River Road Rambler: A Curious Traveler along Louisiana's Historic Byway

7. Once upon a Time in St. James Parish

55 7 Once upon a Time in St. James Parish I arrived one day at the St. James Parish Historical Society Museum as two buses of second-graders spilled out onto the tight grounds of the museum complex. The children, buzzing with anticipation, had been studying pioneer life, and each year their social studies teacher made an appointment to bring them from New Orleans to the little museum in Lutcher. Here they had an interactive experience with some of the old ways of doing things in south Louisiana—with River Road pioneering, so to speak. The tumbling flock of eight-year-olds were divided into groups to ride a short rail on an authentic lumber industry handcart, pumping the handles to propel themselves; to wrestle with the stiff iron wheel of a grinder for the reward of transforming corn kernels into coarse, fresh cornmeal; and to watch as a blacksmith demonstrated how a red-hot poker right off the coals could pierce a hole through a wooden board as cleanly as any power drill. All this and more dazzled the students, and I—a city gal—enjoyed each demonstration as well. But I’d come to expect such experiences each time I’d visited this crowded, distinctly low-tech jumble of collections that reveals a way of life not only unfamiliar to me but also fast disappearing from St. James Parish. I equate the ambiance of the museum to a grandmother’s attic, if grandmother lived in river 56 River Road Rambler Cajun country and had collected and preserved family belongings since the first relatives arrived from Acadia in the mid-eighteenth century. And especially if she was proud of her family history and wanted everyone to understand it. On a previous visit to the museum, I’d encountered a hearty, white-haired woman in her late seventies giving two Texas families a tour through the complex. They were in the back shed, and the Texans were puzzling over a large bale of black wiry fibers: they couldn’t identify the ginned Spanish moss, although they’d just admired its curly grey tendrils swaying from the boughs of old oaks in Audubon Park in New Orleans. They were fascinated to learn that St. James Parish had had a thriving moss-ginning industry—men patrolling the swamps in pirogues, pulling moss from the trees, then cleaning, curing, and selling the product. It was used, the guide told them, for building insulation, packing material, seat padding in some vintage cars, and her favorite—as mattress stuffing. Their “pioneer” guide proudly proclaimed her roots as the Texans warily patted a mossstu ffed mattress. “Yep,” she grinned, “I grew up sleeping on this stuff. After nine months, it got so flat that we had to wash it. Then we were happy because we were lying way high again.” Beyond the open door of the moss shed, a large barrel cistern stood high on a sturdy brick base. The cistern’s banded cypress slats showed daylight; they were shrunken from too many years as a display without holding water. That was her family’s water supply when she grew up, the guide told her visitors: “We didn’t have running water.” A cistern like this one—but air-tight, of course—captured the rainfall, and then “we just went out with the bucket and put it under the spout.” She looked at the children and grinned. “No such thing as hot and cold.” When one of the children questioned the use of a lantern and several other unfamiliar home furnishings in the main exhibit building, their docent confessed that “when I was married in 1949, we didn’t have electricity.” Lanterns, wood stoves, and grinders that required muscle power were what everyone had to use. To the Texas visitors and the second-graders, references to an Once upon a Time in St. James Parish 57 almost unimaginable way of life might well have sounded like fantasy, or certainly pioneering. But even younger residents of St. James Parish , many of whose ancestors lived this way, have the same reactions. That is why the St. James Historical Society Museum was begun. In 1987, a group of locals began to realize that the unique culture in which they had grown up was disappearing. The familiar traditions and local industries that had defined St. James Parish for a century needed to be recognized and documented before...