Historic Louisiana

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Houma in the early 1950s still had the look
of a small town. Today it is a prosperous
medical and oil center.
COURTESY OF THE NEW ORLEANS PUBLIC LIBRARY.
HISTORIC LOUISIANA
62
Louisiana from Michigan about 1900. He
soon began purchasing land at levee board
sales and elsewhere. He paid prices ranging
from twelve and a half cents an acre to $8 an
acre for the 4,900 acres he purchased in the
Labranche wetlands. Both the railroads and a
new federal agency, the Office of Experiment
Stations in the United States Department of
Agriculture, helped him develop the
techniques for land reclamation. In 1909,
Professor W. Gregory of Tulane University
persuaded the office to endorse research on
the ways swamps could be drained. The
experiment station hired its first drainage
engineer in the person of A. M. Shaw.
From 1900 to 1915, Wisner acquired a
million acres of wetlands, and developed
250,000 acres using the techniques of
reclamation. He began at a project near
Raceland, and developed forty-five more sites.
In 1906 he began assembling the land in
Labranche, and, during the following years,
dug canals, cleared land, and built a steam
pumping station. Wisner concentrated his
efforts on Section 39 at the mouth of Bayou
Labranche and apparently did little elsewhere
on the Labranche wetlands. He surveyed the
east bank of the bayou and laid out
subdivisions along the two thousand feet of
Illinois Central railroad track extending
eastward from the bayou. Along the lakeshore
he created farm sites of twenty acres and
through the center of the tract he drew an
“Avenue.” The eastern boundary was another
canal with a levee, running perpendicular to
the railroad and extending to the lake. This
canal emptied into a canal paralleling the
railroad, which the pumping station emptied.
Another canal paralleled the lakeshore and the
bayou just inside the levee, providing the earth
for the levee. The entire tract drained by the
pumping station amounted to about 140 acres.
The pumping station was a corrugated tin shed
with engine and pumping apparatus. It was
oriented to drain the east-west canal paralleling
the railroad tracks and dump into Bayou
Labranche. The pump seems to have been a
type known as the low-lift Menge pump. It
contained an impeller wheel attached to a
vertical shaft, set in a large wooden body. A belt
attached to an engine drove the shaft. When
the water reached the height of the discharge
mouth, it spilled over into the outlet, in
this case, Bayou Labranche. A residence,
perhaps a keeper’s house, appears to have been
attached to the pumping structure on the
north end.
By 1911, Wisner’s Suburban Land
Company was ready to begin selling parcels to
individuals. The first purchaser was Louis M.
Rountree, a gardener in New Orleans. In June
1911 he was a resident of St. Charles Parish,
probably already living at Labranche. On June
16, Rountree purchased the point of land at
the juncture of the lake and the bayou, identified
in the act of sale as part of Lot 1 or the
“ten acres of the northwest lot.” This point
was also referred to as the junction of the
main drainage canal and Bayou Labranche.
Although Lot 1 contained twenty acres,
Rountree purchased only ten acres at first.
The following March he purchased the other
ten acres, and then six months later purchased
the adjoining lots, Lots Seven and
Eight. Rountree presumably cultivated corn
and vegetables there, typical truck farming
crops of the suburbs, perhaps with some early
success. In 1915, his wife used her separate
funds to purchase ten acres of Lot 2 adjoining
their tract. The plan attached to the act of sale
clearly shows their house sitting at the northwest
corner of Lot 1 on Bayou Labranche at
the Lake. The authorizing resolution referred