
Beauregard and Jefferson Davis were created
from 2,548 square miles of Calcasieu and
became the last parishes created in Louisiana.
HISTORIC SOUTHWEST LOUISIANA: A Story of Heritage, Industry and Louisiana Living
110

In 1967 a Parish Government Building
was constructed to house the various offices
of the Police Jury. The building was expanded
in 2003 and houses a number of government
departments to include the district attorney’s
office. A new state-of-the-art correctional center
was completed in 1990 to replace the old
jail and a separate building was completed
in 1991 for the Third Circuit Court of
Appeals. A newly-constructed Judicial Center
to house the Fourteenth Judicial District was
completed in 1994, and sits on the site of
the old jail.
Between 1993 and 1998 an extensive interior
and exterior restoration and renovation
was performed on the Parish Courthouse.
The various departments of the Police Jury
employ approximately 600 people, who provide
services such as Geographic Information
Services, Engineering and Road Maintenance,
Juvenile Justice Services, Mosquito Control,
Animal Services, Homeland Security and
Emergency Preparedness, Housing, Parks and
Recreation, Planning and Development, a
government cable channel, and others.
The population of Calcasieu Parish is
192,768 according to the 2010 census.
The Parish comprises an area of 1,086
square miles.
The Calcasieu Parish Police Jury is located
at 1015 Pithon Street in Lake Charles and on
the Internet at www.cppj.net.
Above: The solid copper dome atop the
courthouse is a replica of the famous
Villa Copra in Italy.
SHARING THE HERITAGE
111

FIRST FEDERAL
BANK OF
LOUISIANA
Just under seventy years ago—with no
guarantees of success and with their personal
funds on the line—the founding members
of what would become First Federal Bank of
Louisiana forged forward in support of an
important mission: helping the people of
southwest and central Louisiana thrive and
realize their dreams.
Ultimately, their endeavor would stand out
as an important chapter that began in their
hometown of Lake Charles before impacting
an entire region.
Sam M. Richard, president of Gulf National
Bank of Lake Charles, and Sam H. Jones, erstwhile
governor of Louisiana, joined several
other prominent business and community
leaders in chartering First Federal Savings
and Loan Association of Lake Charles on
July 20, 1949. First Federal first opened
its doors on November 1, 1949, in an office
located in downtown Lake Charles.
Continued growth led to new properties,
new expansions and, over the years, several
new branches. In 1981, First Federal officially
relocated to its current seven-story structure
on Lakeshore Drive.
First Federal’s leaders prudently managed
operations, always staying within regulations
and making sound lending decisions,
and weathered the turbulent financial industry
of the 1980s. Regulations changed,
leading First Federal Savings and Loan to
HISTORIC SOUTHWEST LOUISIANA: A Story of Heritage, Industry and Louisiana Living
112

change its name to First Federal Bank of
Louisiana. The rest is history.
Still locally owned and operated, First
Federal remains a full-service community
bank with an accent on community. With
“24-hour convenience” services such as
online banking, a multiplatform mobile app
and full Apple Pay integration available—
in addition to personal checking, savings,
CDs, investment and insurance services,
business products, mortgage loans, consumer
loans and more—it is all the services
customers could want in a bank, except without
the typical, long-distance approach to
customer service.
For countless organizations, First Federal
means business banking—from multiple
checking account and lending options to
insurance and small-business retirement
accounts for businesses of all sizes. Coupled
with Private Banking services for individuals,
professionals and small business owners
requiring a high level of personalized service,
First Federal is known for offering a variety
of customized wealth management solutions.
Recently, along with a bright and colorful
brand refresh, came a refreshing new concept:
bundled services. Combining checking and
savings accounts, plus instant online account
management tools and exclusive perks, First
Federal’s bundled services represent a unique,
streamlined approach to financial management.
It is an approach that, along with multiplatform
mobile app support and full Apple
Pay integration, was designed to meet the
ever-changing needs of lifelong customers.
First Federal Bank has a presence that
reaches business, community, media and
customer markets with sixteen locations and
various stand-alone ATMs across the State of
Louisiana, including Lake Charles, Sulphur,
Westlake, Moss Bluff, DeRidder, Oakdale,
Natchitoches, Alexandria and Pineville and is
continuing to grow with plans for additional
locations currently on the drawing board.
Along with the operation of the current
offices across Southwest and Central Louisiana,
employment has grown to over 220 and the
bank has enjoyed a remarkable history of
growth and success while remaining one of
the top financial leaders in each of the markets
it serves with assets in excess of $800 million.
First Federal plays a major role in the
local economy by investing money in the
communities it serves. This is the premise on
which First Federal was originally founded,
and it is the same principle that guides
the leadership of President and CEO
Charles V. Timpa and the board of directors
under the chairmanship of M. A. Pierson, III.
Today, First Federal continues to earn the
trust and confidence of its shareholders by
delivering outstanding financial services
that underscore quality and innovation. The
board and management are committed to
contributing to the community through various
causes and charities—often mobilizing
entire branches as part of their continued
efforts to help families, schools, businesses
and the economy as a whole improve.
Because after all, serving the community
was First Federal’s mission from day one.
SHARING THE HERITAGE
113

DARRELL’S
Darrell DeRouen was a driven man. He
was an avid cook, loved to hunt, was an
outstanding athlete, and had a knack for
saying the right thing at the right time!
And, he was extremely hospitable. In the
mid-1980s, he dreamed of opening a
restaurant. The idea was discussed with his
wife, Susie, who always supported his ideas.
She was not surprised when he came home
one evening after making an agreement to
lease a building on Ryan Street and a plan
to open a bar the following week. He was
always full of surprises, and Susie was
ready to assist him in that adventure. Darrell’s
officially opened in 1985.
the Po’boys came from Darrell’s childhood.
His mother made sandwiches from leftover
roast and gravy, and as a boy, he loved it as
his after-school snack.
Top, right: Susie and Darrell DeRouen.
As a team, Darrell and Susie worked
together, first selling liquor with music
provided via the jukebox and, soon after,
a record player. Susie decorated the bar
for Christmas, bought music (albums) and
made the environment welcoming. Darrell
continued working at South Central Bell
while Susie was swift to catch on to doing
payroll, preparing the registers, hiring
employees, and securing liquor licenses.
After a long day at his job, he relieved Susie
and he took charge of the evening shift.
As the business prospered, Darrell did
not stop with his dream to invent a tasty
product. Within the first year, he decided to
incorporate Po’boys into the business with a
blend of jalapeno mayonnaise and gravy. He
used roast beef, followed by turkey, ham,
and Darrell’s special—a combination of ham,
turkey, roast beef, and thinly-sliced sausage;
and later, the surf-and-turf. Putting gravy on
During the development, he tried many
different breads until he was satisfied.
He drove to nearby cities tasting bread of
different size, consistency and taste. All of
the bread seemed delicious to most, but to
Darrell, he knew exactly what he wanted
and was not going to settle for anything
but excellence. By the end of the first year,
he mastered the right combination that
remains today.
Success never prospers without challenges.
At one time, the couple moved
to a different location temporarily. They
rented a small space on South Common near
Cowboy’s and Yesterday’s where Susie kept
the kitchen prospering. In the meantime,
Darrell decided to purchase property and
build a Darrell’s where the temptation could
not be passed up—right along the Interstate.
Also, the business location offered easy
access to the parade route for Mardi Gras.
For years, Darrell and Susie spent hours
barbequing for the community while they
waited for the parade to start. For many
years, Darrell cooked for Monday night
football games for the locals to come in and
HISTORIC SOUTHWEST LOUISIANA: A Story of Heritage, Industry and Louisiana Living
114

enjoy a home-cooked meal. Thirty-one years
later, Darrell’s is still supported by McNeese
students, athletes, coaches, and faculty.
Even McNeese’s opponents come in to order
sandwiches for their own team.
Today, there are approximately fifty
employees. Customers range from every
age, professionals in suits and
ties, students, families, industry
workers, not to mention those
who drive from Houston and
New Orleans to get Darrell’s
special. The kitchen is so busy
during lunch that the line of cars
at the drive-through extends to
the street. Customers are encouraged
to call twenty-four hours
in advance to place their orders.
Darrell passed away in 2013
after a six-month battle with
brain cancer at age sixty-six.
His dream of opening a restaurant has
become more than he ever anticipated.
The business continues to thrive. His
wife continues the tradition the couple
established together. She is able to enjoy
the benefits after many years of hard work.
The Darrell’s tradition continues.
Above: The McNeese Football team.
SHARING THE HERITAGE
115

Above: Left to right, Jessie V. (1926-2013),
Sheldon and Bryan McManus.
Below: McManus Construction
equipment working at an industrial site
preparation project.
MCMANUS CONSTRUCTION, LLC
McManus Construction, LLC, located in
Lake Charles, Louisiana, was founded by
Jessie V. McManus in 1970. Jessie was joined
by his son, Sheldon, and later, his grandson,
Bryan, and together they built one of the
largest civil contracting companies in
Southwest Louisiana. Three generations of
the McManus family have contributed to
achieving their goal to become the best
civil contractor whose skills, knowledge
and approach were combined to produce
excellent, reliable and timely site preparations
for private and commercial customers.
The company has since expanded its
services to large sitework, drainage, concrete,
and paving projects for government, industrial,
and commercial clients. To ensure
quality and reliability, four borrow pits and
two permitted landfills in the Lake Charles
and Sulphur areas were added to serve project
needs in addition to retail sales. McManus’
background and experience enables them
to carry out many challenging projects with
confidence and conviction, ensuring the
customer’s complete satisfaction. The company
is known for performing top quality work
and fast track completion dates.
McManus Construction employs approximately
seventy-five employees, which fluctuates
with work demands. Employees have
completed many safety training courses and
several employees have received specialized
training in Hazardous Waste Operations &
Emergency Response. The company focuses
on projects primarily based in Southwest
Louisiana ranging from $10,000 to
$20,000,000. They have had the opportunity
to work on some of the largest, most visible
projects throughout the region. Over time,
these projects have developed into repeat
business and lasting relationships.
Today, McManus Construction is one of
the largest civil construction contractors in
HISTORIC SOUTHWEST LOUISIANA: A Story of Heritage, Industry and Louisiana Living
116

Southwest Louisiana with a heavy equipment
fleet of nearly 100, and many completed
projects. They meet tight schedules by bringing
experience, manpower, and the right
equipment to each project. The company has
a proven record in fast tracking projects and
over thirty years with no liquidation damage
fees. McManus Construction has achieved a
record of success in the public and private
sectors. The company is committed to continuing
to supply their customers, with the
highest quality of services while working in
a safe manner and meeting completion dates.
Years of experience and expanded services
enable McManus Construction, LLC to offer a
wide variety of services to fill all the site
preparation, paving, and drainage construction
needs for their customers to provide
construction services necessary to transform
land into a site ready for building. They are
equipped to handle projects ranging from
several thousand to multimillion dollars with
unlimited bonding capacity. Services include:
• Site Preparation—with site preparation
being the initial focus of McManus in
1970, it has become McManus’ specialty
and consists of fifty-five percent of all
projects. Site preparation projects range
from parking lots to building and road
foundation. The team has the capacity
to work from start to finish—grading,
excavation, fill and land clearing.
• Concrete Paving—concrete or asphalt,
new or reconstruction, parking lot or
roadways; McManus Construction provides
services for all levels of paving
projects. Capabilities include installation
of base core, excavation, demolition, and
concrete and asphalt paving.
• Drainage—McManus Construction’s years
of experience in site preparation and
roadway projects led to their expertise
in commercial and government drainage
work. Drainage services range from
demolition and installation to piping for
roadways, subdivisions, and parking lots.
• Landfill—McManus Construction owns and
operates a permitted Type III Construction/
Demolition Debris and Wood Waste
Landfill. The landfill accepts construction
and demolition debris as well as wood
waste. The landfill is well-maintained and
can be accessed during wet weather. There
is an operator available to help remove
waste from trailers, if needed.
McManus Construction is best recognized
for the three generations of men that were
and continue to be dedicated to building
and maintaining a successful business for
their family, employees, and the greater Lake
Charles community.
For additional information about the company
and the types of services it provides,
visit its website at mcmanusconstruction.com.
Above: Sheldon McManus operating
equipment at a project jobsite.
Below: Concrete finishing at a new housing
development project.
SHARING THE HERITAGE
117

LUNDY, LUNDY,
SOILEAU &
SOUTH LLP
Above: Top row, left to right, Kristie
Hightower, Houston Middleton, Daniel
Kramer, Dina Beach, Max Guthrie and
Nicholas Kohrs. Bottom row, left to right,
Jackey South, Hunter Lundy, Matthew
Lundy, Rudie Soileau.
Below: Hunter and Matt Lundy, attorneysat-law.
Lundy, Lundy, Soileau & South, LLP (LLSS)
is committed to helping people, businesses
and communities by providing quality legal
services while guiding people through
difficult situations and circumstances. LLSS
strives to be salt and light to Southwest
Louisiana and beyond.
The firm is comprised of ten attorneys:
Hunter Lundy, Matthew Lundy, Rudie Soileau,
Jackey South, Kristie Hightower, Daniel
Kramer, Houston Middleton, Nick Kohrs, Max
Guthrie and Dina Beach, with over twenty support
staff. Lundy, Lundy, Soileau & South, LLP
handles a wide range of personal injury cases,
including automobile and trucking accidents,
catastrophic brain, spinal cord, and other
serious injuries. Over the years, the firm has
developed a comprehensive commercial litigation
department which has and continues
to meet the needs of businesses and their
owners in Southwest Louisiana.
The firm began on December 5, 1986,
when at the age of thirty-two, Hunter Lundy
left one of the premier defense law firms
in Lake Charles and founded the firm
now known as Lundy, Lundy, Soileau
& South, LLP. The firm was small with only
two attorneys and one support person.
Over the next few years, the firm grew when
now Judge Clayton Davis and Matt Lundy
joined the firm. In the early years, fees were
sometimes paid with food. One of the firm’s
first clients, Sam Saloom, delivered fresh fried
kibbe every Friday.
In the late 1980s, the firm garnered national
exposure when Hunter successfully represented
Pastor Marvin Gorman in a high profile
defamation case against Evangelist Jimmy
Swaggert. After four years of preparation and a
ten-week trial in New Orleans, Louisiana, the
jury returned a $10 million verdict in favor of
Gorman. While still in law school at LSU, Matt
played an integral role in the Gorman/Swaggert
litigation. Matt’s work on the appellate brief
led to the establishment of the rule of law in
HISTORIC SOUTHWEST LOUISIANA: A Story of Heritage, Industry and Louisiana Living
118

Louisiana that a corporation can be defamed
if the name of the individual about whom the
defamatory comments were made is inextricably
tied to the name of the corporation.
The early years of the firm were focused
primarily on maritime defense work, which
held a special place in the Lundys’ hearts
as their father, T. E. Lundy, co-owned Lake
Charles Stevedores where they both worked
as teenagers. However, as the law firm grew,
Hunter and Matt came to realize the future of
the firm was in representing injured people
and striving for the justice they deserved.
Lundy, Lundy, Soileau & South expanded
both in size and in the types of cases it handled
including environmental contamination,
dangerous drug litigation, and mass tort litigation.
At one time, the firm included over
twenty attorneys and fifty support staff with
additional offices in Houston, Texas; Jackson,
Mississippi; and Fayetteville, Arkansas. Most
of the expansion came about as the result of
the firm’s involvement in significant cases in
those areas. When those cases resolved and
there was no longer a need for offices in those
locations, the satellite offices were closed.
Currently, the firm handles all litigation from
Lake Charles with ten attorneys and a very
capable support staff. Although, Lundy,
Lundy, Soileau & South is centralized in
Southwest Louisiana, the firm practices
throughout the United States.
Hunter took a brief recess from his law
career to run for a U.S. Congressional seat in
1996, ultimately losing in the run-off by a
narrow margin. His stint in politics not only
provided a new appreciation for his firm and
his law career, but also enhanced his practice
and relationships throughout the community.
In the late 1990s, the 1912 Federal Post
Office/Courthouse at the corner of Broad and
Hodges sold at auction. At Clayton Davis’ urging,
the building was purchased and restored
by F. Miller & Sons. Subsequent to the renovation,
the building was placed on the National
Register of Historic Places by the United
States Department of the Interior. Two unique
features of the building are a 1911 safe, which
still bears the seal of the United States of
America and the restored courtroom, which
has hosted many events since 2000, including
weddings, political functions for presidential
and gubernatorial candidates, historical society
meetings, Lake Charles Kiwanis Club meetings,
and Bible studies. The firm moved into the
beautifully restored building in 2000 and
continues to practice at 501 Broad Street.
In 2008, Rudie Soileau, an experienced litigator,
joined the firm and in the years since,
he and Hunter successfully tried many cases
in Lake Charles including several hurricane
cases, which arose from Hurricane Rita. In
2010, Matt was appointed to the Plaintiff’s
Steering Committee for MDL 2179 in re:
Oil Spill by the Oil Rig “Deepwater Horizon”
where he worked with a group of attorneys
dedicated to restoring and compensating
the people of the Gulf Coast for the damages
caused by the BP Oil Spill. Matt is currently
serving as president for the Louisiana
Association for Justice.
The firm continues to pioneer many areas,
including suits against the wireless industry
in connection with brain tumors linked to
low level radiation from cell phones and
manufacturers of herbicides, which are linked
to cancers among people who work in agriculture
and landscaping. However, the firm’s
roots remain in Lake Charles where Lundy,
Lundy, Soileau & South continues to serve the
people and businesses of Southwest Louisiana
primarily in the areas of personal injury,
products liability, and commercial litigation.
What was originally the 1912 Federal Post
Office and Courthouse is now the offices
of Lundy, Lundy, Soileau & South, LLP,
located at 501 Broad Street in Lake
Charles, Louisiana 70601, (337)-439-0707.
SHARING THE HERITAGE
119

THE BEL GROUP/BEL COMMERCIAL, LLC
Mullers joined in the acquisition. One of
his granddaughters married into the Krause
family and the 44,000 acres Krause owned
became Quatre Parish Company, formed in
1934. MorganField, a 2,000 acre residential
and commercial development in Southeast
Lake Charles, was founded by the fifth
generation Bel descendant, Chad Thielen, in
2011. One of the land owners within this
development is The Lacassane Company, Inc.
Above: Left to right, Albert, Della and
Della Goos Bel, Ernest and Albert Fay,
John Albert Bel—founder of Bel Properties,
Marie and Jimmy Gardiner, c. 1916.
Right: William D. Blake.
Below: The J. A. Bel Sawmill, located
on the north shore of Lake Charles, was
erected by M. T. Jones of Houston and later
purchased by Charles Bunker of Boston,
Massachusetts. Bunker merged with Bel
and operated the mill as Bel-Bunker until
1896, when Bel became the sole owner.
This photograph was taken around 1918.
Going Green is more than just a slogan for
the Bel Group/Bel Commercial, LLC of Lake
Charles, Louisiana. It means that everything
in their land development, oil and gas (O&G)
exploration, wetlands mitigation, timber and
agricultural production, and residential
and commercial real estate development is
conducted with the utmost care to protect
wildlife and wetlands. Louisiana is known
for its protected and beautiful land, and the
Bel Group intends to keep it that way!
The Bel Group and associated companies,
The Lacassane Company, Inc., Quatre Minerals
LLC, Bel Minerals LLC, Bel Commercial LLC,
and MorganField Development LLC, manage
approximately 100,000 acres of surface and/or
minerals, with an eye on “doing the right
thing” when it comes to land development
and protection of the natural beauty of the
Lake Charles area.
John Albert Bel started the first of the
companies in 1889 when he bought 50,000
acres of timberland and operated a sawmill on
the north shore of Lake Charles. One of his
three children married J. W. Gardiner, whose
lands were incorporated into The Lacassane
Company, Inc., which was formed in 1929.
Prominent Lake Charles families including
the Webers, Kings, Nobles, Chalkleys, and
The group of companies was run by different
members of the Bel Family through the
years, including Albert Bel, David Garrison,
Rudolph Krause, and William D. Blake. Blake
served as manager and president for over
fifty years. The company grew under his
leadership and the timberlands flourished.
He was so successful that he negotiated the
sale of 93,000 acres of timberland in 1998,
at the top of the timber market, retaining
the associated minerals, which are mostly still
held by the mineral companies. His nephew,
Thielen, assisted him in the negotiations
for the sale. The companies are currently
managed by Thielen and Nick Guillory.
In the 1930s, the federal government
acquired 13,000 acres of Lacassane property
for the Lacassine National Wildlife Refuge.
Along with the Gardiner heirs, the company
continues to hold the mineral rights in the
refuge and have maintained production in
one of the most environmentally-sensitive
areas of the state.
HISTORIC SOUTHWEST LOUISIANA: A Story of Heritage, Industry and Louisiana Living
120

The company has completed restoration of
the Green House, the oldest Acadian dwelling
west of the Vermillion-Teche Settlement.
Located on the banks of the Mermentau River,
the historical landmark is used for weddings
and corporate events. The old Bel Sawmill
site on the north shore of Lake Charles is
part of a large project of a future lakefront
development in partnership with the city.
Bel Commercial and MorganField
Development have partnered with Southern
Lifestyle Development, who developed River
Ranch in Lafayette, to become the largest
residential developers in Calcasieu Parish.
Belle Savanne Subdivision is located south of
Sulphur. Phase I has a combination of residential/commercial
real estate; Belle Savanne
Phase II is currently engineering and will soon
begin pre-selling lots. Carlyss Place Phase I
is selling lots to builders and many homes
are built and occupied; Carlyss Place Phase II
has recently completed engineering and will
begin pre-selling lots. When the entire project
is completed, it could consist of up to 1,000
residential homes. Belle Savanne Apartments
has 208 units and has recently completed the
construction of the clubhouse.
MorganField Development in southeast Lake
Charles has a combination of conventional
residential and Traditional Neighborhood
Development (TND). Along with the residential
community, 500,000 square feet of commercial
space will be provided along with recreational
facilities. MorganField plans to build aspects
of a traditional neighborhood development
with conventional housing and green space.
The Lakes at MorganField has 112 homesites
with many occupied and are currently
installing the amenities package, which
includes a community pool. MorganField will
expand from 500 to 700 homes over a five to
eight year period, as well as multi-family units.
Waterside at MorganField and Wildflower
at MorganField are two subdivisions located
off of Highway 14. Waterside has twenty-nine
lots and most have homes with an established
Homeowners Association. Wildflower has
10 lots that are “ranchette” lots with 5 to 19
acres; there are only 3 remaining, also with
an established Homeowners Association.
Waterside Phase II is currently in the engineering
stages and will have approximately
thirty-seven lots.
The Lacassane Company, headquartered
at 500 Kirby Street in Lake Charles (and
field offices south of Hayes) continues to
operate one of the premier waterfowl hunting
properties in the country adjacent to the
Lacassine Refuge.
With fifteen fulltime employees, Bel
Commercial’s future looks bright with other
construction planned in Belwood (Highway
171 in Moss Bluff, encompassing 522 acres
and including residential, multi-family and
commercial structures with a total economic
impact of $456 million.
Historic Green House, the oldest
Acadian dwelling west of the Vermillion-
Teche Settlement.
SHARING THE HERITAGE
121

STEAMBOAT
BILL’S
Few of the customers enjoying the delicious
seafood at Steamboat Bill’s on North Lakeshore
Drive realize that the popular restaurant is
the culmination of a dream that began twentyeight
years ago with a road-side shrimp
peddler named Kathi Bonamici Vidrine.
It is a story straight out of Hollywood (or
Louisiana in this case), with a vivacious, hardworking
heroine determined to overcome all
the odds and build a successful business.
The story begins in 1982 when the end
of an ill-fated marriage found Kathi and her
three young daughters stranded in Lake
Charles, far from her home town of Chicago,
with little money and no friends or family in
the community. Kathi, however, was driven
by a strong will for survival and an uncanny
ability to overcome obstacles that would
overwhelm less motivated individuals.
Kathi had a dream of peddling shrimp on
the side of the road but had only $1,800 to
her name. Rather than forget her dream, she
put a little sink in the back of her truck and
drove to DeRidder each day to sell shrimp by
the side of the road. Kathi named her business
Steamboat Bill’s in honor of her father, and
had the name painted in large letters on the
side of the truck.
“I didn’t know if I could sell in Lake
Charles so I got a license in DeRidder,” Kathi
explains. “I would go down to Hackberry at
2:00 a.m. each morning to get the fresh
shrimp from the boats coming in, come
home, get my kids off to school, and drive an
hour to DeRidder to sell my shrimp.”
After a while, Kathi learned that she could
qualify for a license to sell shrimp in Lake
Charles and moved her road-side operation
closer to home. “I thought that was great
because I didn’t have to commute to DeRidder
every day,” she says.
Kathi’s bubbling personality and strong
desire to deliver the freshest shrimp possible
at very reasonable prices quickly gained her
the respect of customers and fishermen alike.
The business grew to the point that she called
on her brother, Billy Bonamici, for help.
“Billy came down from Vegas without a
dime in his pocket,” Kathi recalls. “We would
take turns peddling the shrimp from the back
of the truck. He would ride the bike out in
the afternoon to take my place so I could
make dinner for the girls. He was so loved by
the customers that he became the face of
Steamboat Bill’s. Still to this day he is known
as Brother Billy or Steamboat Bill. He later
passed away.
“It was nothing for us to sell a couple of
hundred pounds at one time,” she says. “We
met everybody in the whole town and it was
just wonderful. We developed a one-on-one
relationship with all the customers.”
Kathi remembers one lady with several
children who would come by every afternoon
about 4 o’clock to buy shrimp. “I told her that
instead of coming at 4 o’clock, you need to
come when I’m ready to close up and I’ll
make you a deal on whatever I have left. I
gave her a really good deal so she could feed
her kids.”
HISTORIC SOUTHWEST LOUISIANA: A Story of Heritage, Industry and Louisiana Living
122

In 1982, with her brother’s help, the business
grew to the point where they needed a
shrimp dock to supply the demand, and Kathi
was able to buy a little dock that had been
closed down. After buying the shrimp dock, she
and Billy discovered the dock had no refrigeration
and no way to make ice. “We were able
to lease a 400 pound ice machine and when
the first shrimper showed up he took all the
ice, which wasn’t much. That created another
dilemma because there wasn’t enough for the
next shrimper. But we always worked through
our crisis. The lessons we learn as first-time
business owners are hysterical looking back
today. One day a friend showed up and just
gave us a refrigerated box to store the shrimp,”
she says. “To this day, he hasn’t let me pay him.”
Like most small businesses, Kathi’s shrimp
business endured growing pains. She still
remembers the day her brother called to say
he needed $2,000 to pay for twenty boxes
of shrimp. “We didn’t have the money to
pay these people, so I went to a bank,” she
explains. “Now, I don’t know the banker from
Adam. But I go in and tell him, ‘Either I’m
going to be broke or I’m going to be on my
way to success. You’re going to make that
determination today. I need about $2,500
because I have shrimp sitting at the dock and
I don’t have the money to pay for them.’”
The banker, Lee Temple, made the loan and
it marked the beginning of a growth period for
the business. He changed her life!! “We started
buying large amounts of shrimp, because
everybody knew we were honest and wanted
to do business with us,” Kathi says. With the
new growth Kathi recruited her daughters to
help work and later her Mom and Dad.
Restrictions on peddling shrimp also
plagued the growing business, but rather
than give in to the petty restrictions, Kathi
fought the ordinances all the way to the
Supreme Court, and won.
Finally, in 1984, Kathi’s dream of owning
her own seafood market came true with the
opening of Steamboat Bill’s Seafood Market.
That eventually grew into three Cajun seafood
restaurants: 1004 North Lakeshore Drive,
Lake Charles, Louisiana; the corner of Broad
and Highway 14, Lake Charles, Louisiana; and
Hendersonville, Tennessee.
Kathi’s determination to succeed helped
her overcome major obstacles that would
have discouraged most people—from one of
the businesses burning down in a fire, and
rebuilding, to fighting for her right to peddle
all the way to the Supreme Court. “I have
been through it all.
“It was so much fun doing this because,
you know what, it was never a day’s work,”
Kathi says. “It was always a passion. I never
got into it for money.”
SHARING THE HERITAGE
123

VERON, BICE,
PALERMO &
WILSON, LLC
Veron, Bice, Palermo & Wilson, LLC is
located at 721 Kirby Street in Lake Charles.
It is only natural that residents of Louisiana
rely on the law firm of Veron, Bice, Palermo &
Wilson, LLC. This boutique firm is experienced
in all kinds of disputes–environmental,
personal injury, medical malpractice, contract
disputes, business litigation, and maritime
law. But one theme rings true: they represent
real people and businesses who have suffered
at the hand of another–no matter how big or
small the injury or damage is. From its offices
located in Lake Charles, the firm routinely
handles cases throughout Louisiana, and its
many successes have drawn clients from
across the country.
Veron, Bice, Palermo & Wilson was founded
in 2005 when Jay Bice, Rock Palermo, and
Jamie Bice joined forces with J. Michael Veron
to combine their expertise in personal injury
and commercial litigation. Its clients include
individuals as well as Fortune 500 companies,
financial institutions, education institutions,
public officials, municipalities, and governmental
agencies. The attorneys’ record of success
in obtaining multi-million dollar verdicts
and settlements attests to their expertise. In
just a short time, the firm’s success has attracted
other outstanding lawyers. Former Federal
Magistrate Judge Lon Wilson, Mike Hodgkins,
Turner Brumby, D’Ann Penner, and Julie Love
Taylor have all joined the Veron, Bice,
Palermo & Wilson team. The diverse experience
they bring has enriched the firm’s wealth
of knowledge.
The mission of Veron, Bice, Palermo &
Wilson is to provide clients in Lake Charles and
the surrounding parts of Louisiana with the full
measure of justice available to them under the
law. In addition, it is their goal to provide justice
for those injured by medical malpractice
and other forms of negligence; and to provide
justice for people who have suffered environmental
property damage because of negligence
at the hand of the oil and gas industry.
The lawyers at Veron, Bice, Palermo &
Wilson have substantial experience in the
courtroom and have tried a wide variety of
cases to verdict, including landmark cases
credited with changing Louisiana’s legal landscape.
Their reputation of producing meaningful
results for their clients comes from
their focus and experience as trial lawyers.
Their years of experience before judges and
juries have given them a foundation in courtroom
excellence that puts them at the forefront
of the legal community.
In addition to the firm’s nine lawyers, its
staff of talented and experienced legal assistants
enhances its ability to obtain the results
its clients deserve. It is a hallmark of Veron,
Bice, Palermo & Wilson that its lawyers and
HISTORIC SOUTHWEST LOUISIANA: A Story of Heritage, Industry and Louisiana Living
124

staff speak with clients about their cases in
plain English, avoiding confusing language,
and give every client individual attention.
Veron, Bice, Palermo & Wilson has established
a reputation for providing excellent
service and achieving positive results. The
community trusts them, and every day they
seek to validate that trust. Other lawyers,
judges and court personnel respect them. Past
clients send their friends and family members
to the firm knowing that they are serious
about providing justice.
As a law firm that remains on the cutting
edge of courtroom procedure, they often use
technology to strengthen their cases. This
technology includes medical art, forensic
photography, computer analytic modeling
and even video recreations of accidents in personal
injury cases. Ultimately, the use of technology
enables the firm to make details and
injuries come alive for the people who will
determine the outcome of the case: the jurors.
Most importantly, the lawyers at Veron,
Bice, Palermo & Wilson serve as determined,
dedicated advocates for their clients. The
results they have achieved for their clients
over the years are nationally recognized, as
shown by their consistent selection as the Best
Lawyers in America, inclusion in Louisiana
Super Lawyers, selection as one of the Top 10
Law Firms for Client Satisfaction, recognition
by the Bar Register as Preeminent
Lawyers, and more. Their clients can be
confident in their ability to see that their
goals are met.
The attorneys at Veron, Bice, Palermo
& Wilson know the law. They know
how to maneuver through the court system.
They know how to use technology
to build strong cases. And they know
how to fight for their clients. Their
knowledge and skills are used to accomplish
one mission: to achieve justice for
their clients.
Above: Firm Attorneys Top: Front row:
Turner Brumby, Lon Wilson, Julie Love
Taylor, and Rock Palermo. Back row:
Michael Hodgkins, D’Ann Penner, Mike
Veron, Jay Bice, and Jamie Bice.
Below: A diagram used in a trial to
demonstrate an oncoming, drunk driver
crossing a center line and ultimately
striking an innocent victim head-on. The
attorneys at Veron, Bice, Palermo & Wilson
used a video to recreate the crash, and
ultimately secured a favorable settlement
for their client.
SHARING THE HERITAGE
125

LAKE AREA
MEDICAL CENTER
Lake Area Medical Center, first known as
Women & Children’s Hospital, began with a
group of eight obstetricians and gynecologists
led by Floyd A. Guidry, M.D., who wanted to
offer the most advanced healthcare services to
women in Southwest Louisiana. They dreamed
of a hospital that would put patients first, one
that would strive to meet the special needs of
women and newborns.
In 1981, Dr. Guidry contacted Humana,
Inc., the largest hospital company at that
time, to discuss the idea of building a
women’s hospital in Lake Charles. After conducting
several demographic studies, the
company agreed that Southwest Louisiana
would benefit from a women’s specialty hospital.
Dr. Guidry was selected as chairman of
the steering committee and three years later,
he was named the hospital’s first chief of staff.
When the hospital opened on October 21,
1984, it was the first women’s hospital in the
Lake Charles area. With eighty patient beds
and eight physicians, the hospital featured
state-of-the-art-technology, spacious rooms,
a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), complete
gynecological services, mammography
and surgical services. Just two years later,
services were expanded to include care for
women, children and men. Then in 1988,
a new emergency department, intensive care
unit and orthopedic services opened.
In 1989, Charles Washington, M.D. performed
the first laparoscopic laser cholecystectomy
(gallbladder removal surgery) in the Lake
Charles area at Women & Children’s Hospital.
Only eleven other facilities in the U.S. were
equipped to perform this procedure, including
one in Houston and another in New Orleans.
Between 1999 and 2007,Women & Children’s
Hospital completed several large expansion
projects, which doubled the size of the obstetrics
and neonatal intensive care units, added
a new day surgery lobby, chapel, medical
records department, surgery expansion and a
new adult ICU wing. From 2008–2014 additional
service lines were introduced, along with
the development of an on-campus physician
clinic corporation and a hospitalist program.
Additionally, a family medicine clinic opened
in Grand Lake, a Wound Care Center opened
on campus and the Urology Center of
Southwest Louisiana was purchased. Due to
the accelerated growth of new business,
industry and families relocating to Southwest
Louisiana, Women & Children’s Hospital officially
changed its’ name to Lake Area Medical
Center in early 2014.
Today, Lake Area Medical Center (LAMC)
is an eighty-eight bed full service acute care
hospital offering inpatient, outpatient, medical
and surgical care for men, women and
children. Still recognized as the area’s preferred
leader for women’s services, the hospital
is an accredited Bariatric Surgery Center,
and has earned ongoing recognition for
receiving high patient, employee and physician
satisfaction scores. LAMC is recognized
as a Top Performer in Key Quality Issues by
the Joint Commission, one of the healthcare
industry’s most recognized quality and performance
standards organizations. Modern
Healthcare magazine also recognized Lake
Area Medical Center as a Best Places to Work
in Healthcare for three of the past eight years.
With over 500 employees and an experienced
medical staff of over 200 physicians,
Lake Area Medical Center remains an important
healthcare resource for the residents of
Southwest Louisiana.
With such a rich history of innovation and
dedication to providing exceptional healthcare
services, it is no wonder why families continue
to choose Lake Area Medical Center as the
birthplace for their children and the hospital
they will trust for generations to come.
HISTORIC SOUTHWEST LOUISIANA: A Story of Heritage, Industry and Louisiana Living
126

HD Truck and Tractor was founded on a
dream. This was the case of Hiram DuRousseau
in 1982 when he enlisted the help of his
family, bought a tractor and began grass
maintenance and land leveling for family and
friends. With the help of wife, Jeanette and
sons, the company surprised them all when
they formed DuRousseau Construction, Inc.,
ten years later and obtained their first
contract. In short, they all rolled up their
sleeves and went to work.
In 2001, DuRousseau Construction, Inc.,
formed HD Truck & Tractor, LLC, and has
not stopped growing since. Services now
include new road construction, drainage
installation and repair, mass excavation, site
preparation, neighborhood development,
levee construction and reconstruction, airport
taxiway additions and repairs, and new golf
course construction.
The company had eight employees and a
contract that included bush hogging, mowing
and landscape maintenance for the Port of
Lake Charles. Four years later, Hiram II
obtained a second contract with the POLC to
unload various coal and non-metal material
from ships and barges at the terminal in
Sulphur, Louisiana. In the early years, HD
Truck & Tractor performed small civil projects;
but, things changed in 2003 when L’Auburge
du Lac Casino awarded the family-owned business
a $4.6 million site work contract for its
new Lake Charles Resort. This prompted the
HD Truck &Tractor’s journey toward differentiating
itself from competitors. It soon expanded
to include design/build general contractor
responsibilities and eventually, facility maintenance
once construction was complete.
Faced with the difficulties of operating in
a small market, the company turned to
road construction, successfully landing such
high-profile projects as the $6.5 million Red
Davis Road Construction project, and the
$7 million Ryan Streetscape project. By 2012,
HD had developed extensive experience in all
major disciplines of heavy civil construction.
Today, Hiram is still active in the day to day
operations of the business as one of three
managing members along with Jeanette
managing member and office manager and
Hiram II. His other children are integrally
involved as well, Justin DuRousseau as vice
president of operations, Jena DuRousseau as
comptroller and Jalin DuRousseau as human
resource director. Lead Superintendent Scott
Sitting has over twenty-five years’ experience
in heavy construction and project management.
Also Kerry Dupre, superintendent, has
more than fifteen years’ experience and
numerous professional certifications under
his belt. In all, the company has grown to
fifty-three full-time employees.
No matter how big or small the job, the
company remains committed to its core
values, providing every customer
with superior services and the
most cost-effective techniques.
It requires its employees to go
beyond what is expected to
exceed client demands. As
founders Hiram and Jeanette
demanded in 1982, so does HD
continue to work with reliability
and respect, trust and honesty
and a sharp eye for safety and a
passion for success. Helping to
accomplish these values, HD
stays ahead of the trend by purchasing
the latest in 3D equipment
technology for its fleet of
heavy equipment, which has
enabled HD Truck and Tractor
to complete projects quicker,
more efficiently, and at less cost.
HD TRUCK &
TRACTOR, LLC
Below: Carlyss Boulevard pipe installation.
Bottom: Left to right, front row, Jena,
Hiram II, Jeanette, Hiram and Jalin
DuRousseau. Back row, Justin DuRousseau.
SHARING THE HERITAGE
127

LANDRY SUPPLY,
INC.
Above: Randolph “Rookie” Landry.
In January 1947, Randolph “Rookie”
Landry went to work for Berry Brothers, Inc.,
a young company in town that opened its
doors in January 1945. Berry Brothers was
a NAPA Auto Parts store. Rookie started
working in the shipping and receiving
department. Soon, he was promoted to the
parts counter and a few months later, he
became the store manager.
In 1946, Mr. Berry needed
an outside salesman. He recognized
that Rookie had a
knack for building relationships
with customers and
had quickly become quite
knowledgeable about the
different products he sold.
Mr. Berry offered Rookie the
outside sales position and
Rookie kindly accepted his
offer. Rookie was never
a high-pressure salesman;
but, instead stuck to being
honest and straightforward
with his customers. Rookie and many of
these customers became lifelong friends.
As the years went by, Rookie excelled in
his outside sales position and the company
continued to grow. Eventually, he became
the company’s general manager, but also
continued with his outside sales position.
Late every year, NAPA holds a marketing
conference where all the surrounding NAPA
store owners get together for a year-end
meeting to make their sales plans for the
following year. At one of those conferences in
the 1970s, Mr. Berry was talking to an old
friend and introduced Rookie to his friend
and said “This man is Berry Brothers.” That
was a compliment that Rookie never forgot.
In 1990, after forty-five years of serving the
community, the Berry family approached
Rookie, their most loyal and longest tenured
employee of forty-three years and told him
that after much thought they were going
to sell their family business and wanted to
offer him the opportunity to purchase it. He
accepted the offer without much hesitation.
He was sixty-five years old and he mortgaged
everything he owned to make the purchase
and, on August 1, 1990, Rookie and his two
sons started Landry Supply, Inc. He admitted
at his age it was probably not the most conservative
decision to make, but he very much
believed in the business he had helped build
over more than forty years. He continued to
work every day until his retirement in 2005,
at which time, he had spent fifty-eight years
selling NAPA parts and service. Although
Rookie passed away on May 12, 2015 at the
age of eight-nine, his sons have continued
his legacy of selling quality NAPA parts along
with unbeatable service. The business has
continued to grow over the years and has
received the prestigious NAPA Five Star
Award eight times.
HISTORIC SOUTHWEST LOUISIANA: A Story of Heritage, Industry and Louisiana Living
128

CARAWAY
PHARMACY
Garrett Caraway purchased Keller’s
Pharmacy from Allen Keller in December
1969. Garrett and his wife, Juno, worked to
grow the pharmacy and gift business at
820 McKinley, in Westlake. In the summer of
1976, Caraway’s celebrated a grand opening of
the new expansion of the gift shop. There was
a week-long celebration with bicentennialthemed
events with employees dressed in
1776 costumes, including powdered wigs.
The expansion and new exterior were
designed by Juno, gift buyer for the store.
Caraway’s has the charm of an old corner
drug store with modern convenience and
service. Expansion added a fireplace with
couches where people could have coffee
while waiting for their prescriptions. Garrett
helped his customers when they had a
cold or sinus or some other aliment. His
passion was developing remedies for these
maladies such as Redeye, a cough syrup;
SnodGrass, a sinus remedy; BecBalm, a
diaper rash formula; Goose Grease and
Pink Panther, creams for poison Ivy and
skin rashes. BecBalm, Goose Grease and
Pink Panther are still available today.
Caraway’s, back in the late 1970s, was
known for its legendary Halloween parties.
People came from all over Calcasieu Parish
for the party. There was something for all
ages: friendly clowns and witches handing
out candy to kids from a smoking caldron,
to McNeese football players dressing as
monsters such as the “Hulk” in green, scaring
teenagers. Local Westlakers also participated.
There was a headless horseman on a live
horse terrifying adults. Not to mention a
space ship that flew from the roof of
Caraway’s, which freaked others out. After
several years, the crowds grew so large that it
became dangerous, so the Halloween parties
ceased; but, are still remembered by many
as a main event “back in the day.”
Garrett remained owner and pharmacist
until April 2000. At that time, Kenneth Gayle
became pharmacist-in-charge. The Caraway
family is actively involved with daily store
operations. Evette Caraway Ange is a pharmacist
along with Gayle, and Danee’ Caraway,
works with the store manager as gift buyer.
In June 2012 the gift shop returned to
Caraway family ownership and management.
Store renovations were made, and new
merchandise and gift lines added. New
pharmacy software was installed in mid-2016
for a point-of-sale computer system to better
serve customers in the ever-changing and
demanding world of healthcare.
For over forty years, Westlake residents
(and surrounding areas) have been supportive
with their patronage. That dedication and
the longevity of employees have made for
Caraway’s success. With the support of the
community, Caraway’s Pharmacy plans to
continue serving the Westlake community
adhering to its motto “In God We Trust” for
years to come.
Above: Caraway Pharmacy’s motto is
displayed at the entrance, “In God We
Trust.” Caraway Pharmacy is located at
820 McKinley in Westlake.
Left: Garrett and Juno Caraway.
SHARING THE HERITAGE
129

ALLY-GATOR
BOOKBITES
PUBLISHING
HOUSE
Armed with a psychology degree, Tommie
Townsley was torn between becoming a
school counselor or pursuing her love of
writing for children. Hurricanes Katrina and
Rita in 2005 swayed her decision. The rebirth
of Southwest Louisiana and the determination
of the Cajun people inspired Tommie to
author children’s books about the region she
appreciates and loves.
Today, the entrepreneur is CEO and
publisher of Ally-Gator BookBites (AGB)
Publishing House, an independent, selfpublishing
organization concentrating on
children’s books. “I’ve always had a passion to
be a counselor, but I just wasn’t sure. I prayed
about it and, finally, the hurricanes helped
me decide. Those storms devastated homes,
and people of all ages when they hit. Children
were especially distraught, struggling to
understand what had happened. Writing
books targeting their fears and feelings came
easy for me because of the psychology
background. It helped them better understand
and deal with their feelings through reading.
“That’s when the concept of Ally-Gator
BookBites fell into my lap.” Five years ago, she
founded the Southwest Louisiana Children’s
Book Writers and Illustrators Guild. It was her
way of supporting Louisiana children’s book
authors and illustrators. The guild meets
monthly to discuss children’s markets, and
critique other’s work. As members of the
guild became interested in publishing their
works, Tommie decided to open a publishing
house, Ally-Gator BookBites Publishing began
with publishing one book. She now has seven
Cajun Tales titles to her credit: Adolpheaux
the Adventurous Dolphin, Clyde the Cajun Calf,
Amos the Artistic Alligator, Dixie the Ole Dawg,
Sabine’s First Family Reunion, Sampson the
Spirited Horse, and Kyser the Singing Schnauzer.
Ally-Gator BookBites is located in The Seed
Center at 4310 Ryan Street, Suite 130 in
Lake Charles. Today, AGB has thirty titles and
is still growing. “Local support for AGB has
been positive and rewarding,” she says. “The
business is growing rapidly. Our authors visit
schools, libraries, museums, festivals, and
other venues to inspire children to read.
Some titles have been performed on stage.”
Ally-Gator BookBites is known as a
boutique publishing house because the staff
works with authors to assist with illustrating,
editing, design, and printing. “We make
dreams come true for authors, printing in
both soft- and hardcover books. Our goal is
to market high-quality books at affordable
prices internationally as well as nationally.
Even now, we assist with marketing to reach
our target audience.”
Tommie has many varied interests and is
dedicated to the importance of reading to
children. She believes that every child has the
potential to do great things!
HISTORIC SOUTHWEST LOUISIANA: A Story of Heritage, Industry and Louisiana Living
130

The Calcasieu Parish Public Library was
formed with the merging of the Lake Charles
Public Library and Calcasieu Parish Library
in 1974. Library services had existed in
the area for many years, starting with the
Carnegie Memorial Library founded in 1901
through the efforts of local businessmen and a
$10,000 building grant provided by Andrew
Carnegie. The city agreed to appropriate not
less than $1,000 annually for maintenance.
By March 1904 the Carnegie Memorial
Library was open to the public, on the same
land—at the corner of Pujo and Bilbo
Streets—where it stands today. Hurricanes and
time weathered the building, and in 1949, a
bond issue was passed by the citizens of Lake
Charles to build a new one. The new library,
called the “Lake Charles Public Library,”
opened to the public on March 14, 1952.
On January 22, 1944, members of the
first Calcasieu Parish Public Library Board of
Control met in the Police Jury Office of
the Calcasieu Parish Courthouse to plan a
Demonstration Library, supervised by the
Louisiana Library Commission, which would
operate for one year. Headquarters for the
system would be in Lake Charles, at Kirby
and Hodges Streets, with branches located
in municipalities throughout the parish. At
the end of 1944, residents of Calcasieu Parish
voted in a parish-wide election for a .75 mill
tax for the next decade to keep the public
library system in Calcasieu Parish.
The two libraries were combined in 1974
when the City Council and Policy Jury
approved consolidation of the Lake Charles
CALCASIEU PARISH PUBLIC LIBRARY
Public Library with the Calcasieu Parish
Public Library.
Between 1990 and 1995, under the leadership
of Director Lynda Lee Carlberg, the
library was able to renovate or rebuild every
library in the system, doubling square footage
available for library services. Calcasieu Parish
residents continued to stand behind and
support their public libraries through the
years, voting to increase their level of support
to 1.5 mill in 1954, and finally, to 5.99 mills
in 1999 and continue to pass the ten-year
property tax renewals by wide margins.
Library service in Calcasieu Parish has
grown over 109 years from a single building
in 1901 serving 5,000 people to fourteen
buildings serving over 189,000 people with
over 1,000,000 checkouts annually.
To learn more about the Calcasieu Parish
Public Library, please visit the website at
www.calcasieulibrary.org.
Above: Carnegie Memorial Library as it
appeared in 1904.
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF THE MCNEESE STATE
UNIVERSITY FRAZAR LIBRARY ARCHIVES.
Below: Central Library as it looks today.
SHARING THE HERITAGE
131

SPONSORS
Ally-Gator BookBites Publishing House.............................................................................................................................................130
The Bel Group/Bel Commercial, LLC.................................................................................................................................................120
Calcasieu Parish Police Jury ..............................................................................................................................................................110
Calcasieu Parish Public Library .........................................................................................................................................................131
Caraway Pharmacy............................................................................................................................................................................129
Darrell’s.............................................................................................................................................................................................114
First Federal Bank of Louisiana .........................................................................................................................................................112
Hampton Inn, Lake Charles ..............................................................................................................................................................106
HD Truck & Tractor, LLC .................................................................................................................................................................127
Lake Area Medical Center .................................................................................................................................................................126
Landry Supply, Inc............................................................................................................................................................................128
Lundy, Lundy, Soileau & South LLP..................................................................................................................................................118
McManus Construction, LLC ............................................................................................................................................................116
Port Aggregates, Inc. ...........................................................................................................................................................................94
Raleigh Newman...............................................................................................................................................................................102
Schlesingers Wholesale .......................................................................................................................................................................90
Steamboat Bill’s .................................................................................................................................................................................122
Veron, Bice, Palermo & Wilson, LLC.................................................................................................................................................124
Westlake Chemical Lake Charles South Vinyls Complex .....................................................................................................................98
HISTORIC SOUTHWEST LOUISIANA: A Story of Heritage, Industry and Louisiana Living
132

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
A DLEY
C ORMIER
For over forty-five years, Adley Cormier has studied and researched Louisiana, particularly
Southwest Louisiana, to gain a unique insight into the society, culture and history of the region. He
has written monographs, commentary, and articles for dozens of newspapers, journals and
magazines, and has appeared on national television, on Louisiana Public Broadcasting, and in
independent productions to share our unique heritage and culture. He professionally guides groups
on tours of Southwest Louisiana, consults, and writes. In 2017, in addition to this regional history
for the Chamber, his book Lost Lake Charles was published which revealed the fascinating “hidden
history” of the city.
He is a native of Breaux Bridge, graduated LSU with majors in history, English and French, and
retired from the Department of Labor in 2007. Long active in live theater, he was the principal
director for Lake Charles Little Theatre and has production credits at McNeese State University,
Lake Charles Symphony, Sarah Quinn Jones Ballet, Ballet Joyeux, ACTS Theater, Itinerate Theater,
Louisiana Governor’s Program for Gifted Children, and St. Bart’s Theater off-Broadway. He did
research and design for Keith Gates’s opera Evangeline and for Carolyn Woosley’s production of
Louisiana Women. He promotes arts and culture and has served on the boards of the Arts Council
of Southwest Louisiana, Lake Charles Little Theatre, the Imperial Calcasieu Museum, Southwest
Louisiana Historical Association the Calcasieu Historical Preservation Society. He is a speaker,
lecturer, and presenter with appearances at McNeese State University, Sowela Technical and
Community College, high schools, civic groups (Kiwanis, Rotary, Lions), Calcasieu-Cameron
Retired Teachers’ Association, Masonic and Eastern Star groups, Friends of Libraries associations,
DAR, VFW, Calcasieu Parish Library System, Calcasieu Parish School Board, Lake Charles and
Southwest Louisiana Convention and Visitors’ Bureau.
He is a longtime member of the City of Lake Charles Downtown Development Authority (and
chairman) under which major improvements to the City’s lakefront and downtown infrastructure
were envisioned and constructed, post Rita, including the Lakefront Promenade Park, Marina,
Louisiana Landing Fountain, Gill Street Extension, Ryan Street improvements, Millennium Park
and splash park, Transit Center, and the relocation and construction of City Court. He is a historic
preservation commissioner for the City of Lake Charles and a long-term advisor to the Community
Services and Development Department with particular emphasis on fair housing. He was awarded
the Tourism Leadership trophy from the Lake Charles/Southwest Louisiana Convention and
Visitors Bureau in 2017.
He and his wife, artist Melinda Antoon Cormier, live in Lake Charles’s Baptist Meadows neighborhood.
Adley Cormier.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
133

For more information about the following publications or about publishing your own book, please call
HPNbooks at 800-749-9790 or visit www.hpnbooks.com.
Albemarle & Charlottesville:
An Illustrated History of the First 150 Years
Bakersfield: It’s the People, And a Whole Lot More
Black Gold: The Story of Texas Oil & Gas
Black Gold in California
Carter County, Oklahoma: Then and Now
Cheyenne: A Sesquicentennial History
Coastal Visions: Images of Galveston County
Davis County: On the Move
Fort Myers - City of Palms: A Contemporary Portrait
Garland: A Contemporary History
Historic Abilene: An Illustrated History
Historic Alamance County: An Illustrated History
Historic Albany: City & County
Historic Albuquerque: An Illustrated History
Historic Alexandria: An Illustrated History
Historic Amarillo: An Illustrated History
Historic Anchorage: An Illustrated History
Historic Austin: An Illustrated History
Historic Baldwin County: A Bicentennial History
Historic Baton Rouge: An Illustrated History
Historic Beaufort County: An Illustrated History
Historic Beaumont: An Illustrated History
Historic Bexar County: An Illustrated History
Historic Birmingham: An Illustrated History
Historic Brazoria County: An Illustrated History
Historic Brownsville: An Illustrated History
Historic Charlotte:
An Illustrated History of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County
Historic Chautauqua County: An Illustrated History
Historic Cheyenne: A History of the Magic City
Historic Clayton County: An Illustrated History
Historic Comal County: An Illustrated History
Historic Corpus Christi: An Illustrated History
Historic DeKalb County: An Illustrated History
Historic Denton County: An Illustrated History
Historic Edmond: An Illustrated History
Historic El Paso: An Illustrated History
Historic Erie County: An Illustrated History
Historic Fayette County: An Illustrated History
Historic Fairbanks: An Illustrated History
Historic Gainesville & Hall County: An Illustrated History
Historic Gregg County: An Illustrated History
Historic Hampton Roads: Where America Began
Historic Hancock County: An Illustrated History
Historic Henry County: An Illustrated History
Historic Hood County: An Illustrated History
Historic Houston: An Illustrated History
Historic Hunt County: An Illustrated History
Historic Illinois: An Illustrated History
Historic Kern County:
An Illustrated History of Bakersfield and Kern County
Historic Lafayette:
An Illustrated History of Lafayette & Lafayette Parish
Historic Laredo:
An Illustrated History of Laredo & Webb County
Historic Lee County: The Story of Fort Myers & Lee County
Historic Louisiana: An Illustrated History
Historic Mansfield: A Bicentennial History
Historic Midland: An Illustrated History
Historic Mobile:
An Illustrated History of the Mobile Bay Region
Historic Montgomery County:
An Illustrated History of Montgomery County, Texas
Historic Ocala: The Story of Ocala & Marion County
Historic Oklahoma: An Illustrated History
Historic Oklahoma County: An Illustrated History
Historic Omaha:
An Illustrated History of Omaha and Douglas County
Historic Orange County: An Illustrated History
Historic Osceola County: An Illustrated History
Historic Ouachita Parish: An Illustrated History
Historic Paris and Lamar County: An Illustrated History
Historic Pasadena: An Illustrated History
Historic Passaic County: An Illustrated History
Historic Pennsylvania An Illustrated History
Historic Philadelphia: An Illustrated History
Historic Prescott:
An Illustrated History of Prescott & Yavapai County
Historic Richardson: An Illustrated History
Historic Rio Grande Valley: An Illustrated History
Historic Rogers County: An Illustrated History
Historic San Marcos: An Illustrated History
Historic Santa Barbara: An Illustrated History
Historic Santa Maria Valley
Historic Scottsdale: A Life from the Land
Historic Shelby County: An Illustrated History
Historic Shreveport-Bossier:
An Illustrated History of Shreveport & Bossier City
Historic South Carolina: An Illustrated History
Historic Smith County: An Illustrated History
Historic Temple: An Illustrated History
Historic Texarkana: An Illustrated History
Historic Texas: An Illustrated History
Historic Victoria: An Illustrated History
Historic Tulsa: An Illustrated History
Historic Wake County: An Illustrated History
Historic Warren County: An Illustrated History
Historic Williamson County: An Illustrated History
Historic Wilmington & The Lower Cape Fear:
An Illustrated History
Historic York County: An Illustrated History
Iron, Wood & Water: An Illustrated History of Lake Oswego
Jefferson Parish: Rich Heritage, Promising Future
More Than a River: Decatur-Morgan County
Loudoun County, Virginia:
Preserving Tradition, Embracing Innovation
Miami’s Historic Neighborhoods: A History of Community
Old Orange County Courthouse: A Centennial History
Plano: An Illustrated Chronicle
The New Frontier:
A Contemporary History of Fort Worth & Tarrant County
Rich With Opportunity:
Images of Beaumont and Jefferson County
Salt Lake City: Livability in the 21st Century
San Antonio, City Exceptional
The San Gabriel Valley: A 21st Century Portrait
Southwest Louisiana: A Treasure Revealed
The Spirit of Collin County
Terrebonne Parish: Stories of the Good Earth
Tyler: A Natural Beauty
Utah Valley: Heart of Utah
Valley Places, Valley Faces
Water, Rails & Oil: Historic Mid & South Jefferson County
HISTORIC SOUTHWEST LOUISIANA: A Story of Heritage, Industry and Louisiana Living
134

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