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8. A Lush Paradise
- University Press of Mississippi
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Pierre Cenac’s Terrebonne Parish consisted of a lush combination of vast cultivated lands, thick stands of timber, and undeveloped wilderness. Louisiana’s bayou country was not an “Eden…as Longfellow and his successors have claimed, but a dense and forbidding semi-tropical jungle.”1 One directory of the late 1800s described Terrebonne’s topography: “Less than one eighteenth of the parish [approximately 1,808 square miles total] is high land; the balance is marshes, swamps, low prairies, bayous and lakes. “The cultivable land is composed of the ridges along the banks of the different bayous, rich alluvial soil that is highly productive and easily cultivated. The principal bayous are the Terrebonne, Little Caillou, Grand Caillou, Black, Dularge and Blue. The space between the ridges of the different bayous is mostly swamps of cypress timber. Numerous lakes, bays and islands form part of the parish, and its southern limits are washed by the waters of the Gulf of Mexico.”2 Many early-comers to Terrebonne in the late 1700s and very early 1800s had obtained Spanish land grants, most of not more than 640 acres, some being granted as early as 1787.3 Among names recorded as receiving such grants were Edmund Fanguy, Joseph Hache (Achee), and Etienne Billiot. The Billiot land relatively soon (1824) was sold to J.B. Duplantis, and later to Euphrosin Hotard. Early crops in southeast Louisiana included indigo, rice, and cotton. By the 1860s, sugar cane reigned supreme in the more southerly/coastal parishes of Louisiana, as opposed to King Cotton in Louisiana’s central and northern regions, as well as in most of the Southern states. The swaying green landscape which Pierre evidenced was broken by crops of farmlands and animals of pasture lands, and by forested areas, as well as houses where one cluster of a sometimes-grand planter’s home and workers’ (often slave) dwellings lay at some distance from the next cluster. The Civic Guard newspaper printed an account in June 1866 that gives a detailed description of Bayou Black plantations, a landscape representative of what Pierre would have seen upon first arriving in Terrebonne Parish: CHAPTER 8 A Lush Paradise ReveredartistJohnJames(Jean Jacques)Audubonwasalready famousforhisexpansiveBirds of America volumewhenhechartered aboatandsailedalongthecoastof TerrebonneParishin1837. Hecollected104differentbirdspecies onCaillouIslandand125specieson IslesDernieres. Woodlawnslavecabins,Terrebonne c.1870 81 Chapter 8 “In former times, the plantations on this bayou produced great crops of sugar. In the winter of ’60 and ’61, we remember the whole crop of this parish was estimated at some 16,000 hhds [sugar hogsheads: barrels or casks that each contained an average of 1,000 pounds], 8,000 of which were produced on bayou Black alone. The planters, overseers and slaves all vieing with each other, in a laudable desire to excel, not only in making large crops, but also in improvements and in opening and clearing up new lands. The sugar houses on the large plantations cost from $50,000 to $100,000 and when viewed at a distance, in connection with the great numbers of other buildings near them, resembled towns and villages. The buildings were almost always kept whitewashed and had a pleasing effect. The fences and bridges were generally kept in excellent repair and all the ditches nicely cleaned out. In fact, the reputation of a manager depended much on these things….” As a matter of record, more than 1,200 plantations were producing Louisiana’s sugar crop in the year 1861. Terrebonne Parish was home to numbers of sugar cane plantations and was a substantive sugar producer at the time Pierre arrived. Planters by the 1850s were beneficiaries of two earlier important leaps in the industry. In 1795 Etienne de Boré initially developed the process for granulation. Fifty years later, Norbert Rillieux, son of a white planter/engineer and a freed slave, invented the multiple effect vacuum evaporation technique that replaced the open kettle process. Rillieux was a graduate of the École Centrale in Paris. When Pierre arrived, most Terrebonne parish planters used their own individual sugar houses and mills, some using the older and some the latest processes. A list of sugar planters along each bayou area, along with production statistics, indicate the capacity of Terrebonne’s growers. Most of the years’ lists (beginning with 1844 and ending with the 1860-61 season) are segmented into planters along Bayou Terrebonne, Petit Caillou, Grand Caillou, Bayou Black, Bayou Dularge, and Bayou Chacahoula.4 As early as 1844-45, Terrebonne Parish was home to 42 sugar houses producing 12,661 hogsheads of sugar...