The first house east of the Chavanne building at the big intersection, was that of George Wells, a pioneer lawyer from New York who came to Lake Charles in 1861 at the beginning of the Civil War when the outpost was still called Charleston. When the Champagnes walked past his house almost 50 years later, he’d died 2 years before at age 72, but his (much!) younger widow lived there with their 3 daughters the same age as the older Champagne children until 1911 and could have easily known them in school. The house, however, was demolished in 1912 and replaced by a brick commercial building.

Caption by Maude Reid: “Leopold Kaufman – immigrant from Alsace-Lorrain who became the town’s richest citizen and president of the First National Bank. Mr. Kaufman came to Louisiana from France in 1872, coming to Lake Charles in 1879.”

On the next corner was Leopold Kaufman who’d been 29 when he came to Lake Charles, started his first store in a building he rented from Ged Gray (the grandfather of Mathilde, one of Tisoleil’s piano students), and was wealthy enough to build his beautiful Broad St home 10 years later, in 1889. Soon afterwards, he built the first of the four large brick commercial buildings on the corner of Ryan and Broad. In 1907, when the Champagnes took their first family stroll down Broad, he and his wife Pauline were in their 50s , their 2 children grown, no grandchildren yet, and they would live in that house throughout Tisoleil’s 29 years in Lake Charles.

Also from the Alsace region near Germany was Julius Frank, born in 1849, who also came to Louisiana in 1872, and also built a large brick commercial and office building with a large department store on the corner of Ryan and Broad, catercorner from Kaufman. It was immortalized in a photo of Haley’s comet flying overhead. Age 58 when the Champagnes took their first Sunday walk down Broad St, he lived another 22 years, until just a few months before J Euclide’s death in 1929, and like Kaufman, surely cut a familiar figure with the family for 21 years. His 2 youngest boys were Beulah and Carmen’s age.

6 – The Watkins bank was built in 1885 by Kansas entrepreneur JB Watkins as the first private bank in Lake Charles, but eventually became the office building for Watkins’ land holding company, which he ran from his home in Kansas. ‘Lake Charles wouldn’t be Lake Charles were it not for him’ is a phrase that could apply to many pioneers in the early years of the settlement, but none more so than Jabez Bunting Watkins, a Kansas investor and promoter. In 1883, his North American Land and Timber Co bought 1½ million acres of land (2343 sq miles) between Lake Charles and Alexandria at prices ranging from 12¢ to $1.25 an acre for the purpose of development as farmland, largely rice, then ran a railroad through it and sold lots at $5 an acre as towns sprouted along the railway. In 1887, he sent out the first mass advertising campaign of its kind, aimed largely at Midwestern farmers, who had experience growing grains. He spent $2000 for penny postcards praising the land and its industrial potential… that’s 200,000 postcards, then sent them all over the Mid-West. He’s the reason rice became a big industry in south Louisiana.

Though Watkins kept offices on the 2nd floor of his bank for when business called him to Louisiana, and didn’t fully sell all his interests in the North American Land and Timber Co. until 1911, he kept his home in Kansas. By the time the Champagnes walked past his bank building, he’d long since returned to Kansas.

A boarding house when the Champagnes passed by, it remained so until the hurricane of 1918 picked up the entire 2nd floor, with roof, and threw it onto Hodges St.

Don’t believe me?

An interesting shot dated Aug. 1910 that shows the Powell boardinghouse, Watkins Bank across from it, and a tiny corner of the Elks Club balcony, is one of several documenting the construction of the lovely Carrara marble post office begun 2 years after the Champagnes arrived. A partner photo taken from another angle a full year earlier shows surprisingly slow progress made during that time, which made me curious. Both photos noted the contractor as a Gude Co. out of Atlanta. Atlanta?… for a magnificent government building of Carrara marble? They’re not gonna go to their favorite architect for such a showpiece public building, the famed Favrot and Livaudais firm out of New Orleans? Actually, they were a little busy, right there in Lake Charles, rebuilding the Courthouse, City Hall, and the Catholic church complex as fast as they could after the fire had destroyed them all in a single day. In fact, I think that fire and those 3 public structures were what started Lake Charles’ relationship with Favrot and Livaudais. The post office, which stayed safe in its old location in the Calcasieu Bank, would have to wait a bit and make do with another designer.

They will not, however, see any sign of the post office. Just an empty field, a lopsided tree, and maybe a few animals, or some children playing.

Dr. Almon Pierce came to Lake Charles from Wisconsin around 1890, possibly in response to JB Watkins’ nation-wide ad campaign promoting the region. He was 48 when the Champagnes passed their lovely home, with 2 daughters, the younger one Lucille being Roosevelt Champagne’s age. So maybe they got to know each other at school. The Pierces lived in that house until Tisoleil graduated from the Conservatory in 1929, when the doctor was 70 and probably no longer working, then suddenly they’re in a tiny house they’ve bought at the south end of town. The market crash must have hit them hard. – McNeese archives

~~~ (*aside*) Chavanne family ~~~

There are so many tidbits of data about the Chavannes in the records that a real portrait of the immigrant experience takes shape. I don’t know if the Champagnes, deeply insulated within the Cajun culture of St Martin Parish, ever had any exposure to an immigrant culture, the struggles, adjustments, the communication barriers, languages from Germany, Denmark, Scandinavia and Russia. And lumber-baron-sized wealth, a culture in its own right, bringing American northern ways from Michigan with it. But the Chavannes represented one of many cultural microcosms of the town the Champagnes had moved to, theirs being eastern Germanic French, from near the German and Swiss borders.

Old Madame Chavanne was a newlywed when she and her young husband left their home in the Jura Mountain region of France near the Swiss border, sailing for America in 1858. She endured late pregnancy and childbirth aboard their ship, and they landed with their 5-week-old daughter Esther in New Orleans, by way of Cuba, in August of that year. [I read somewhere that the shipping line gave ‘its’ baby Esther a lifetime pass to sail anywhere she wanted free, something she never took them up on. I’d like to think this special notice hints that the captain gave her some special care, use of the ship’s doctor, maybe a more comfortable sleeping area.]

They settled west of New Orleans on an alluvial ribbon of fertile land, a twin ribbon split by Bayou Lafourche, that wound through the rich ecosystem that is the Atchafalaya Basin. Did Eugene Joseph Chavanne ever venture into that fascinating swamp out of curiosity, or for occupational purposes, or simply to catch fish for his family’s table? I wonder what he thought of his strange new neighbors eating alligator. Was he there long enough to experience any of the seasonal floods that flowed into the Atchafalaya from the Mississippi River, or the area’s Yellow Fever that Europeans had so little immunity from? Who knows, but he must have decided that living off of the land, be it farming or fishing, was not for him, because 2 years after landing in New Orleans, they went back to the city to catch a ship bound for Orange, Texas. If he thought he’d escaped the Yellow Fever scourge of south Louisiana’s hot mosquito months, he was mistaken, because after their ship had left port, they found that they’d both brought it with them from New Orleans. How Madame Chavanne must have come to hate ships! And knowing that they eventually settled in Lake Charles, we know they didn’t escape floods there either.

We do know that Eugene Joseph proved to be a fine ‘numbers man’ as a merchant, and that his sons would follow suit, first with his stores, and later in real estate sales and insurance. Their time in Texas was brief, as the Civil War saw Eugene J conscripted into the army and assigned to a supply unit just the other side of the Sabine River from Orange, Texas, back in Louisiana, in Niblett’s Bluff where he moved his family and opened a store in 1867. In May of 1875, he relocated for the last time to Lake Charles and opened a general store. I don’t know if his origins in France near the Swiss border helped create a bond between him and the two Germanic Frenchmen from Alsace, Julius Frank and Leopold Kaufman, who owned the NW and SE corners of Ryan and Broad, that led them to recommend buying the NE corner. But in 1879, he did just that, buying a big 200′ lot for $1100 that ran up Ryan St for 2/3 the length of the block. He built a 2-story general store on the corner that housed the family upstairs, then a grocery and bakery with lunch room, all from the local pine. He kept building little 1-story stores, probably for rental. By 1885, there was a saloon and furniture store. By 1889, a hardware store and a drug store had been built. Somewhere in there, he built the family a large home a couple blocks up Broad St. which he didn’t get to enjoy for long. In August of 1890, Eugene Joseph Chavanne died suddenly and unexpectedly from a brief illness. He only got to meet the first 3 of his 28 grandchildren, daughters of his oldest daughter Esther (of trans-Atlantic birth) seen in the 1891 photo above. And he never got to see the fine brick commercial building that his sons replaced his little wooden business complex with, the first of the 3 big brick storefront-and-office complexes that the Champagne women saw on their first shopping foray down Ryan St.

After Eugene died, one of his younger sons Charles went to work at the Southern Pacific freight depot where J Euclide worked when he first arrived, though he’d left to join the family real estate agency by that time. His oldest son Francis, who’d taken over the bakery in the family cluster of little wooden stores on Ryan near Broad, earned this comment from Miss Maude. “Mr. Chavanne, who has lived in Lake Charles since 1875, was one of the town’s early bakers. I recall with delight his delicious currant buns – I’ve never eaten any as good since then. When he delivered bread to my mother in the afternoon, it was a great treat if the delivery included currant buns. Later, at the turn of the century, he became a real estate man and was quite successful.”  

The Widow Chavanne finished raising their children, the last leaving home to get married in 1904, and lived in the Broad St home for many more years, enjoying the fruits of the family businesses in the fine brick Chavanne building Eugene’s sons replaced his wooden storefronts with. Let’s hope she was not the kind of mother who looked forward to having some peace and solitude in her own home when her kids were grown and gone, because by the time her youngest was gone, her older ones had already presented her with 18 grandchildren. Worse and more of it [just kidding], only a few years later, the first of her grandchildren to get married, Estelle Jonté, would move in with her and bring her shiny new husband with her. It was the first of what would be a series of newlywed Chavanne grandchildren and their spouses who would briefly move into the Broad St home as a jumping-off point to finding their own place.

~~~

When the Champagnes walked past the Chavanne house in 1907, old Madame Chavanne, now 71 and widowed for 17 years, had 23 grandchildren most of whom were likely there at their grandmère’s for Sunday dinner after church, the same Catholic Mass the Champagnes had just come from. If they weren’t inside sitting down to dinner, they’d have been scattered around the front and back yards, their parents rocking the afternoon away out on the front porch. Eighteen of the Chavanne grandchildren were within the same age range as the Champagne kids, so they could well have noticed each other with particular interest. If the French Chavannes sent their younger children to Catholic school, rather than the public school, would they have had the chance to get to know the Champagne kids? Maybe not, but there was only one high school, and the older kids would’ve been all together, likely taking the same streetcar that ran in that direction. Seeing the Champagne family walking down Broad, looking around like tourists, what did the Chavanne children see? Did the newcomers seem different? From somewhere else? Of a lower socio-economic strata? The Champagnes would have dressed in their Sunday-go-to-meetin’ best, but I’ll bet the clothes of a rural sugar cane farming family, even their Sunday best, were not as new, not as fashionable, and not as well made. What did the Champagnes see when they looked back at all the people, old and young, in and around the Chavanne home? Thanks to a Chavanne family portrait taken around the summer of 1908, we have a pretty good idea what the Chavannes and their happy chaos, complete with dog and pony, would have looked like to the Champagnes. I think it was taken at Clarice Chavanne Pavia’s house ‘in the country’, a few blocks south past Pithon Bayou, possibly celebrating the marriage of her niece Estelle Jonté, the first of the Chavanne grandchildren to get married.

Estelle’s husband, Isaac Murrey, was a professional photographer whose photos from Tisoleil’s years in Lake Charles appear in my posts thanks to the McNeese archives and Maude Reid, including my favorite of the brave men on the roof of the old Knapp drug store building fighting the fire with a hose strung across the street from the Majestic Hotel. The Murreys would eventually buy a house the Champagnes might have seen on their first day’s carriage ride from the train depot, the house that Tisoleil’s cousin Quinta Babin would live in for a while. It later attained a bit of local folklore fame for being haunted by the victim of a murder supposedly buried under the living room floor. A square cut in the floor boards between the livingroom and dining room, traditionally where the grate for the floor furnace was cut, was instead used as supporting evidence of that. The Chavanne house enjoyed a happier fate, representing the fast-disappearing tradition of being a 3-generation home much like my Tisoleil’s beloved home was for me. When the Widow Chavanne’s oldest daughter Esther (of celebrated trans-Atlantic birth) was widowed following her husband’s death in a freak streetcar accident, she moved in with her mother permanently and continued the tradition for the rest of her 84 years. In 1960, Esther’s daughter Eugenie was still in the house, renting to lodgers.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

North was a ‘Michigan Man’, brought to Louisiana as a banker at First National Bank by its directors who were high-powered lumber magnates out of Michigan, Robert Nason and William E Ramsay. North’s two children were Carmen and Presley’s age. Perhaps they met in high school.

Nason and Ramsey came to Lake Charles from Michigan in the 1880s after the northern forests were depleted, bought land at rock bottom prices intended by the government to help the former slave population establish homes of their own after the Civil War. They opened the Bradley-Ramsay lumber mill on 2 sites, the old Goos mill and W. L. Hutchins’ oldmMount Hope mill. They built magnificent homes on Broad St., eventually bringing their families with them but never cutting ties with Michigan as their home base. Bradley-Ramsey became the largest employer in Lake Charles which, with today’s hindsight, could arguably have had as detrimental an effect on Louisiana as beneficial. Back then, though, running out of forest was inconceivable, and reforestation wasn’t a twinkle in anyone’s eye yet. The main ‘twinkle’ in Louisiana’s ‘eye’ after being financially ruined by the Civil War was its desperation for an infusion of cash, industry and entrepreneurship from out-of-state investors. Men like J.B. Watkins fit the bill, actively promoting real estate development, agricultural business, and infrastructure that left Louisiana much better than he’d found it. Nason and Ramsey, not so much.

The out-of-state lumber industry was a rapacious business that travelled around the country turning millions of acres of ancient forests into barren stump-scapes, sending profits back to the company’s home state, in Bradley-Ramsay’s case, Michigan. They patronized Lake Charles businesses as little as possible, instead building company towns with company-owned stores, investing nothing in Louisiana businesses that would only compete with their own. When the forest ran out after one or two decades, they abandoned the community for the next location, taking the community’s jobs and means of support with them. “Cut out and get out” was their way, having provided nothing in return for the forests it stripped bare except the wages paid to do the stripping. Many of the company towns rotted so thoroughly into the ground that no sign of them remains.

When Bradley-Ramsay ‘got out’ after 20 years, selling to a Kansas firm in 1906, the chief executives did leave their magnificent showcase homes behind, up and down Broad St, which the Champagnes saw the following year. Its executives, now elderly and retiring back home to Michigan or sunny California, sold their homes to the local mill owners and businessmen, wealthy grandchildren of the founding pioneers. They gave these homes a 2nd life, but also a new interconnectedness since the new families, whose kids ran in and out of each other’s homes, were in-laws in one way or another. In 1907, the Champagnes were looking at a neighborhood that had completely changed hands the year before.

~~~ Ramsey-Miller house and the Miller/Lock story ~~~

Across the street from Newton North’s house was the home of William Ramsay, chief executive of the Bradley-Ramsay lumber mill.

One of Bradley-Ramsay’s major contracts was with the government, making railroad ties and ship decking for the navy and merchant marine. I’m sure Roosevelt (Tisoleil’s older brother), a merchant mariner all his life, never knew that the decks of the ships he sailed to all corners of the globe in were built of yellow Calcasieu long-leaf pine from back home.

The Champagnes would probably not have ever known old W E Ramsay or his family unless they saw him and his furniture moving out of the house, bound for the sunny climes of Los Angeles. (And he went in style; he sold his stock in the company and made $2,500,000. I don’t know if those were 1906 dollars or modern dollars, but still…)

If the Ramsays had already left, the Champagnes may have seen the family of Mathilde Miller, a wealthy widow of 54, settling in with her teenage sons Albert,18, Edgar 15, and Ernest 14. Kid brothers of 3 married sisters and adored uncles to their 6 kids, every one of ’em girls, they were probably used to the testosterone level of the house getting a good run for its money.

Carmen would get to know Edgar in a few years being bank tellers together at the Calcasieu National Bank.

Mathilda, originally from Denmark’s Foehr Islands in the North Sea, came to Lake Charles in 1872 when she was 19 and married a Swedish immigrant who worked his way from being a laborer to a wealthy mill owner in Westlake, opposite the lake from Lake Charles. When he was 54, in Texas visiting a health resort, he was killed in the deadly Galveston Hurricane of 1900. Soon after, his junior partners Rudolph Krause and William Managhan stepped up to take over the company. Small world. Tisoleil grew up next door to the Krauses, and their youngest, Karl, was one of her best friends. And Managan’s oldest son W H, Jr, who was 12 when the Champagnes arrived, would grow up to marry a well-educated pianist from Missouri and bring her home. Mrs. Managan took special interest in Tisoleil’s piano studies. and was instrumental in finding funds toward a scholarship for her to go to the Conservatory of Music in New Orleans.

Anyway, the Widow Miller bought the house from Ramsey and moved from Westlake into town with her 3 teenage sons. Some time later, she remodeled the building in much the same manner that Mrs Julie Muller of Muller’s dept. store remodeled Maude Reid’s childhood home at 511 Hodges (see previous post), replacing the delicate Eastlake balconies with massive Lake Charles-styled box columns, which is how the house appears today.

At first, I didn’t give much thought to the absence of Mathilda’s eldest girl Mamie from this informal family shot, or Mamie’s youngest daughter Selma, when the older two, Irma and Elaine, are present. But now I think there’s a sad reason for that, which may in turn have had some influence on Mathilda’s decision to buy a bigger house. Granted, that’s when Ramsay chose to sell his house. But the 1910 census shows that Mathilda had taken in the older 2 of Mamie’s 3 girls (15 & 13), and the youngest one (11) had gone to live with her other set of grandparents a block away, her father’s parents, Capt. George and Ellen Goos Lock.

The girls were separated?

I couldn’t find either parent in the 1910 census, but Mamie’s death certificate and subsequent succession had a lot of information in them. Mamie Miller Lock died in July of 1914 in Moody’s Sanatarium in San Antonio of ‘nervous prostration’, with contributing factors (longer term) also listed as nervous prostration. She was divorced and had been living there for 4 years, since 1910, but her succession states that as far back as 1902, when the girls were only 3, 5, & 7, Fred G Lock had asked to be appointed curator to his wife Mamie by virtue of a judgment of interdiction, meaning Mamie was no longer able to manage her affairs or her family’s. She was 29 and Fred 30, and this must have made for a great deal of pain in their marriage. The last I could find of Mamie alive was in a family portrait, around 1906, on the front lawn of her in-laws down the block, the Locks, where her youngest would later live. Could Mathilda Miller have seen the divorce coming and wanted a bigger house in case her daughter and granddaughters moved back in with her?

Wherever the girls’ father was for the 1910 census, December of 1913 found him at the far west end of Canada, in Vancouver, getting remarried. He returned to Lake Charles and built his young new wife a fine home a block further down Broad from the homes of his brother and his parents. Irma, the oldest, had gone to live with her father and new wife by 1915, but that may have been because Mathilda had already planned to sell her house and buy a 1-story place across the street between George Lock Jr and Sr that was coming up for sale. By 1917 though, Mathilda Miller now in her new place across the street, Irma, now 22, had left to join Selma, 18, at Capt George and Ellen Lock’s home. I think the informal family shot at Mathilda’s home was taken near the time Mamie was institutionalized in Texas, while Irma and Elaine were living there, looking much as they did when the Champagnes walked by a couple years earlier. I also think it’s possible that their father’s remarriage could have been the tipping point for Mamie, because 7 months later she was dead at 41.

~~~

Back to the Champagnes on their first Sunday walk after church. (Please!) If they’d gotten to the corner and turned around to take one last look at the Ramsay-Miller house, the block would’ve looked like the following shot, taken 2 years before.

Caption by Maude Reid, with edits. “The William Ramsay home on the left, bought by Mathilda Miller around 1907, and beyond that, the turreted home of dentist Dr. Anderson. Across the street – the cottage with the dormer windows – is the old Lem Dees home and beyond that is the home of the Michigan banker Newton North. The house at the extreme right, across from the Ramsay home, belonged to Leon Viterbo, a rice industry executive from Istanbul, Turkey.” (close quotes, sorta, with apologies to Miss Maude for a few corrections)

Continuing on across Ford St, they’d have passed the little wooden Presbyterian church on their right. And just for the sake of completeness, I should include the home of N. D. Pope, which was 2 doors back from the church, on Ford.

Pope was the only one of Bradley-Ramsay’s Michigan executives who didn’t build his home right on Broad St. Pope was also the only one to stay in Lake Charles past the 1906 sale of the Bradley-Ramsay company, perhaps because he had branched out as president of Hodge Fence Co. Or maybe it was because his only child died in Lake Charles in 1900 when she was 18, after being sick for several weeks, and they could not bare to leave her. Eventually, though, leave her they did, in 1924, moving to Oregon… when he would’ve been in his 80s?! Why would anybody that age choose to make an exhausting move across the country?

Rounding out the 4th of 4 homes that made the intersection of Broad and Ford a Bradley-Ramsay residential enclave is the home of Robert H. Nason, the first of the Michigan men to come check out Louisiana, forming a lumber company in 1881 that he soon merged into Bradley-Ramsay. He built his fine home in 1887 and split his time between his home in Michigan with his family in the summers, and his house at 705 Broad St in Lake Charles over winter.

Caption by Maude Reid: “R.H. Nason who came to Lake Charles in the early 80’s from Michigan. Built several fine homes and then returned to Michigan. Bought the entire square bounded by Hodges, Mill, Moss and Division and contributed his name to a rambling boarding house on the square – ‘Nason Villa.'”   

He bought that block from Dr Abram Moss who’d built a large Queen Anne house in the center with a 3-story tower topped by a mansard roof. You saw it in J Euclide’s first walk to the S-P freight depot. Though the block became known as Nason Villa, Nason never lived there. And though the boarding house became known as Hayes House, Moss had lost his first wife, maiden name Hayes, and remarried by the time he moved to Lake Charles and built the house. Its origins aside, its back door was directly facing the Moss St home my Tisoleil would grow up in. By the time she was there, her best friend Bernard Levy’s house had been built across the street, directly in the line of sight to the Hayes boarding house, but she’d have seen it from everywhere else but her front door, though she’d have see its turret above the Levy’s roof from there, too.

Back to his Broad St house, though. Nason, who turned 70 in 1901, may have retired, rejoined his family in Michigan, and sold his home in Lake Charles before the dissolution of the mill. It may have been the family of F. E. Newcombe, an Englishman and lumber exporter with 3 boys around Tisoleil’s age, in the house when the Champagnes took their Sunday stroll down Broad. But they only stayed a couple years, so it may have been the next owner in the house, Arthur Wachsen, at which point the home found itself in the hands of a Lake Charles pioneer family.

Mathilda Miller had married her two older daughters to grandsons of the Capt. Daniel Goos, a Lake Charles pioneer and founding father, but more importantly, a fellow Foehr Island countryman. Mamie married Ellen Goos Lock’s son Fred in 1893 and Hilma married Rosalie Goos Wachsen’s son Arthur in 1900. Like Fred’s father, Capt. George Lock, who’d been brought into the lumber shipping business by Capt. Goos, Wachsen’s father had been a Prussian ship captain for Capt. Goos based out of the Galveston side of the Goos business before he married Goos’ daughter Rosalie. Their son Arthur owned a dry goods store around Capt. George Lock’s lumber mill west of Lake Charles, Lock not only being his father’s brother-in-law by marriage to Goss daughters, but his son Fred being Wachsen’s brother-in-law by way of their marriage to the Miller girls. Confused?!

Anyway, Wachsen bought the Nason home right around the same time as his mother-in-law Mathilda Miller bought the Ramsey home catercorner from it, both taking advantage of the sudden appearance of showpiece homes on the market following the dissolution of the Bradley-Ramsay mill. He kept his Westlake store but branched out as president of a small lumber mill. When movies became a new source of entertainment, he branched out further still into the Nickelodeon movie house business. The Wachsens lived in the home until mother-in-law Mathilda Miller’s death in 1923, when they inherited her home, which was no longer the big Ramsey place. Around 1916, the widow Mathilda Miller, now 63 with all but one of her children grown and gone, had sold the cavernous Ramsey mansion and bought a smaller home 3 doors past the Wachsens, a lovely 1-story raised villa a few doors past her daughter in the old Nason home.

It had been built around 1905 by William A Guillemet, a New Orleans banker, who, 10 years later, had had to move his 4 young children and his wife Pearl, aged 41 and gravely ill, back to New Orleans so she could die at home.

The year 1918 was a fateful year for the Millers and Lake Charles. Before buying the Guillemet house, the wealthy Widow Miller had built a home for her newly-married son Edgar, possibly as a wedding present, that was a showcase Craftsman ‘airplane’ bungalow a few blocks away.

Soon after they settled in, Edgar left the bank where he’d worked with Carmen and joined his brother Albert’s car business. Albert, whose first job had been as a machinist with the MoPac railroad, must have loved machines, because by 1913, he opened one of the town’s first automobile dealerships. But 1918 saw metal and rubber going toward the war effort, and car manufacturing shift its focus from personal vehicles to military use. And then the hurricane of 1918 hit Lake Charles broadside. Mathilda’s succession from 1923 tells the tale.

Her succession, as well as a photo, refers to her having a 2nd hand Mercer, bought around 1919. Did she buy it from her son’s business? To me, the real question is why a woman of her wealth would buy a second-hand car. I’ll bet the devastating 1918 hurricane which destroyed homes and businesses all over town caused a lot of automobiles, which were still considered luxuries rather than necessities in life, to be returned by or repossessed from people who’d been ruined. Maybe she bought it from her sons to help their suffering business, one of whom had just left a good job to join his brother’s dealership. But maybe it was a second-hand car that she bought because not enough new ones were going to the civilian market. And the start of WWI earlier that year, diverting metal, rubber and able-bodied men away from pleasure driving, couldn’t have helped the Miller boys’ struggling business either. Mathilda’s succession states that by 1923, though he’s listed as part of Miller Brothers auto sales company, Edgar was backrupt, having taken out many loans from his mother.

Mathilda breathed her last in 1923, leaving her house to the Wachsens who, with their only child grown and soon to marry, decided to downsize as Mathilda had, moving into the more manageable 1-story house and renting out the big Nason place. It was during the Wachsen’s time in the house that a further remodeling extended the upper and lower bannisters around Mathilda’s side wing and extended the whole roof further out to cover a porte-cochere, driveway and side entrance.

The Wachsens’ daughter Lorraine and husband Clyde Williams took over the house after her mother Hilma died in ’49. She died in 1984, and as she had no children, a large rear wing that exists today was likely added after her time, possibly when the house became a business.

But . . . when the Champagnes strolled along the 700 block on their first Sunday, back in 1907, the Widow Mathilde was just settling into the old Ramsey house with her 14-, 17-, & 19-yr-old boys, all within flirting age of Beulah and Carmen. She may have had her Lock granddaughters, 6, 8, & 10, over for Sunday dinner, if not yet living with her, the two older girls being Presley and Roosevelt’s age. Across the street in the old Nason home, the Wachsens and their daughter Lorraine, 6, may have also been just settling into the Nason home but it’s possible the Newcombes and their 3 small boys all close to Tisoleil’s age may not have quite left yet. And down the block, the Guillemets would be in their lovely new raised villa with their 2 girls, 8 & 4, and 2 boys, 2 & 6mos., and Pearl still had 8 more years of her short life with her young family there. These families, all new to the neighborhood, in their new homes, would not have known that the Champagnes were themselves newcomers. If any of them had been out front with the children, or rocking on the front porch, perhaps with extended family waiting for a big Sunday dinner to be ready, they would likely have inclined their heads in greeting to the Champagnes, and J Euclide and Tiwazzo would certainly have done the same.

Mathilda’s succession stated that her 2nd hand Mercer was worth $1000. Mercers were considered very expensive luxury cars, costing about $2500-$3000 new in 1919 dollars, about 45k-55k in 2025 (x 18.25). She’d fall over if she saw today’s 500k Mercedes cars. Which got me wondering what it meant to be rich back then? Her succession inventory looked like this –

• Her home . . . . . . . . . . . = $7500. (x 18.25= $136,875. in 2025 dollars)
• Real estate investments = $135,125. – ($2,466,031.)
• Promissory notes . . . . . = $220,000 !! – ($4,015,000.) By 47 people!! Was she making loans as a regular business? Many were after the hurricane.
• Stocks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . = $68,100. —– ($1,242,825.)
• Household contents . . = $1879. ——- ($34,291.)
• Bank accounts (cash $74,834., Personal $383,143., Rental income $28,253., tutrix acct $607. (for Mamie’s kids?)
  • . . . . . . . . . . total = $486,837. — ($8,874,303.)
• Total = . . . . . . . . . . . . . = $918,834. — ($16,768,720.)
• ———————– Comparison ———————————————–
• William Ramsay’s 1909 estate ………………………………………….. $1,088,208. ($19,859,796.)
• Capt George Lock, 1917 …………………………………………………. $1,108,602. ($20,231.986.)
• J A Bel’s 1918 estate, heavy on stocks and bonds ……………….. $2,094,985. ($38,233,472.)
• Mathilda Miller, 1923, heavy on promissory notes and cash, …. $918,834. ($16,768,720.)

—- ︎ ︎ ︎ —-

But I digress. Another family linked by intermarriage to others along Broad St were the Mosses. C D Moss was the 2nd son of Dr. Abram Moss, who was an early pioneer teacher, real estate investor, and ‘self-taught’ doctor (of questionable training, suggests Miss Maude) from St Landry Parish. He lent his name to the street where my Tisoleil grew up. ‘Dr.’ Moss raised a large family, including his son Clement, in a house on Broad possibly on the original grant of Judge David John Reid (of hot-tempered infamy) near where the Reid family cemetery had once been, back when the town was a remote outpost not yet named.

Clement, four years after graduating from law school, would build a fine home for his young bride on the corner of Kirkman St across from Mathilda Miller’s raised villa. A respected attorney, he was also president of the Chamber of Commerce. And by the time the Champagnes walked past in 1907, they had 2 young sons, 5 & 1.

Across the street from the Moss home, at 804… Who knows if the Champagnes saw anyone in that house. Dr Stephen Carter was listed at the house for a few years, but the censuses showed that he never left his home in Cameron, down on the Gulf Coast. Maybe it served as his office in the city during the week, but big enough for the whole family if they wanted to come.

Much like the Bradley-Ramsay execs who went north during the hot summer months, hence were never found in the Lake Charles censuses, which were taken in the summer, maybe the Carters returned to their seashore home for the summer when the census caught them. And since the Carters had 2 girls and 3 boys roughly the same age as the Champagne kids in 1907, and would have 2 more by the 1910 census, who wouldn’t prefer to spend their weekends at the seashore.

~~~

The next house they passed returned them to the Moss clan.

Like CD Moss, several of his younger sisters stayed in the neighborhood after marriage. Emma got married the year after Clement to J Alton Foster, a local executive with a rice mill. And Foster built the house the year after Clement built his. Years later, Alton Foster’s path would cross with Tisoleil’s when she was a newly-graduated piano teacher and his youngest daughter Blair took lessons with her.

Actually, another of Clement’s sisters, Floy Moss, had crossed paths with Tisoleil already. Floy married Ernest Bel, and their wedding present from Ernest’s father JA Bel was a lovely home behind the grand Bel mansion, making them across-the-street neighbors to the newly-arrived Champagne family from the Bayou Teche sugar cane fields. Floy was the mother of Della Bel, whose 8th birthday party photo from 1913, taken in the Bel mansion’s front yard, had Tisoleil in, little Stella as an 8-yr-old, way at the beginning of my Lake Charles research.

A third sister, Delia, married George Lock Jr (brother-in-law to poor Mamie Miller in the Texas sanitarium) who lived on the west side of the lake around Lockport would later build a grand home in the next block. George Jr.’s parents, though, Capt. George and Elmina Goos Lock (co-grandparents with Mathilda Miller to Mamie’s 3 girls) lived in the next house the Champagnes walked past after Alton and Emma Foster’s house. It didn’t look like it had when it was first built, though.

~~~ Lock-Foster house ~~~

Built in 1895, several years after most of Bradley-Ramsay’s executives had settled into town, Chester Brown, a New York-to-Quebec-to-Michigan man, served the company as civil engineer and treasurer for only 5 years before an untimely death at 42. His widow returned to Michigan with their daughter shortly afterwards and the family left very little footprint on Lake Charles, except a lovely home. By the time the Champagnes walked past this house, perhaps getting ready to turn the corner to head for home, the house had been bought by Captain George and Elmina (Ellen) Lock. They would become the hub around which the network of Miller-Wachsen-Moss-Foster in-laws along that 3-block stretch of Broad St. would revolve. They would also become a haven for widowed elders and orphaned nieces in the family, which is probably what prompted them to build a substantial west wing onto the house.

Capt George Locke, a wealthy lumber mill owner in Lockport, west of the lake, bought the house around 1905, perhaps with retirement in mine. He was 67, his wife Elmina Goos was 58, and their son, 25 and not yet married, had recently moved in when the Champagnes walked by. But there may have been many people over for Sunday dinner.

The house during the Locks’ tenure, especially under Miss Ellen’s well-known generosity, became as known for being warm and welcoming to extended family in need as the house under Chester Brown’s ownership seemed distant and uninvolved. The 1900 and 1910 censuses tell the tale, first at their Lockport home and then in Lake Charles. Among those living with the Locks at one point or another were the Captain’s elderly widowed sister, Miss Ellen’s elderly widowed aunt, Miss Ellen’s nieces Maggie, 11, and Rosalie, 6, by her deceased sister Medora, her granddaughters Selma, 8, and later, Inez, by her son Fred, and their married daughter Letitia. Though Letitia’s listed in Kansas City, Missouri with her new husband, a chief engineer for the railroad, she is mistakenly listed twice as also being back home with her parents with their 1 year old and 4 month old. A little help down south from mom and the aunts, maybe?

There is a family portrait from around 1905, taken in the front yard, where they look much as they would’ve in 1907 when the Champagnes first walked by their house.

Capt and Ellen Lock are the white-haired couple standing left of center. Oldest son Fred is standing right of center in dark suit and vest, his hand on his wife Mamie Miller’s chair. Younger son George Jr, standing at left holding his baby daughter Delia is with wife Delia Moss(Deetsie). The woman standing at far right may be the Locks’ daughter Letitia whose husband is standing 2 to the left. Their 4 children’s ages span those of Presley, Roosevelt and little Stella Champagne, but they lived in Kansas and were only visiting. George Jr, Deetsie, and daughter Delia, who were still in Lockport west of the lake, may have been over more often, and after 1910, they too moved to town, building a house right on the opposite corner from the elder Locks. By the time the girls started school, they’d be in the same class. If the children were outside on the lawn when the Champagnes walked by, perhaps the little 2-yr-olds’ eyes met.

When the Captain died 10 years later, in 1917, and the much-beloved Miss Ellen 4 years later, the house was sold to the Locks’ neighbor to the west, J Alton Foster, who was Delia Moss Lock’s brother-in-law through her sister, his recently-deceased wife Emma Moss Foster. Alton remarried at age 47, a year before his daughter Mary Belle married, and both father and daughter had a child within the same year. Alton’s child, Blair, who was 26 years younger than his first child, one of Tisolay’s students, was one of two flowergirls at Ti and Granddaddy’s wedding.

This house is a mystery to me. I know that Dr. Charles W Loomis, an eye, ear, nose & throat specialist, was born in Ohio but grew up in Kansas. He came to Lake Charles and was settled into his practice by the time he was 28, in 1895. Eight years later, on the day before Christmas, he married a Lake Charles girl whose parents were from his home town but left when she was 2. When he was 39, they had their only child, Dorothy, who was a year younger than Tisolay. It was around that time that Loomis built their fine home in the 900 block, the only house on an otherwise empty field.

What I don’t know is why there’s no picture of it in the archives, no stories about Loomis, nothing from Maude Reid, and only bare bones mention of it in the architectural preservation records. There was mention of there being a commercial add-on that obscured the front for 60 years, but that it had recently been removed. We’re not even sure it had been built yet when the Champagnes walked by, 1904-1909 is the window. It, and they, were there when the two little girls started school, though, and they were there until Tisolay was married and gone. Did little Stella know Dorothy Loomis from school?… 12 years, just a grade apart?

In any case, they’d have likely turned up Reid to head home, their heads swimming with wonder about what the insides of those homes they’d just seen were like, and the lifestyles of such wealthy people. And they’d have likely returned home pooped from such an intense day, seeing so much, and lain down for a nap, all except Tiwazzo, and maybe Beulah, who had to get their own Sunday meal.

And life remained relatively like what I’ve imagined in these 3 hypothetical walks I just took with my grandmother’s family, for about 2 ½ years, until April 23 of 1910 when the great fire changed life as Lake Charles knew it.

~~~~~~~ cont’d on next post ~~~~~~~

================================================================================

[for my own organization: 31 screen pgs, 53 shots]

The post First Week: The Champagnes’ First Sunday, pt2 appeared first on My Old New Orleans Family.

Of the 3 things I’m sure the Champagnes would have done around town, the first being J Euclide’s walk to check in with his new job at the Southern Pacific railroad’s freight depot on Division St, and the second being Tiwazzo and the girls’ initial shopping run down Ryan St, the third, going to Mass on their first Sunday morning, is the one I’m the most sure of. And unless the weather was bad, I’m reasonably sure that they would’ve made a leisurely, enjoyable family day of it, exploring around the small town center. Right after Mass, though, J Euclide would most likely have taken the family for their morning coffee and some breakfast, since Catholics couldn’t eat before taking communion. [As I say this, I’m filled with sadness, knowing that this was probably a time of optimism for a bright and financially stable future which, sadly, did not come to pass, and that J Euclide treating the family to breakfast somewhere was a luxury that would soon disappear from the Champagne family’s list of regular activities.] But this Sunday, I’m going to imagine the family going to the new Majestic hotel for brunch, built the year before, which Lake Charles would have been all abuzz about. From there, they’d wind their way around the back of the convent school complex, checking out the library and visiting some horses in front of a local stable along the way, then around City Hall and the fire station, then around the Courthouse and the town square, and finally to the waterfront and the ferry landing. Thanks to the McNeese archives, I have photos that illustrate the whole day’s path as the Champagnes would’ve seen it, an amazing majority being within 2 or 3 years of when they’d have seen it.

But first, after rallying everyone in the house to be dressed and walking a couple blocks to Ryan, I see them catching the streetcar which had a stop at the corner of the church complex in front of the school. There’s a wonderful photo from that very year, 1907, of a streetcar stopped at that corner, which gave me the perfect starting point for my map of the proposed route the Champagnes might have taken for the day’s walk. The starting-point camera, in red in the center of the Sanborn map guide, but it signifies a streetcar, which makes me think of it as “a little red streetcar”, a nod to someone very dear to me.

Well, ‘comin’ right out the gate’, it got bizarre. The banner on front of the streetcar reads: The Diving Horses at Ball Park, Sunday 3 pm. Diving horses??? So I googled it and got a poster for a travelling circus act in Atlantic City from the early 1900s. . . . Dear God!!!

Leaving the Majestic after breakfast and turning towards the library on the opposite corner, the Champagnes would’ve seen, but not known the significance of, a small house 2 doors back behind the library, a modest house that the 1910 census says was being rented by a couple from Lithuania the Champagnes would later come to know, a couple who’d had 6 of their 7 musical children up in north Louisiana before coming to Lake Charles the year before to have their last. All of Lake Charles would come to know the Kushners, unquestionably the town’s first family of music whose further generations saw Juilliard educations, symphony positions and conductorships nationwide and abroad, and more recently, Tony Kushner’s Tony award for best play, “Angels in America”. But those newcomers back then… I wonder if, four days after the census page of April 19th listed them there, the Kushners saw the air above them filling with black smoke, walked to the corner in front of the Majestic and saw the water hose that the hotel had slung from its roof to the roof across the street, the old Knapp’s drug store with the Mansard roof. They probably couldn’t see the men on top of that roof hosing down the roofs of the little tinderbox storefronts all and the old Leveque house that stood between the Majestic and the wind-whipped, out-of-control blaze that was headed straight for them. I wonder what they felt in the split-seconds it took for their brains to grasp that they too were in the path. Did they do what so many other families were racing to do, pulling their most cherished valuables out of the house, hoping to secure one of the many horses and buggies that were moving frantic people’s possessions out of the line of fire, some of them losing everything to unscrupulous drivers they never saw again?

Turns out they didn’t have to. The Majestic did indeed succeed in keeping the fire away from it and all the little wooden buildings within their hose’s reach, and by the next year, the Kushners had built a fine home a few blocks further from the town center, across the street from Rudolph Krause, the Division St grocery store, and the only childhood home my grandmother remembers.

Caption for photo 11, by Maude Reid – “Men, horses, and a dog posing in front of the livery stable. This stable located on Bilbo street (just north of where the Catholic church now stands) was owned by Ed Ryan, a son of old ‘Pap’ Ryan – a pioneer mill man, and as interesting a personality as David Harum ever was between the pages of a book. He is shown at the extreme right of the picture with ‘Bob,’ his dog. He was an excellent judge of animals – man and beast – a great horseman, taking a great pride in his animals whom he treated with much kindness. If he ever found a stableboy abusing an animal in his stable, that boy was soon looking for another job. The stable burned in the fire of April 1910.” 

Caption by Maude Reid – “The little hand-pumper with which the volunteer firemen used to fight fires is in the front truck – so decorated with flags and bunting as to be unrecognizable. The steam engine is next, the “modern” equipment of 1906. Dick Gunn, fire chief, stands at right. The scene is on Cole St near the corner of Clarence. At this time the fire department was lodged in the brick building shown at left. The cupola of the city hall, which stood next to it, can be seen above the fire station.”

Just 2 years after the photo of Louella, Olive, and their children was taken, Olive died at age 30, and 3 years after that, Olive’s husband, steam tugboat captain Thomas Kaough, died on a hunting trip when he got lost on foot in the marshes. The 4 orphaned Kaough children ranging from 14-7 came to live with the Millers and their 3 who ranged from 8-5. I wonder how long it took the Millers to start thinking of leaving their trusty old pioneer home for a bigger place. Nine years later in 1909, when Pearl Kaough got married and brought her husband to live with the family, perhaps that’s when the Millers thought it was safe to let the new couple take over the younger Kaoughs’ care in the old Kirby St house, and get a place of their own. Cuz that same year, they did just that, on a sprawling piece of property south of Pithon Coulee in the newly-cleared area south of town.

I thought it was strange that the the following year, the 1910 census showed the Millers in their new place, but the Kaough boys still with them, but more so that they were listed twice, as also being with their sister on Kirby St. I figured that maybe it reflected a relaxed, unpressured transition, with the boys being bilocational as the spirit moved for a while. But I looked at the dates on the two census pages the two households were listed on, and that wasn’t it at all. The census page that showed Pearl, her husband, and her brothers living in the old Kirby St house was dated April 20th. Three days later, on April 23, their home in the old Miller house… actually their entire block and several surrounding blocks, were reduced to wisps of smoke and glowing cinders by the 1910 fire. Two days after the fire, the census taker – Who knows what kind of disruption this caused him – had made his way to the Millers’ neighborhood south of town, and the boys who’s fled there after the fire were counted again. Little did the Millers know that the open country feel of their new neighborhood would end within a year of them moving in, since after the fire, a building boom would turn the area south of the Pithon Coulee into the ‘hip’ new neighborhood of Margaret Place. Talk about disturbing their peace: the relocated St Charles Academy, newer and bigger, was built directly across the street from their front door.

I love rabbit-holes; they lead to discoveries and unexpected connections that can be wonderful… usually. Trying to find out why the Miller house disappeared, replaced by a new town park only 7 years after the fire?… not so much. Luella Miller was gone by then, too, re-emerging in 1917 in Houston listed as a widow, with her 3 grown children, never to return to Louisiana, and never to relinquish the identity of widow. Her husband wasn’t dead, though, and I think she knew it. Perhaps it was a face-saving mechanism. Cuz something happened within Edmond D Miller after the fire, and in the summer of 1911, the redoubtable 56-yr-old judge and attorney general totally went walkabout, packed his things, and abandoned his home and family. He must have made sure his wife knew he was leaving for good, cuz soon after, she petitioned the court to be allowed to perform the duties of his estate, saying that Miller had ‘permanently left’ his home with no legal action of separation, but also no provision for the management of his estate, which included rental properties. A year later, he did finalize a divorce, and then sailed to Japan, where he met a German woman at a friend’s party in Yokohama who’d been teaching languages to the children of foreign diplomats. When he came home, he settled in Jennings, 30 miles east of Lake Charles, where he took up his law practice again. And in 1916, the Jennings newspaper wrote unabashedly… in fact, a bit petulantly, that it and everyone was shocked to get a message from a Chicago paper, where he’d gone for a 3 week vacation, saying he had gotten married to a woman he’d met several years before in Japan, apparently having kept up correspondence. It was the first anyone had heard of her. From her ship from Japan, he had her travel to Chicago to marry him there instead of getting married among the people he knew. When she died 10 years later, he wrote to inform her good friend in Japan, also a German woman, corresponded for 2 years, then married her as well, this time in Cuba, ‘since he couldn’t get married in the U.S.’? Sounds to me like he filed court papers for a divorce but she refused to sign them, or the judge refused to grant one, which was common back then without proof of egregious fault. He knew the law: Perhaps by blatantly abandoning her, he was trying to give her clear grounds and the judge the proof he needed, except that she refused to file. When he died, the Jennings paper wrote up a long bio for his obit, with his schooling, his law practice in Lake Charles, his grown children named, but otherwise completely skipping the 28-year association with Luella Clark.

If only marriage to Edmund Miller had been the beginning and end of the tragedy in Luella’s life. It wasn’t. She and Olive were born in the middle of the Civil War to a white father with a wife and family, and a mulatto mother in the Opelousas area, the father dying in 1870 when they were 5 & 3. There is a record of his second marriage to their mother, Catherine, in the courthouse, dated 2 years before the death of his 1st wife. His succession, though, mentions nothing of a divorce from his first wife and neither provides for nor acknowledges his second family. Following his death, Catherine took the children and joined her sister’s family in moving from Opelousas to settle in Lake Charles.

We’ve met her sister’s husband before, Julien Richard, whose store Miss Maude confused for the jewelry store next door, both built and rented out by old Monsieur LaFargue on the corner. On arriving to Lake Charles, he took over the boarding house on Lake Charles’ courthouse square in the 1870s from Mrs. Bryant Hutchins when her husband’s newspaper business took them elsewhere. And we know Julien’s sister Emelie, whose husband, attorney Louis Leveque, Carmen’s future mother-in-law’s uncle, partnered with Judge D.J. Reid to start Lake Charles’ first newspaper, with Bryant Hutchins at the helm. So when Luella and Olive’s mother died in 1877 at 41, orphaning them at 12 &10, and Emelie’s husband Louis, 43, died nine months later having never had children, the widow Emelie took them in.  Finding this information was difficult and circuitous, and speaks to the legacy of shame and secrecy with which mulattos who ‘passed’ for white hid their black family lines.

For more tragedy, fast forward 3 decades after Luella is divorced and in Texas. Their son Edward died in a psychiatric hospital of ‘mania and exhaustion’ at 34, having never had a job or lived anywhere but with his mother. And their oldest daughter Fleta, after her husband finally succumbed to a long period of heart disease, died a few months after him “of a lacerated throat” – method, razor blade.

Jeez, let’s move on. And maybe let’s duplicate the map for convenience of back-and-forth-ing.

The return to the schoolhouse, seen in photo 18, and the streetcar stop in front of it brought the Champagnes full circle to the new brick school’s front yard where the streetcar had dropped them off. If they’d walked up the steps of the courthouse, then turned around to look back down Kirby St where they’d just come from, and then gone up to the top of the bell tower and done the same, they’d have seen a later version of the two photos below. Though these photos had only been taken 4 years before, much had changed. So many old wooden buildings from the early days had just recently been replaced by big brick structures… government buildings, church and school buildings, and large commercial/office complexes. What a shame that the fire was so intense that even the brick couldn’t withstand it.

With apologies to Maude Reid and her multiple captions for photos of the same places, I rearrange, and sometimes correct, bits and pieces of her information.

From the bell tower, a slight turn of the head south from Kirby St toward Ryan, and they’d have seen the Walden Hotel in what had been the United Staters Hotel 12 years before, then the complex of offices, lumber milling rooms and storage houses of the Mutersbaugh planing mill.

After seeing the view from the tower of where they’d been all morning, they’d come back down to turn into the courthouse square and head toward the lake.

The Champagnes just missed seeing the May 14th flood of 1907, with its waterline being above the end of the wharf, keeping passengers from reaching the ferry and washing millions of water hyacinths ashore.

But I’d rather imagine the family being able to enjoy their first Sunday outing in pleasant weather, visit the lake, perhaps eating a few oysters while watching the pleasure boats come and go, a freight schooner or two, and the ferry Hazel keeping its hourly schedule to and from the west side of the lake. This was a time of excitement and optimism, and the Champagnes had no idea that job losses and financial hardship were in their future. Maybe one of the older kids asked J Euclide if they could take a little ferry ride out on the lake, and he may have considered it. But finding out it was 30 minutes to Westlake and 30 minutes back, with a sleepy 2-yr old in tow, he might have deemed it an activity best saved for another Sunday.

Instead, I imagine them simply walking home, ending their first Sunday outing with a walk home by way of the grand homes and mansions of Broad St. They wouldn’t have known anything about the seafaring immigrants from the Danish Foehr Islands, seeking peace, as with other Europeans, from political or religious strife. They wouldn’t have known anything about the early American pioneers down from up north and east, sometimes taking several generations to do it, eschewing established towns in favor of the fresh pioneer experience , or the ‘Michigan Men’ lumber barons from the north whose success would find expression in the architecture of Broad St. They would simply see faces, families, on their one day to be free from work, joining together with extended family, much as they did in Cajun country, laying out long tables under the oak trees after all going to church together. Only on Broad St, the in-laws would be catching up on each others’ week on wide expansive porches with enough rockers for big gatherings, and cousins playing on the lawn in clothes that didn’t routinely touch bayou mud or farm dirt. Only in these houses, the Champagnes would see Grandmère rocking on the porch with the rest instead of sweating in the hot kitchen, because money that paid for houses such as these also paid for cooks and housekeepers to manage a gathering of several generations across several households that routinely had 7-10 children each, all while periodically bringing trays of tea or lemonade with chunks of ice out to the porch.

So when they were done exploring the shoreline, they’d turn right and head home by way of Broad St.

~~~~~~~ cont’d on next post ~~~~~~~

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[for my own organization – Church and town center – 20 screen pages, 42 shots]

The post First Week: The Champagnes’ First Sunday, pt1 appeared first on My Old New Orleans Family.

It wouldn’t have been long before Tiwazzo and the girls had a list of things they needed, sooner than later, before any further settling-in could be done, like cleaning supplies, buckets and bowls. J Euclide might have told them of the grocery, butcher shop and dry goods store they’d find in the 600 block of Ryan, but if Tiwazzo and Beulah were like me, they’d want to take stock of the whole 4-block shopping district for future purposes. Passing the point where J Euclide had turned off, the girls would have found the 700 block of Ryan to be more densely packed with storefronts and businesses, both sides of the street being a solid 2-story brick front of commercial buildings with no trees or greenery. Gone was any remnant of the block’s previous family presence and residential use.

~~~~~~~ 700 block of Ryan, Sanborn, 1909 ~~~~~~~

There was a bank, a newspaper, & a telegraph office… good to know. There were 6 clothing & dry goods stores and 2 shoe stores to take care of clothes and linens, 4 groceries & 2 bakeries to take care of food, 2 hardware stores, 2 stationery & book stores, a drug store, a furniture store, & a harness shop. (D.G.=dry goods, B&S=boots & shoes, H&S?= harnesses & saddles?)

The “Lake Charles American” newspaper was the first of several businesses in two long buildings with fancy parapets along the west side, spanning the addresses 704-720 Ryan, that would have covered anything Tiwazzo and the girls would’ve needed right off the bat; groceries, dry goods and clothes, furniture, and hardware.

A few years later, the furniture store would double its size by taking over the space of the dry goods store next door, becoming 710-712 Ryan. Soon after, though, around 1916, the furniture store moved a block up Ryan, next door to Mathilde’s men’s furnishings store, and in its place, the double-size space became a dry goods store called The Hub. J Euclide and Beulah, as well as Mathilde, would’ve met the furniture people, and it’s possible that’s where they heard about the new business that had moved into the furniture store’s old space, and that it was now hiring. Presley had graduated the year before and probably wanted a job. By 1920, the census shows that both Presley and Roosevelt have gotten jobs at The Hub.

Tiwazzo knew nothing of this and saw only the merchandise in the windows as they walked past. Something that might have caught her attention across the street was one of the most elegant stores she’d ever seen, though she may have guessed that she’d never be able to afford to shop there.

Levy’s Men’s Clothing and Furnishings was touted in a 1905 newspaper article as having fixtures and shelving of solid rosewood throughout, with periodic French plate mirrors framed in the same rosewood, all manufactured especially for Mr. Levy. The Champagne women wouldn’t know it for several years, but Mr Levy’s closest younger brother Sam’s family would be their across-the-street neighbors and good family friends, the son Bernard becoming my grandmother’s best friend all through grade school.

~~~~~~~ Intersection Ryan & Broad (700-800), west side ~~~~~~~

I had help imagining what Tiwazzo and the kids would have seen when they got to the intersection of Ryan and Broad, the heart of Lake Charles’ commercial life, and it isn’t just because there is such a wealth of shots of that intersection. There is a series of 4 photos taken professionally of each of the four corners of the town’s main intersection sometime between 1903 and 1909, most likely for promotional reasons, that the Lake Charles newspaper used in a 1912 article that, some years later, Miss Maude cut out and captioned for her scrapbooks. I’d originally wanted to present the photos in this post through their eyes, with only the information that the Champagnes would have seen on the signs in front of the stores. But there is a richness to Miss Maude’s mix of fact, humor, and humanity, as well as the collection itself, that the Champagnes never got to see, and I didn’t want you not to see it either. With every caption, she draws me into the details of each building she talks about, adding to the growing context of everything I’ve learned about my grandmother’s world.

If Tiwazzo and the girls were anything like me, they would have gone to the middle of the intersection, turning first toward the water (I love water), and then continued the turn for the full 360°, taking in the four corners of what was so clearly the town’s main intersection.

2 – Caption by Maude Reid: “Building on the corner was the Lake Charles Bank; went out of existence years ago. It is now occupied by the First National Bank. The old Chinese shop and Theall, the Tailor, were next door on Ryan street. At the right – on Broad – was the fine two-story home of Dave Bloch which was torn down in 1950. Mr. Bloch for years had a saloon on the corner where the bank stands. Before that – in the 70’s – Wm. Hutchins had ‘the Red Store’ on this corner, and his family lived in the rear. Beyond the Bloch home was the cottage where the Reinauers lived.”

Back in photo 2, barely visible in the grainy newspaper shot to the right of the Bloch house, is a big 2½ story wholesale grocer’s warehouse compound that included side buildings, a big wharf and a railroad spur serving it. Photo 4, though, a panorama shot taken from the top of the courthouse 12 years before, captured it.

Photo 4 also captured a small, boxy building to the warehouse’ right that had a bell tower but didn’t look much like a church. Since it was there in Sanborn 1903 and gone in 1909, we can’t know if the Champagnes saw it in1907 when they were making their first exploration of the Ryan St stores. The house in between the warehouse and the bell-tower-place, closer to the bottom of the shot, is the home of one of the earliest founding fathers, Jacob Ryan, but there would have been too much greenery in the way for the Champagnes to have seen it from the intersection. Further to the right, you can see the back of the Bloch house, with its 2-storey rear wing, then at far right, the old Frank house with its asymmetrical roof line.

“This picture, taken in 1912 (sic), shows the brick building that replaced the wooden store of Julius Frank. The building still is in the Frank family [in the 1930s]. In the rear, is the old Frank home. At the time the picture was taken the Frank family had moved into a large house further up Broad street. The old Stoddard home was next door, sitting far back from the street, and next to them was the home of the Solomon family. Lorena Walker lived in a small cottage between these two. On the corner can be seen dimly the outlines of the old fire hose house where for a number of years the city council met upstairs to ponder on our town affairs. The old fire bell in the tower for summoning the volunteer firemen to duty when fires occurred was also used to call the Councilmen to meetings. Later this bell was sold to Central School, and, finally, the old bell was donated to the government for scrap in the 2nd World War.” Caption by Maude Reid

Oh, and listen to this, Ti. The place with the bell tower was the old fire hose house, and the bell went to Central School after the fire house was demolished between 1903-1909. That was the school bell that called you to school until you were 14. And there’s Lorena Walker, one of W.L. Hutchins’ children. And isn’t that the silhouette of 2 schooners to the left of the fire house?

You’ve seen the Halley’s comet shot before, in the post about the Hodges St route home, but it bears repeating since this is the closest in time I can come to knowing that Tisolay had seen the same scene as in the photograph . . . during the 6-hr window that the comet was visible in Lake Charles. Newspapers all over the country talked about when the comet would appear where for weeks ahead of time, and no one who wasn’t bedridden would’ve missed it.

~~~~~~~ Intersection Ryan & Broad (700-800), east side ~~~~~~~

Caption by Maude Reid – “Building on corner is J. H. Mathieu’s Drug Store. The two-story frame building at the far right is the old Pelican Hall where so many cotillions, church fairs and big wedding receptions took place in the 90’s. One of the biggest affairs was the wedding of Rosa Reims to Sam Bendel which occurred here in orthodox Hebrew ceremony. The Daughters of the Confederacy used to hold their early meetings here, too. I particularly recall an elaborate Christmas tree party the children of the Episcopal Church had here one year – the lovely holly tree, the hundreds of wax candles aglow upon it, the strands of white popcorn and red cranberries that we children strung to decorate the tree. We had no fancy colored electric bulbs, no store-bought tinsel or gaudy glass ornaments, but we children took a delight in its magic beauty that I rarely see on the faces of our young people today. Later, this building housed the Lake Charles Press and became known as the Press Building. The American Press building now occupies the site.”

Combined captions by Maude Reid – ” In the [early 1890s] Kaufman erected the above building, later selling to Charles and Ed Martin. Penney’s store now occupies the building. The popcorn wagon shown in the picture did a thriving business there for several years.”  “Kaufman built this building to replace the long skinny wooden building he rented for his general store from J G Gray, back in the 1870s, eventually becoming one of the town’s first millionaires.”

~~~~~~~ [*aside*] Hutchins corner at Broad ~~~~~~~

Well, look who Kaufman rented his first store from . . . Ged Gray, little Mathilda’s grandfather. [One of Tisolay’s last piano students before leaving Lake Charles.]

You know what else? Remember a bit ago, Miss Maude talking about the Lake Charles bank next to David Bloch’s house, how it had previously been the site of Bloch’s saloon, and before that the home and corner store of Wm. L. Hutchins [Lorena’s dad] back in the 1870s?… how his family lived in the rear behind the store? Well, you grew up with those kids’ children. Those kids living next to their daddy’s “Red Store”?.. they were the parents of the kids you grew up with, part of the gang of Hutchins/Reid cousins who grew up, settled, and started their own families next door to you, behind you, and on both corners across the street from you. The newly widowed Capt. Wm Hutchins had brought them to the ‘old Hutchins House’ on Hodges St, a block away from you, when they were young, 30 years before y’all got there. He was still there when he died. You were only 3 and probably hadn’t spent much time yet with the children around you, but you may have seen him walking to and from your corner to visit his kids’ and Reid in-laws’ families.

I told y’all about the ‘old Hutchins house’ in the last post, The Route Home, 1907 – part 2 of 2… how the old cranky builder-turned-judge DJ Reid had never finished building it, and when his wife left him for making her live in the Mill St home that she’d hated for 30 years. He claimed that he’d been building the Hodges house as a present for her, but then out of spite, washed his hands of the half-built house and gave it to his daughter Eugenie (Jenny) and son-in-law W L Hutchins. In 1883, 2 years after Hutchins was widowed and remarried, Hutchins’ brothers-in-law finished the house for him, one of whom being Peter Bruderson, the Foehr Islander who eventually sold one of his properties to the butcher David Reims… which in turn was replaced by the brick building that briefly housed Tante Mathilde’s store.

Jeez, what a small world. Everyone knew everyone, and now I’m starting to.

We know the house the Hutchins family was in before Hodges St because Miss Maude described it lovingly, a house north of town on the river of ‘fever miasmas’, as her Aunt Jennie apparently felt about it. Miss Maude had called it charming, though… something about a yellow rose arbor off the front gallery. She knew how much it meant to her father, her Aunt Jenny’s younger brother who lived with them before he was married, because he’d met and courted her mother in that house when she was a guest recuperating from the 1-2 punch of the 1879 hurricane which destroyed her Gulf Coast home, and the typhoid epidemic that followed it.

So, if the yellow rose house on the river was the one that Hutchins left in 1883 to move to Hodges, where did the house next to the ‘Red Store’ on the corner of Broad and Ryan fall in the sequence? David Bloch, who Willy Hutchins sold the place to, didn’t immigrate from Alsace until 1875, so the corner house with the store was probably the one he sold to Bloch to go to the yellow rose house. Actually, evidence points to the corner house being the one Hutchins’ father built 20 years before, when he first moved his family to Lake Charles from Opelousas in the mid-1850s and Willy was just a boy. There’s a promotional history of Lake Charles in the 1895 directory that describes what Lake Charles looked like during the Hutchins family’s first years there, an unincorporated little outpost that barely had 2 dozen houses spread around a checkerboard of dirt paths that didn’t merit street names yet, which means that this little house at the intersection of 2 dirt paths that weren’t even named Ryan and Broad St yet, was one of the very first homes, and Hutchins one of the first pioneers.

But the census indicates nothing about a store, nor anything about anyone in the family being a merchant or storekeeper. His father, still in the family business of printing in Opelousas in 1850, had gotten a job in Lake Charles as a brickmaker by 1860, but he’d taught his boy the printing trade, which is how young Willy was working when he was 16. The earliest Sanborn map doesn’t get made until 1885, long after W L Hutchins was grown, widowed, remarried, and in his last home, but it still tells a tale. It shows the house centered on the lot, as though the idea of putting a store, or any other substantial structure, on the property hadn’t occurred to anyone yet. The store is squished awkwardly into what space there was between the house and the street corner.

I think the events of 1865 set things in motion. Hutchins returned from the Civil War and made plans to marry Eugenie(Jenny), but two weeks before the wedding, his father died. Man of the house now, William had to support his mother, younger sister and baby brother, as well as his new wife and the babies that would start coming soon. Were times as desperate as they were everywhere else during Louisiana’s destitute post-Civil War years? In Feb of 1868, he and his mother allowed his sister to marry at the very young age of 15, into the family of the town’s first lumber mill owner, Jacob Ryan, whom they’d all grown up next to, something I think is rather drastic if financial need and his sister’s security weren’t an issue. But Lake Charles was a lumber boomtown, made more so by post-war repair and rebuilding, which provided a financial buffer for the tiny settlement. How much worry was there? William might have had a good job as a printer with the Lake Charles newspaper, which his uncle had recently been hired away from Opelousas to run. Plus he’d either inherited or been able to buy investment land, because he sold a piece of it in 1869 to the Catholic church which was expanding.

In any case, the following year, in 1870, the census lists him as a merchant for the first time, and his neighbors look like the same ones as were in the 1860 census when his father was still alive. But he was not a merchant on the corner of Broad St quite yet, as Miss Maude remembered, with ‘the Red Store’ on the corner, in the 1870s and his family living in the rear’. Two blocks south, on the south side of the town square, a drawing of that block from the same year as the census shows the tiny newspaper building that had been run by his uncle until the previous year, the boarding house next to it that his aunt had been running, and then William Hutchins’ store, which may have been on his aunt’s property. Was he supporting his family with that store while building the corner store next to his home, the one Miss Maude remembered him being in during the 1870s? Given how the southern boundary of the street doesn’t line up, with the west side of Broad being a bit further north than the east side, I think he simply moved the store he’d built on the town square. They routinely moved houses, much bigger ones than this.

One of the oldest photos of Lake Charles, from 1882, shows the Hutchins home and store, at left, center, after Hutchins had sold it to Block.

It’s too bad that Miss Maude’s caption for this photo includes nearly every building but the Hutchins’. About one of them, directly across the street at right, she wrote, “The long building on the corner was the property of Ged Gray – who rented it to Leopold Kaufman . . . . The white house beyond is the home of George Ryan [husband of Hutchins’ sister], and the house still further on was that of Frank Gallagher“.

Now there’s some perspective for you. Your daddy saw the Gallagher house on his first walk to the SPRR freight depot, 25 years after this shot was taken when it was the lone remaining residence in the otherwise commercial corner of Mill and Ryan.

When Kaufman rented his store building from Ged Gray, Gray was just a young surveyor and cattleman in his early 20s, accumulating grazing land all over the marshlands of lower Calcasieu Parish. That was before someone found oil on all that land and the Grays became crazy ri h millionaires. I wonder how Kaufman’s millions stacked up against the oil fortune that eventually came to the Grays. He was little Mathilda Gray’s grandfather. Her aunt [also named Mathilda] was the one who gave you that gorgeous yellow Belgian lace handkerchief for a wedding present.

Little tidbit that amused Miss Maude. When Ged’s father died and the last of his siblings was grown and gone from the old Gray home a block down Broad from Kaufman’s store, it was Leopold Kaufman who bought it. When he was wealthy enough to build a grand mansion on the fast-becoming-prestigious Broad St address, he moved the old Gray home (in the words of Miss Maude), “not bothering to turn it about as it went across the road. So the back of the house fronts on Bilbo street.” It stayed like that, too, until it was torn down in the ’40s.

And here’s another tidbit for perspective. Imagine you’re standing at the intersection between the Hutchins and Kaufman stores in that 1882 shot, but facing south, with the Kaufman store at your left and the Hutchins home and store at your right. Just 7 years later, in 1889, Bloch’s saloon having replaced the Hutchins buildings, the block was packed, as the faded photo below shows. Gone are the yards and picket fences and trees. Not only had the railroad finally cut through the forests of SW Louisiana, opening the little town up to the major ports of both New Orleans and Houston, but the government opened up the forests for sale at $1.25 an acre, and a Kansas land investor with a vision bought 1.5 million acres of SW Louisiana forest, then advertised the potential of Lake Charles all over the country. Lumber barons from the northern states flocked to Lake Charles, and their Broad St mansions began sprouting up in the ’90s and ’00s.

But that’s a little far afield. As for Hutchins and his store, if there were financial hard times, they didn’t last. In the mid-70s, Judge Reid loaned his son-in-law the money to buy into a lumber mill on the river on the north edge of town, which Hutchins also managed. This is what prompted his father-in-law to build them a home next to the mill, overlooking the river, with a verandah where Eugenie would plant her yellow rose arbor.

I wonder how Hutchins came to be the captain of a mail boat that went back and forth to Cameron, on the Gulf coast.

No, what I wonder is why so many of my little lines of research keep bringing me back to the Hutchins/Reid clan. Hutchins’ brother-in-law Peter Bruderson’s property ends up being the site, 50 years later, of Tante Mathilde’s store. And the house that Judge Reid’s wife hated?… that’s the house that was replaced by the Bel mansion, which was where I first found you at the very beginning of my Lake Charles research, at the Bel’s garden party when you were 8. I feel like fate keeps steering me toward the Hutchins/Reid clan because of some ‘disturbance in the force’, maybe because you were supposed to have married one of them. Was there some great love that was supposed to happen, but something intervened? You never talked about dating anyone in high school, which I always thought suspicious. Hmmm… of all the older gang of Hutchins/Reid grandchildren on that corner, Earl Reid and his twin sister Audrey, the youngest, were only 2 years older than you. Actually, Earl was Hutchins’ nephew-in-law twice over; Earl’s dad being his first wife’s brother, and Earl’s mom being his second wife’s sister. How this is apropos of the Champagnes, I don’t know, but I wouldn’t want to be around when anyone told Granddaddy that destiny had meant for you to be Mrs Stella Reid.

Sorta brings to mind the image of him huffing and puffing, the day I showed Tisolay how to hop the iron spike fence at the cemetery to see him that first All Saints’ Day, when we’d gotten there too late, after closing. All the tourists, in dead silence, their cameras forgotten around their necks for once, clapped and cheered when we made it down the other side. She shook her fist up at the sky and said, “and there’s nothing you can do about it!” , but I could see him, lightning bolt in hand, fixin’ to zap my a** but good.

~~~~~~~ 800 block Ryan ~~~~~~~

Continuing down Ryan, Tiwazzo and the girls would find the 800 block even more packed. There were 2 banks, a post office, a telegraph office, 2 hotels, the Kansas City Southern railroad office, a stove store that also carried sewing machines, and 2 barbers. There were 2 big department stores, a dry goods store, 2 men’s furnishings stores and 4 tailors, as well as a millinery, a shoe maker, and 4 jewelry stores! There were 5 restaurants & cafés, a large grocery store, 2 fruit stands, a meat market, and a confectionery. Entertainment was also found in abundance on this block, in two 5¢ theaters, 2 movies theaters, 1 sporting goods store, 4 pool halls (some with cigar & tobacco shops, often above saloons), and speaking of saloons, 9 saloons… on a single block.

Look, Ti,… C.M. Braden, that’s Mary’s grandfather. [One of Tisolay’s piano students] You might have met him if he went to Mary’s recitals. If Tiwazzo bought a new stove from him, it would’ve only been a few years after this shot. I was thinking… Even if Mathilde had brought her stove with her from her old house, it’s likely that it was too small to make the jump from a 3-person household to a 10-person household, counting their boarder. Did the two families go in together for a large stove? And how about room heaters? Mathilde wouldn’t have had enough room heaters for a big 2-storey house. So it’s possible you saw Charles Braden and his store, if not in 1907, then maybe after you moved to 617, when you were 7.

You certainly would’ve met his son William at Mary’s recitals, though you probably dealt mainly with his wife. Mary’s dad became a judge, and apparently owned one of Lake Charles’ first cars. Take it away, Miss Maude…

Caption by Maude Reid – “One of the first automobiles in Lake Charles – 1910. Although automobiles were being manufactured in 1898, it was not until 1902 that we saw one on the streets of our little town. Then William Ramsay, one of the large mill owners, bought a “horseless carriage” and tried to use it – “one-bigger” Winton[?] The whole town laughed at his efforts to make it go, quoting the adage about a fool and his money, that the things were nothing but toys for rich children to play with and could never be put to any practical use, and so on. We had terrible roads then – only one or two streets in town were paved – and outside of town, in rainy weather, they were almost impassable. . . . In a short while, J.A.Landry bought an electric car [Carmen’s future grandfather-in-law]. Then a few other daring souls followed with the purchase of a “horseless carriage” and dared the comments of the town by driving them – but only on sunny days when the streets were dry. . . . Typical of those early cars is the one pictured above, It was purchased in 1910 by C M Braden from a manufacturer in Indianapolis and was a Waverly electric carriage. Mr Braden invented the front seat that you see in front of the driver. The driver is his son William, now Judge Braden, and the girl next to him is Laura Dees, next to her is Carrie Freck?, and on the sidewalk are Mr & Mrs Braden. – In front of the Braden house northeast corner of Cole and Clarence Streets.”

Turns out, the Bradens lived across the street from William L Hutchins’ cousin Mary, the daughter of his uncle Bryant Hutchins, the newspaper printer, which means the photo of Judge Braden in his car was taken from in front of Mary Hutchins Kaough’s home. It was her husband Joseph’s kid brother Tom, an experienced steamship captain, who died of exposure at the age of 43 on a hunting party on foot out in the marsh, having gotten lost. His friends didn’t find his body for days. His widow died only 3 years later, leaving 4 children that were taken in by her sister’s family, that of the esteemed judge and attorney general Edmund Miller. That’s a story unto itself and will come up in the next post.

6 – 818 Ryan, Caption by Maude Reid: “Crager Bros. dry goods store, built in 1890 … was the first brick store erected in town. Built in 1890. Mr. Louis Crager married the sister of Mrs. Sol Bloch, a Miss Loeb of New Orleans. The store was where the Moss building is now. The firm was composed of Harry and H. A. Crager of Orange, Texas, and Louis Crager of Lake Charles. And they were shrewd business men. This was the first store to give you change in pennies. Before that if your bill came to $1.59 the store keeper kept the penny change. The local paper referred to them as ‘old New York City dry goods clerks.’ This store was considered the best and biggest between New Orleans and Houston in 1895. Doing a retail business aggregating $100,000 a year.” – McNeese archives

7 – Crager dry goods store, 1892 – Caption by Maude Reid: “… Notice the display of goods – shoes in the foreground, surmounted by straw hats, neckties hanging from open umbrellas suspended from the ceiling. Closed umbrellas hanging at the left. Other articles of wearing apparel on lines strung across the shop in the rear. This was the swankiest store in our town.“

[* aside*] Louis Crager died in 1899, and a few years later, Lithuanians Ezrael Kushner and his wife took over the old Crager building and opened a dry goods and clothing store, The People’s Store, which remained there until Tisolay went off to college. Some months after the fire of 1910, the Kushners built a fine home for their 7 children, all the same ages as the Champagne kids, 3 doors down from 617 Moss where the Champagnes were soon to move. The Kushner kids had a boatload of musical talent between them, and they were all over the archives, as well as the recital programs in Tisolay’s scrap book. A 1911 shot of the high school orchestra shows Maurice in the first violinist’s position, the most prestigious in the orchestra, Abe playing the clarinet, and Louis on the cornet. Sam, Roosevelt’s age and not yet in high school, played the cello. Music was not their only art, either. One of Ezrael’s grandsons went to Juilliard in New York, and his son Tony wrote the Tony-award-winning play Angels in America. The youngest Kushner daughter Florence, a few months older than Tisolay, played the violin and went to the New Orleans Conservatory of Music with her, and Ti had a photo portrait of Florence in with all her old photos.

It was strange; several times over the years, I’d forget who she was and ask again if the girl had been a friend of hers. She always said no (though not with any irritability in her voice), that she was a girl who went to the Conservatory with her. There’s no way, though, that growing up 3 doors from each other, and being musicians, they woudn’t have had the chance to be friends if they’d wanted to. Maybe it was simply a personality thing, and they just weren’t drawn to each other. But then, maybe Tisolay was intimidated by how much more musically advanced everyone in that family was. Maybe without meaning to, Florence made Ti feel like a country bumpkin, out of her league, which was true, truth be told.

This never occurred to me until after Granddaddy died, when I found that he’d kept all of her letters to him during their courtship years in a trunk in the attic. She had kept all of his as well, but hadn’t looked at them for 50 years, so I read them all to her, in order … his, hers, his, hers, like the 4-year-long conversation that they were. One of the main themes of the later ones was about Tisolay’s refusal to marry him because she said the call to be a performing concert pianist was so much stronger than the call to marriage. It was clear that her great affection and respect for him simply didn’t equal the passionate love he felt for her. One of the letters to him wasn’t from her, though, but from her piano teacher, a performing concert pianist herself who taught for periods in between her travels across her performing circuit. She had become a dear family friend, and her letter was in response to an anguished letter Granddaddy had written her bemoaning the fact that Ti refused to marry him, and he didn’t understand her using the piano as the excuse. Madame Schaffner was plainly in his camp on this matter, and admitted to him that Tisolay had started lessons too late, and while she may have wanted it with all her heart, she simply would never have the ‘chops’ as a concert pianist. As a pianist myself, I know that it’s true. Her repertoire had never reached the level of difficulty required. I think half the town’s support of her and her music, paying her tuition and board at the Conservatory, was just because of how adorable she was and how much she loved playing for them.

I’m sorry, my precious girl, but it’s true. It occurs to me now how anguishing it must have been to you when you first realized this, and for the people who loved you and didn’t have the heart to tell you. Strange. Why don’t I remember feeling anguish for you when I first read you that letter? I wasn’t yet 30. Was I really that clueless? I’m so sorry, about so many things I never thought to ask you about… not about facts, but about your feelings about them. (But then, when I did, you’d never tell me). I adored your music, you know that, and you know that learning several of your pieces so I could ‘keep hearing you’ brought me comfort after you were gone. Still do. But it’s true.

What about the others, though? Carmen was Abraham’s age; did they not share any flirtation, even just meeting each other at the grocery store across from the Kushner home? And Morris and Sam were Presley and Roosevelt’s age. Who knows; they may well have been friends. But looking at Presley and Roosevelt’s paths in life, compared with the Kushners’, it makes me wonder if there weren’t a cultural divide there, too, and not just the Jewish-Catholic thing. Karl and Bernard were Jewish too; that didn’t stop y’all from being best friends. I’ve sometimes wondered if your description of your father as sweet and gentle weren’t somehow ‘code’ for passive and unambitious. Well, Presley was content to be a salesman at a clothing store all his life, never marrying, living with his mother until she died, then moving back in with Aunt Mathilde and Mildred in the house he’d grown up in. Roosevelt as well, never marrying, joining the Merchant Marine after his father died. So it’s not surprising that the Jewish immigrant culture could have seemed a world apart for the mild-mannered Champagnes. The immigrant generation, so often coming from a modest background, encourages their 1st-generation-American children to excel at education, intellectual pursuits, the sciences and the arts. The 3 oldest Kushner boys were a doctor, a jeweler and an optometrist, then Ezrael left the store and started a lumber planing mill, and his younger children joined that business. Florence stayed with her music and taught violin.

Maybe I’m reading too much into her stating that they were not friends and it’s a non-story. Ah, well, another mystery destined to remain so.

~~~~~~~

Back to Tiwazzo and the girls’ exploration of the Ryan St stores. We have to remember that they knew nothing of such little histories we’ve learned from Maude Reid’s captions. They simply made note of what stores and businesses had signs to identify themselves.

11 – Caption by Maude Reid – “The Palace Grocery is just above. Crager Bros. store to the extreme right. The wooden building at the extreme left is that of the grocery of Julien Richard whose family lived upstairs. Later, Hollins and Trepagnier occupied the downstairs with a jewelry store.”  [*Correction – Miss Maude’s a bit off. Julian Richard’s grocery store was a nearly-identical 2-storey wood-frame storefront adjacent to the left of Trepagnier’s jewelry store.] – McNeese archives

When Tiwazzo and the girls walked past the storefronts in the beautiful Commercial bldg, they wouldn’t have had much interest in the Arcade Pool Hall, or much use for the Kansas City Southern railroad office. But they might have perused the posters of coming attractions at the Imperial Theater, and certainly would have taken note of the Palace Grocery store, one of the biggest and longest-running groceries in town. They may have looked up to notice the lovely sunburst parapet, Eastlake, somewhat reminiscent of the delicate doorframe woodwork of the early Reid home on Hodges that Miss Maude didn’t like, favoring Mrs. Muller’s big boxy Lake Charles-style columns. But they would have seen no significance in the long row of 23 second floor office windows below it. They didn’t know that in 10 years’ time, in 1917, after Mathilde’s men’s furnishings store failed after only 3 or 4 years and left J Euclide without a job, he would be working behind one of those windows as an insurance agent for Life Ins. of Virginia. Perhaps the coming of WWI had an effect on sales in a men’s furnishings store, and perhaps insurance companies’ war exclusion clauses affected policy sales as well, but by 1920, J Euclide had changed jobs again, working in sales at a dry goods store, while his 2 boys were at The Hub.

So much would change for the family in the 10 years between 1907 and 1917.

12 – Before refrigeration, grocery stores usually only handled dry foods in boxes, bags or barrels, or things preserved in cans or bottles. People often got their vegetables and fruit straight off the farmer’s wagon which clop-clopped its way every morning through the neighborhoods, calling out his wares to announce his approach. But this grocery offered produce to their shoppers and the chance for a farmer to drop off his whole wagonload at one time, costing a bit of his profits but saving greatly on time. If those cases at left gave the shopper the chance to skip the bakery as well, this could explain the Palace Grocery’s longevity.

13 – Caption by Maude Reid: “Headed by the First Regiment Band of Lake Charles, a parade of women and children, hundreds of them, marched down Ryan street waving flags and carrying transparencies with mottoes urging voters (men only, then) to vote out saloons in the town. This parade took place the day before a parish vote was taken on the liquor question for Calcasieu … Even the sisters from the local convent marched in the parade – for the first time – heading a group of little girls with banners asking that the voters ‘Protect Our Homes’ and ‘Vote for Us.'”

Hollins & Trepagnier’s jewelry store later became a butcher shop, and by 1909, a millinery store. Meat market or ladies’ hat store, the photo shows that in 1908, the building saw a parade that was very likely also seen by the Champagne family. The building was a bit worse for wear, though, its side wall chopped up with doors moved and its bannister missing. And a dead tree seems to back up a caption from Miss Maude elsewhere that said a fire took out the wooden corner buildings. Besides Julien Richard’s store, old Madame Paul Gascon LaFargue’s home and grocery store on the corner are also gone. Lucky jewelry store.

Because of this shot being from June of ’08, a year or less after the Champagnes’ arrival, I felt reasonably comfortable opening the 800-block section of this post with the 1909 Sanborn map detail that showed the corner as an empty lot. But now I’m not so sure that’s what Tiwazzo and the girls first saw as they came to the end of that block. It took a tiny background corner of a photo of the newly-opened Majestic Hotel from 1906 to make me question whether maybe the LaFargue compound of buildings were still there when the Champagnes arrived in 1907. (Why is this important? It’s not, really, but these rabbit holes lead to such interesting tangents.) Several photos of the 900 block of Ryan gave me glimpses of the LaFargues’ corner, and I looked further into who the LaFargues were, hoping to pinpoint just when these buildings came down.

14 – Caption by Maude Reid “A trade parade in 1895, Ryan St, J. V. Richard’s grocery store at right; Madame Paul Gascon’s general store on the corner, … Meyer’s drug store on the opposite corner [which by 1907 had become Eddy Bros dry goods], and the Williams Opera House. … One of the horse-drawn floats features a flag of the New Orleans Brewing Association.”  

LaFargue’s corner store had a cistern fed by a pipe coming from the roof gutter (y’all know I love cisterns). It probably served both the store and the home, seen to the right of the store. Its smaller roofline is faintly visible, and seemingly on top of it (but actually on Jerry O’Brien’s 2nd-floor verandah next door), people are gathered at the O’Brien home above his furniture store to watch the parade. The 2-storey squared shadow that looms as a backdrop to the O’Brien porch is the Rock Hardware store. Tiwazzo and the girls will see the O’Brien place and Rock Hardware, and maybe the tiny LaFargue home when they reach the intersection of Pujo St.

~~~~~~~ intersection Ryan at Pujo, west side ~~~~~~~

Two photographs and a painting illustrate the changes of the first two blocks of Pujo St: the first from 1882 when the little lumber milling outpost seemed barely aware of the significance of the railroad having penetrated the surrounding forest just two years before. A watercolor from 8 years later, in 1890, seems little changed, with no sign of the public wharf and market that would come. But by the time the 1895 panorama was shot, a full 360° taken from atop the new courthouse, Lake Charles was fast becoming a boomtown. Two houses serve as common factors that help to orient the 1882 shot, the 1895 panorama, and the 1909 Sanborn map to each other. Sanborn, above, shows the old home of Dr Erasmus Lyons, first licensed doctor in Calcasieu parish, next to camera 8, and the home of Mr Nettlerode, a billiard hall owner from Cöpenhagen, above camera 9. (Don’t feel like you have to follow this, unless you are really into plotting things on maps.)

1 – The street itself is glimpsed between two whited-out areas along the bottom which represent structures that were no longer there by the time the Champagnes arrived in 1907, having been replaced by two 2-storey brick storefronts. To the left of these whited-out areas is the “T”-shaped, 1½ storey cottage of Dr. Lyons, and above that at far left, facing the lake, the large 2-storey Nettlerode home. (Remember these two houses; they’ll be landmarks to orient you between photos later.) Continuing right from the Nettlerode home, across from Dr Lyons, is the small, 2-story house with verandahs where two young school teacher sisters taught school downstairs and lived with their mother upstairs. Behind the school is the 1½ storey home of Captain Hansen, and beyond it, the wharf and mill of Jacob Ryan, the first lumber mill in Lake Charles, can be seen in front of his home (with chimney and wrap-around 1st floor verandah). To the right of the Ryan homestead is the dirt path that will become Broad St, visible at far right. The two houses at lower right are, left, the small home of Jerry OBrien which will later be rented to the nuns as ‘the first convent’ while the real convent was being built. Next to it is O’Brien’s furniture shop with the bell-shaped façade. You will see this house later as a 2-story because O’Brien built the second floor for his family’s home the same year as this photo so they could leave the tiny cottage, which was then rented to the nuns. The upstairs balcony of that raised home would be where the family watched the 1895 trade parade from, in the previous photo. The Champagnes would know this house as a boardinghouse for many years, but not in its position in the photo. Around the time they got to Lake Chrles, it was moved closer to the lake, a few doors on the other side of the nuns’ cottage.

2 – 1890 painting – I’ve shown you this painting before. It’s problematic. You won’t find the Lyons or Nettlerode homes in it, since Lyon’s home is set too far back behind Meyer’s drug store, at left (which will be the big brick Eddy’s Dry Goods store), and the Nettlerode’s home is hidden behind a tree at the far end of the right side of Pujo. And it was likely painted from a faulty memory. Miss Maude identifies, correctly, the corner house at right as “Paul LaFargue’s Bar” (perhaps the store’s nocturnal identity), and the 2-story building a couple doors down as the O’Brien home and furniture shop, which had been the 1-story shop with the bell-shaped parapet in photo 1. But the red cottage in the middle is wrong. That’s the convent, which should be on the far side of the O’Brien place, set too far back from the street to be seen. The nuns are even painted in, though they would have long been in their new convent next to the church. What should be there is the tiny home of the LaFargues, whose roofline was aligned with the roof of their store next door. By the time the Champagnes stood in this spot looking at the lake, the left side of the steet would be all brick, 2-story stores.

What interests me, though, after looking at McNeese’s hundreds of beautiful old sepia and black-and-white photos, is that it reminds me of the world of color that was the reality of those living amidst a lush green forest, on the edge of a blue lake… not sepia. (The lake wasn’t actually blue; the sky it reflected was blue. But it was, and still is, a clear, clean green since, contrary to what many think, there is no tributary that links the clear Calcasieu River to the muddy Mississippi River Delta system.

Aw, Ti… now, ya’ see? This is what comes of reading and re-reading Miss Maude’s every caption, regardless of whether the photo is relevant to you or not. I just ran across a shot I’ve long ignored of that post office behind Meyer’s, which had a zoo in its back yard or some such, because it was long gone by the time y’all arrived and had nothing to do with us. But Miss Maude’s caption just said, “Mr. Dennis Foster was the postmaster… appointed March 1890 [the same year as the above painting]. The Fosters were then living in the old Nettlerode home, a large rambling building that stood on the north-east corner of Pujo and Front streets”. Young J Alton Foster, Blair’s dad, would’ve been 11 years old. He would be married, widowed, and remarried by the time he sent Blair to you for lessons. He’ll forever be a debonair-looking 52 in the portrait of your wedding breakfast party, just like Blair and Betty Bird will forever be the two flowergirls sitting in the grass in front of the table.

3 – Most of these structures looked much the same 12 years later when the Champagne women were taking their first walk to check out the Ryan St stores. At far right, three 2-storey brick buildings, seen from the rear, are (right to left) Rock Hardware, Loree Grocery, and a vaudeville theater. Left of them is the sloped roof of the Lyons home. The Pujo St wharf and ferry landing are at the top left, and the old Market Hall, with its bell tower, now obstructs what had been the Nettlerodes’ (now the Fosters’) lakefront view.

Again, I have to remind myself that Tiwazzo and the girls knew nothing of the history of Lake Charles or its citizens, or its buildings. All they knew was what they could read on the shop signs. Standing at the interection looking toward the lake, Eddy Bros dry goods would certainly be worth remembering, though they’d passed several dry goods stores already. Past Eddie’s were the 3 new brick 2-story storefronts… Rock Hardware, Loree Grocery, and a vaudeville theater, all worthy of note. If the old LaFargue’s corner had not burned yet, they’d have seen a chinese laundry and a saloon in their old home and store, sold after the 1901 death of the Widow LaFargue. The old O’Brien building, moved before the fire, would have been a restaurant with a fruit store in the old carpentry workshop, or a boardinghouse. But the rest of the street to the ferry landing, on both sides, were residences.

6 – 213 Pujo, ca.1914 – Caption by Maude Reid: “The First Convent in Lake Charles. ‘The Little Chateau,’ as the Sisters called it. This picture was taken just before the building was torn down. In 1882, six sisters from the Holy Cross Convent in New Orleans came to Lake Charles at the request of Father Kelly, the Catholic priest, to investigate conditions here with a view to establishing a school and convent…”
The O’Brien building, which would originally have been off the right edge of the photo, can now be seen at far left, where it was moved after O’Brien’s death and the sale of the property. Regardless of whether the Champagnes ever saw it in its original location, they lived for two decades knowing the old O’Brien house, which was then a boardinghouse, and the old convent, too.

7 – 215 Pujo, ca.1890, Jerry O’Brien’s building after a 2nd story had been added for the family home, around the same time as the painting in photo 2.

Caption by Maude Reid – “Mr. O’Brien had a furniture store and cabinet making shop on the first floor and the family lived upstairs. To the right can be seen a bit of the tiny cottage that was the home of Madame Paul “Gascon” LaFargue, whose store was on the corner now occupied by the Calcasieu Marine Bank. The men of the family are shown downstairs, the women are on the upstairs gallery. Notice Mrs. O’Brien with the feather duster; the photographer came when house cleaning was going on. Notice, too, the typical, long skirted, slatted French sunbonnet on the lady at the left. These were worn by ladies desirous of protecting complexion.”

8 – Pujo St ferry landing and the old Market Hall. I love the “Sunday in the Park With George” feel of this shot, mostly due to the cyclist in the grass, one foot on the pedal, leaning toward his friend, but his head turned toward the coming parade. There’s a dog elsewhere in the grass, and several baby carriages as well. Miss Maude liked this photo, too, and captioned it several times, each with small differences, and one big contradiction.

Caption #1: “Arrival of a Mardi Gras parade, Feb.1895 – The King arrived with his retinue on his royal barge, the Hazel, and landing at the foot of Pujo street, marched up Ryan, Lawrence, Kirkman and down Kirby to Ryan street again, headed by our local band and followed by promiscuous maskers. The town was doing on a small scale the same celebration that New Orleans does so grandly each Mardi Gras day. The building at the right is the City Market erected in 1894 by F.W. Jolet and F. Gueble. The Mardi Gras parade ended that night with a ball upstairs over the market in the big hall where so many dances took place.”

. . . . or . . . . Caption #2: “The Old Market Hall – market downstairs owned by Joliet and Gueble – and hall for dancing upstairs. It stood at the foot of Pujo St at the ferry landing. Many fairs, “germans” , and musicales were given here for the benefit of our church in the ’90s. The picture taken in 1892 shows a grand Columbus Day celebration. Dr A. J. Perkins was King of the ball that followed.”

You be the judge, but there are no Mardi Gras costumes, the parading horsemen have powdered wigs and velvet breeches on, the horsewomen fancy gowns, and I think I see a Spanish conquistadore’s helmet and a Christian cross on the saddle blanket of the first horseman.

9 – “This building near the old ferry landing was a well-known spot in the early 1900’s. Upstairs – one large room – balls were given, ‘germans’ – they were called; church bazaars held and so on. Downstairs, originally a market place for Jolet and Gueble, eventually became a wagon shop – as shown. The steamer, ‘Hazel’ can be seen by the wharf at the foot of Pujo St.”  Caption by Maude Reid

If any of the Champagne girls were sharp-eyed, they may have seen, all the way at the end of the ferry landing pier, the sign of an oyster and fish market and thought that that was worth a quick walk down to the water. And if they did, they’d have noticed, north of the Nettlerode/Foster home, two old homes, one belonging to the old founding father, Jacob Ryan, who owned the first lumber mill on the lake back when there were only a couple of houses cut from the forest that surrounded the lake.

13 – From left to right, the Elite Lunch Room, the Calcasieu Nat’l Bank, the recently-built Majestic Hotel further down Pujo, and the edge of Von Phul’s drug store across Pujo are all on the east side of Ryan. In the foreground at far right is the side of Eddy Bros.’ store. The empty corner at left is where the old Lafargue home and store were before they burned down. The O’Briens’ 2-storey building has been moved toward the lake, to the opposite side of the old convent directly to the left of this photographer.

~~~~~~~ intersection Ryan at Pujo, east side ~~~~~~~

3 – It was the lower left corner of the Majestic Hotel shot that got me questioning whether the LaFargue compound or an empty corner lot greeted the Champagne girls as they passed by. Barely visible is the double verandah of the O’Brien house and the LaFargue store, as well as a mysterious bell tower that is not on any map and is too far to the right to be the Old Market Hall.

Given the bank, hotel and offices on that block of Pujo, it would be understandable if Tiwazzo and the girls saw no shopping opportunities to tempt them off of Ryan, except for one sign . . . OK Second Hand Furniture. The store was an interesting enough building, and I would’ve gone to look for that reason alone. In fact, there was no other building like it in Lake Charles that I know of, a store with Queen Anne ornamentation usually reserved for grand mansions.

4 – Knapp’s had a mansard roof of different-colored shingles set in a geometric pattern and cut through on all four sides by many slender dormer windows, the front and center one fleshed out into a full turret with a raised mansard roof of its own. Across the upper edges of the roof, dormers and turret was beautiful iron grillwork, and along the bottom edge ran a row of Italianate denticulates (like teeth…’dental‘). Beneath the turret was an arched entrance to an enclosed staircase that bisected a wide expanse of store windows set into elegant millwork that continued in the Italianate style. The building had originally been Knapp’s drug store on the corner facing Ryan St, as pictured, before the brick Von Phul bldg replaced it. It was the most beautiful store in Lake Charles and much beloved by Miss Maude who captioned each of the several shots taken of it.

5 – Knapp’s was sold to the Meyer brothers, both doctors in Thibodeaux, and managed by Von Phul. The city had built new brick curbs and had installed telephone poles and wires. And the building had opened the corner window into a door, rented out offices to two different real estate brokers and rental agents and a public telephone station, and covered the exterior with advertisements. “Myer’s Sarsaparilla, Best Blood Medicine”… “Pure Drugs & Medicines” (the word Pure painted over what used to say W. A. Knapp’s) … skinny “Dr Meyer’s Emulsion” signs put sideways up the column bases.

Given such a presence in the archives, Knapp’s was only on the corner of Ryan and Pujo for 12 years or so, but when Von Phul’s built a new brick store, they didn’t demolish the old one. They moved it farther down the block and turned it to face Pujo, across from the Majestic where it sat next to a small former fire station which had been taken over by a 2nd-hand furniture dealer. By 1909, after a brick office building had been built behind Von Phul’s, the old Knapp bldg and its neighboring fire station were moved further back another 50′, but there this lovely building would stay for the rest of Tisolay’s years in Lake Charles.

I don’t imagine Tiwazzo would’ve cared about architecture, though, when they were on their shopping expedition; she’d’a seen that sign for OK Second-Hand Furniture and made a bee line (never mind the questionable promotional value of its name). By then, the store had moved out of the little fire house and into the more spacious Knapp bldg next door. Fresh in town with few of the things she had had in her Bayou Teche farm house, I’ll bet that of all the names of stores these women brought home with them for future reference that day, this one was first and foremost in Tiwazzo’s mind.

Knapp’s Mansard roof and turret, as well as the fire house tower, are clearly recognizable from the rear in shot 6 that seems to have been taken from a balloon in the sky, since there was no structure beneath it high enough to attain that vantage point… since, in fact, every structure beneath it had been burned to ash only months before. For all its architectural beauty, who knew that there was courage and drama in the ol’ girl’s very near future.

6 – The clear unobstructed view of the backs of these wood-frame buildings facing the Majestic was thanks to a fire in April of 1910 that burned everything up to that line, and no further. The new, ultra-modern Majestic had its own water supply which they used to spray the row of houses across the street between it and the fire, keeping them wet. Of all the time I’ve spent studying that fire and its aftermath, it took me a year to notice that a tiny white line in a bottom corner of one of them had captured the men on the old Knapp drug store’s roof, standing next to its turret, maneuvering the hose that had been suspended across Pujo St from the Majestic.

~~~~~~~ 900 block Ryan ~~~~~~~

The old Knapp building might have been one of Lake Charles’ favorite small buildings, but there’s no question what their favorite large building was. Tiwazzo and the girls had already seen it at the end of the 800 block, towering over the intersection across from where the LaFargue compound had been, and possibly still was, but I’ve saved it until the 900 block discussion because that was by far the town photographers’ favorite place to shoot it from.

Taken from the middle of the 900 block, looking north, the rooftop urns of Eddy’s store to the left and the upstairs bay windows of Von Phul’s to the right do make an interesting frame for the Calcasieu Bank turret which soars up and out of the frame. There were many shots from between 1900 and 1909 that I studied, trying to pinpoint when the LaFargue buildings came down and whether they were still around when Tiwazzo and the girls walked past since only one of them is reliably dated: the Prohibition parade in June of 1908. Toward that end, I’ve tried to put these shots in order of age based on the appearance of several things at different times, none of which are in the first photo: the Jewel Stoves sign on the electrical pole in front of a hardware store at left, the mortar & pestle on a column outside Von Phul’s drug store at right, a fifth cross-beam on the electrical pole on the LaFargue corner at left, a second streetcar track in 1905, brick paving shortly afterwards, the disappearance of the LaFargue buildings, the Prohibition parade in 1908, and finally, Von Phul’s awning and Rexall sign.

2 – Look at the telephone pole in front of Rock Hardware, at left. Sticking out off the right is a small, vaguely crown-shaped sign for Jewel Stoves, which the now-quite-spacious hardware store apparently carried. The sign may have been knocked off by horses’ heads and such one too many times, because the next photo shows it missing, and the one after that shows it put back, but a foot or so higher.

What’s a racket store, you ask? They were like variety or 5-&-10¢ stores, named for the racket their predecessors made in their horse and buggies, rattling their way through the neighborhoods with housewares and tools clanging against each other and salesmen yelling their presence. Sometimes they carried miniatures and models of larger appliances like stoves and washing machines to show customers, but that was becoming a thing of the past in town centers, as evidenced by Mr Braden’s store. Rock Hardware too, apparently.

3 – The second streetcar line is in, a fifth cross beam has been added to the electrical pole on LaFargue’s corner, and the Jewel Stove sign has been removed from the electrical pole at far left.

4 – Much the same shot as #3, but the Jewel Stoves sign has been put back about a foot higher than before, and the Von Phul’s mortar and pestle has been installed on the corner (gotta really blow it up to see it).

5 – (*correction, with apologies to Miss Maude – I’ve mentioned before that in several photos of Paul Gascon LaFargue’s corner property, Miss Maude’s captions confuse Julian Richard’s store with its next-door neighbor, the very similar Trepagnier and Hollins’ jewelry store, as though they are the same building with consecutive renters. I find this slip of Miss Maude’s interesting because of the timing. If that corner burned down in 1907 or early ’08, she would have been 25 and in nursing school in New York. It was the only decade in which she was not one of the most active and well-known participants in the town’s goings-on. Apparently, she came home and saw an empty corner lot and only one of the two 2-storey storefronts, and merged the 2 in her memory. )

In fact, both buildings were built by LaFargue as rentals in 1885 and 1887. He died in 1890 and a few years later, the jewelers bought their building from Madame LaFargue for $7000. She closed down her store and let it fall vacant, as well as the old Richard store (Richard having moved elsewhere), and they remained so until her own death in 1901. LaFargue left her well off and she may have preferred to dispense with landlord responsibilities, not needing the income. Perhaps it was her family up in Kinder that wanted her to quit, because the 1900 census shows that one of her grown granddaughters had come to live with her, taking up residence in the old corner store building next to her grandmother. By 1903, all the buildings, including the LaFargue home, have come back to life as other businesses, and the family, all back on the farm up in Kinder, seem to have divested themselves of the LaFargue holdings in Lake Charles.

7 – In a classic meeting of the old and the new, the horse-drawn carriage at right is facing, head on, one of the first ‘horse-less carriages’ which is impatiently passing a stopped streetcar picking up passengers. And Von Phul’s, which has installed a wide shade awning, also sports a Rexall sign as one of the country’s earliest Rexall franchises.

With all the focus I put on this one scene, I’m still no closer to guessing whether the Champagne girls saw the LaFargue complex or an empty lot when they passed that corner. Oh, well.

~~~~~~~

The lower half of the 900 block was very different from the upper, whose modern brick shopping strip gave way to very old wooden storefronts that had never been replaced, most of them dilapidated and forgotten as the 4-block shopping strip transitioned into the religious and civic center of the town. One large, looming old structure was the Lake Charles Opera House, just south of Mrs. Gunn’s book store. Built ca.1887, it was only 20 years old when Tiwazzo and the girls walked by, nevertheless, they saw an abandoned building that had already warranted warnings from the city fire department recommending the demolition of the building as soon as possible. What a shame that, warnings unheeded, the Champagnes did indeed see the dried-out tinderbox of a theater still standing, a ticking time bomb that would set off the devastating 1910 fire.

Croom’s bakery, a tiny wooden, otherwise-unassuming storefront, sported a crown-shaped parapet at the top of its façade that stands out in several photos of this block.

9 – In 1882, Meyer’s drug store on the corner, upper right, would not be replaced by the brick Eddy Bros. building for another 18-20 years. The empty lot at far left would not contain the Williams Opera House (later named Lake Charles Opera House) for another 5 years. The house in the lower right corner with the roofline parallel to Ryan St will soon be torn down to make way for Sol Bloch’s store. But Croom’s Bakery, bottom center, is there with its crown-shaped parapet and will be there 25 years later to see the Champagnes walk by.

10 – On July 4th of 1889, Croom’s bakery’s parapet and portico shade parade watchers from the morning sun, as does Sol Bloch’s store next to it and Knapp’s drug store after that with a flag flying from its turret. Across the street, below the newly-built opera house, is Capt. Bryan’s home and store-turned-real estate office which presides over the corner where the west side of Ryan St opens out onto the town square. The parade has stopped in front of the courthouse, unseen off the lower left corner of the photo, which was only a small 1-story wood frame structure at the time. However, the fact that Capt. Bryan had recently added real estate to his business interests speaks to the great changes that have already begun in Lake Charles. The 1890s saw northern investors and lumber barons take the town’s lumber industry into ‘the big time’, pour resources into modernizing civic and commercial infrastructure, and build mansions up and down Broad St that would set the tone for Lake Charles’ cultural development.

The year this parade shot was taken, the budding entrepreneur J. A. Landry (whose sister Regina would become my great aunt Carmen’s mother-in-law) was planning the town’s first public utilities company to the little boom town that would bring in the town’s first ice factory the following year, followed by electric lights at the street corners, water and plumbing, and a streetcar. A shot of Croom’s and its surroundings from 10 years later exhibits some of these changes.

11 – 1899. Ten years later, an electric streetcar, no longer dependent on mule-team power, is about to pass Croom’s bakery. Electric poles have sprouted alongside Ryan St (foreground wires mysteriously photoshopped out?). And the massive brick Calcasieu Bank building, one of the first of the big brick structures, ushers in Ryan St’s transition from all-purpose family neighborhood of wooden cottages and shops into a specialized brick business district.

The Rouse’s Racket Store sign which spans the street will not be suspended from its narrow, 2-story wooden storefront for much longer (seen in a previous photo with subsequent tenant, Mrs. Gunn’s book & stationery store). When the lovely mansard-roofed Knapp’s drug store is replaced by Von Phul’s big brick building, a sprawling 1-story brick storefront built next to it will become the new home of Rouse’s.

The ‘fresh bread’ sign at far left, though, serves as a symbol of the dying past, since a confectioner and baker didn’t occupy the tiny building that had been Bryan’s real estate office until his death 2 years before this shot.

In 1907, 8 years later, I doubt that Tiwazzo and the girls, reaching the end of their shopping expedition, appreciated that there was real history in that last decrepit old building on the corner, or even noticed it in light of the magnificent courthouse, city hall, and Catholic church compound their eyes could feast on instead. Nothing about the abandoned 2nd floor of the old store-turned-office hinted that it had once been the home of a remarkable man, one of the more unsung pioneers of Lake Charles, and his thriving family of 10.

A rural farm boy from 50 miles upriver who loved education, he became a teacher while trying to continue his own education. The Civil War interrupted his degree program, but he served with distinction and leadership, forming several militias and attaining the rank of captain, after which he settled in the new settlement of Lake Charles where he resumed teaching. In 1868, he was elected to be the first mayor of the newly-incorporated town, and within 3 years, he had married a teacher, opened a large general store which they lived above, then taken over the LCh Echo newspaper. Over the years, he was councilman, member of the police jury, and on the town’s early school board. With few civil officials, no city hall, and a courthouse barely bigger than his store, the building probably saw a lot of civic business done by the founding fathers of the settlement while they sat with Bryan in the store’s doorway in the shade of the chinaball trees. Not quite 20 years later, with his finger on the pulse of Lake Charles’ growth and promotion, Capt. Bryan went into the real estate business, converting a small building on the property into an office.

12 – In 1888, when this picture was taken, Capt. Bryan apparently still had his store up and running since Constable Harmon, Bryan’s younger half-brother by his mother’s second marriage, is standing next to several well-dressed mannequins. The small building at far right could have been Bryan’s real estate office, and would eventually be rented to a confectioner/baker. The town’s public water well can be seen where the barrel and bucket sit at the corner off the curb’s edge. Buggies are parked on the corner of the courthouse square whose horses must have been stabled nearby. A string of liveries in the next block no doubt did a brisk business boarding horses by day, hitching and unhitching for well-dressed government workers, lawyers, and businessmen, or ladies, or independent ‘taxi’ drivers who didn’t want their horses without water or shelter from the hot sun for long periods.

The following year in 1889, 10 days before the July 4th parade in photo 10 (which the family might have missed), his eldest daughter married one of the presidents of Baylor college in Waco, Texas, which apparently opened up an opportunity for the education-loving, former teachers to put their 3 sons in school there. The year after that, the 56-yr-old Bryan retired from the newspaper and sold it to another in a merger, after which the family started to go back and forth to Waco. Capt. Bryan died in 1897, with Mrs. Bryan following 2 years later, and then several little shacks get patched into the space between the old store and office, then rented to itinerant food vendors, a shoemaker, and a barber. The upstairs residencewas abandoned, a remnant of a time when the tiny outpost barely had roads or a name, and that is how the Champagnes found it in 1907.

13 – The Priest’s rectory at far right and Bryan’s roof, far left, mark the end of Tiwazzo and the girls’ initial exploration of the Ryan St shopping strip for their immediate needs in moving into the house at 511 Moss St… as I imagine it anyway. They may have looked around, curious about the church they knew they’d be going to on Sunday, but they still had to deal with getting all their purchases home, either delivered by the store, or by a hired wagon. Sunday would come soon enough, though, when the family was very likely more relaxed, not only going to church, but taking a family stroll to explore the town square, the waterfront, and maybe going home by way of Broad St to see the mansions of the wealthy lumber barons from the north. This, the last of the 3 ‘First Week’ posts, follows.

~~~~~~~ (cont’d on the next post) ~~~~~~~

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[for my own organization… 64 screen pgs, 67 shots, – 700 block Ryan, 4 . . . intersection Ryan and Broad (700-800), west 5, east 6½ . . . Hutchins’ corner at Broad , 5½ . . . 800 block Ryan, 12.5 . . . intersection Ryan and Pujo (800-900), west 11, east 6 . . . *Note – Obrien d.1899 at 61 after long, wasting illness, LaFargue in 1890 at 74, Widow LaFargue in 1901 at 76] . . . 900 block, 13 ½ ]

The post First week: Tiwazzo and the girls go shopping appeared first on My Old New Orleans Family.

It was such a joy to find so much visual information about the houses and neighborhoods the Champagnes lived in from the Sanborn maps; the physical shape and layout of the buildings, how many stories, rooms that stuck out with gables and bay windows, or wings extended into an ‘L’ or ‘T’, the dotted lines representing the verandahs we love so much, bell towers and turrets, and then their layout on the property and amongst each other on the block. And because Sanborn was a map-making company specifically for insurance companies to assess fire risk, there were colors that told you whether they were built of wood or brick, or had an iron-clad shell, and codes for whether the roof was wood shingle or slate. Hand-written labels for each building allowed them to better assess fire risks, such as bake ovens and blacksmiths, or restaurants, and whether a building were decrepit, ruined by fire, or vacant, or maybe one of the several around town where the fire department kept fire hoses.

There were labels for the expected places: government, civic, and transportation buildings, banks, hotels, churches and schools, hardware, furniture, and drug stores, restaurants and groceries (not like today’s, but limited to dry, packaged or canned food), and others. But there were labels that conjured wonderful visuals of the culture of the times and my grandmother’s day-to-day life growing up that I never saw, that were no longer a part of her life when I was born. No further than a home’s back yard, there were Kitchen, Stable, Cistern, and Outhouse, as well as whether the home were used as a Boardinghouse.

Stores and work shops, some no bigger than sheds next to a home, reminded me of how many things, now mass produced, were still done by hand by specialized artisans: Mattress Making, Cistern Shop, and Watchmaker. Some had to do with: horses and farming; (Livery, Hay and Feed, Harness and Saddle Maker, Agricultural Implements, Blacksmith, and Wagons) ; clothing and grooming (Tailor, Boot & Shoemaker, Millinery, Barber and Bathhouse, and Steam Laundry); home supplies (Dry Goods); and construction (Lumber Mill, Shinglemaker, Brick Maker, and Tinsmith). Then there was transportation (Carriage Maker, Carriage House, Ferry Landing, Wells Fargo Express, and Bicycle Repair Shop) and communication (Newspaper Press, Telegraph office, and Printing House).

Food was the big one; Ice house, Stoves (which sometimes sold sewing machines as well), Baker, Confectioner, Fish and Oyster Market, Sausage Maker, and Butcher, even Gunsmith and Knives [though not always for hunting]. And on a bigger scale; Grist Mill, where grain was ground into flour and rice was shucked of their hulls, often half on land, half on water, with a dock, but still, a single-family operation next to their home. Rarely were there produce and fruit stores, I guess because farmers sold them from wagons that went through town or dropped crates off at groceries. But there certainly was entertainment (Vaudeville Theater, Opera House, 5¢ Nickelodeon, Skating Rink, Casino and Dance Hall [at the end of a pier out over the water!], Gambling, and of course Saloon).

But I never would have guessed that a unique history-loving woman born in 1882 named Maude Reid would collect and caption a wealth of photos of Lake Charles’ early years, including Tisolay’s, caption them all in a huge colection of scrapbooks, then donate them to an institute that, 100 years later, would put them online for me to find with a click of a button while sitting in the living room of my home in the Oregon forest. Tisolay’s home town in front of me. Thousands of photographs, so many that I could reconstruct, with photographs, at least 3 paths I knew the family would take that first week, follow them, and see much of what they saw, as though I were silently going back in time to walk with them. 1 – J Euclide would have checked in with his new job at the Southern Pacific Railroad freight depot. 2 – Tiwazzo and the girls would’ve checked out Ryan St’s 4-block shopping strip. 3 – And that first Sunday, the family would’ve gone to Mass at the Immaculate Conception church at the end of the shopping strip, gotten breakfast somewhere (Catholics can’t eat before taking Communion), then taken a nice stroll around the town square and waterfront in front of the church, and maybe walked home by way of the magnificent Broad St mansions. The depth of my gratitude to the cosmos and Miss Maude for this photo collection . . . no words.

It took some doing to get back into the mindframe of someone who knew nothing of the buildings J Euclide would see on his first walk to the freight depot to let his new employers know that he had arrived in town. He knew nothing about the homes he passed on his 3 block walk or the people in them. He just saw the houses, with barns, animal pens, vegetable gardens. He likely saw a few children outside, women rocking on their front porch, men driving past in horses and buggies. Housekeepers and hired men doing chores in the back yards, boiling and hanging out laundry, cleaning wild game, beating rugs hung over the fence, could have been local African-American Creoles freed from slavery 40 years before but still reeling from the financial disenfranchisement of post-slavery Jim Crow and Reconstruction. Or they could have been newly-arrived immigrants from Europe, working to make money to repay their sponsors for their ship’s passage over. If he heard these people talking as he walked by, he’d have heard Danish German accents more often than he heard his own Cajun French.

On the first corner he came to, he saw two of the most magnificent homes in Lake Charles.

In the right side of the photo of the Bel mansion, the 2-storey Champagne home can be seen vaguely through bare tree branches between the Bel house and a large magnolia tree.

Rounding that corner onto Mill St, he would’ve seen another big fine home with a mansard-roofed tower on grounds that took up a quarter of the block. He might have noticed the sign hanging from the balcony that read ‘Hayes House’ and guessed, correctly, that it was a boarding house. A block further down, he might have heard a singing voice in the middle of a lesson coming from a more modest home I don’t have a picture of which he’d guess, correctly, might be the home of a music teacher.

All he knew was what he could see, a wide-open neighborhood with lots of open green spaces where forests had only been cleared for building within the past 15 years. Homes ran the gamut between magnificent mansions, fine two-storey homes with verandas across the front, and tidy wooden cottages with a half-story in the attic and wrap-around porches, all built of the locally milled pine. The massive moss-draped oaks seen today in Lake Charles were small, most only as old as the houses they’d been planted for.

Turning left on Ryan St, the town’s main drag, he knew nothing of the stores and businesses he passed other than what he could see in the windows and read on the signs. But he could see that it wasn’t as busy as it was a few blocks further south where the business and civic hub was. Perhaps he sensed that Ryan St was in a state of transition.

Old wood-frame cottages and barns and sheds with little family-owned stores and offices on the same lot had been built in the 50s & 60s from the local lumber that made the town its fortune. By the time J Euclide saw them, they were in varying degrees of deterioration and collapse. One by one, they were being replaced by 2-story, red-brick commercial buildings wide enough to rent to several businesses in a row, with storefronts at street level and offices, warehouses, or meeting halls above.

As the town spread eastward from Ryan, away from the lake, first to Bilbo, then to Hodges, it took family residences with it, as well as the all-purpose, family-centered feel of a neighborhood with open green spaces and fenced-in yards. It was giving way to commercial use that limited the view of what was behind the wide-spread buildings to the occasional alleyway.

Most of the old wooden structures seen on Sanborn’s 1903 map had been replaced by 1909, but there’s no way of knowing which ones had or hadn’t been by 1907, when J Euclide took his first walk down the 600 block of Ryan St. The only one I know he saw was the long, single-story, brick corner store, at his immediate left as he turned. Whether it was the furniture store seen on the 1903 Sanborn map or the 5¢-and-10¢ store shown on the 1909 map (Meyer’s Variety Store) is anyone’s guess, since businesses seem to have been in as much transition as the structures they were in. You can see Meyer’s Variety Store at the far left of photo 9, below, most of its sign hidden behind the tree in the Gallaghers’ front yard.

Behind the variety store, you can also see the brick commercial row building immediately south of it, sporting a Palace Saloon sign above the first in the row.

~~~~~~~ 607 Ryan ~~~~~~~

In a stroke of luck that has great meaning to me, the lot on which that brick row building stood was represented on Sanborn maps or photographs several times across 3 decades.

The earliest was a photo from the late 1880s and shows the little wood-frame cottage of David Reims set back behind a tidy garden, and his butcher shop up by the sidewalk where the family is lined up. In Sanborn’s 1903 map, the house, in its last incarnation, can be seen below the brick corner store, labelled as a boarding house.

[*aside*] – Reims bought the house from Peter Bruderson, who built it in the late 1870s, but soon left with his young wife for Oregon. We’ve met him before in the previous post, part 2 of “The Route Home”, the son-in-law of the irascible Judge David John Reid, Miss Maude’s grandfather, whom we’ve talked about in all the Lake Charles posts. Bruderson helped build the home of his brother-in-law, the newly-widowed William Hutchins, called Capt. Willy, who had also married a daughter of Judge Reid’s, during a building spree that saw the Reid brothers diving into a sequence of construction projects. Perhaps it was a way to manage their grief over the death of their much-beloved oldest sister Eugenie, who was Hutchins’ 35-yr-old wife and mother to his 8 children (the 8th joining his mother in death). Or maybe it was simply that the bossy, hot-tempered old Judge, also recently deceased, had finally freed his boys to do things their way. In any case, finishing the Hutchins home was the last act of Bruderson before selling his home to Reims and moving his family to Oregon. ~~~

The later photos of the Ryan/Mill intersection were taken professionally, part of a series to document the devastating 1913 flood. Just the year before, in the same brick building that replaced the Reims homestead, a couple doors past the Palace Saloon, Tisolay’s aunt Mathilde Bourdier (Tiwazzo’s sister) had opened a men’s furnishings store with the money from the suit she won against the Southern Pacific Railroad for her husband’s wrongful death. The newly widowed Mathilde, with little Mildred, had left her home in the rural outskirts of Lake Charles and moved to town where she and her sister Alicia’s family rented a big 2-story house at 617 Moss St, a block down from where the Champagnes had first lived. She partnered with the Champagnes in business as well, taking J Euclide (who quit his railroad freight job) and his oldest daughter Marie-Beulah into the business she named Bourdier and Co. Men’s Furnishings Store.

If ever there were a photo that captured an ill omen, it would be photo 11, taken during the 1913 flood which I think J Euclide saw ‘live and in color’ on that wet Wednesday in October.

J Euclide was surely at the store, possibly with Mathilde, keeping a worried watch on the rising Calcasieu River waters that kept pushing inland through the streets, picking everything they could up off the floors and moving merchandise to higher shelves. It’s possible he periodically went outside to stand silent vigil over the rising water like the man at far right. Actually, it’s entirely possible that J Euclide is in this moment that the photo captured, standing shin-deep in water just out of view to the photographer’s right, because as it happens, the photographer set his camera up directly in front of Bourdier and Co.

The man at far right is standing in a doorway beside a store window that can just barely be read, ‘Palace Cold Drinks’. If this brick building had been built by 1907 and J Euclide saw it as he was walking to the freight depot, that window would have read ‘Palace Saloon’ the same as the big sign painted on the exterior of the building, high up in the front corner. Changing the name of saloons to cafés and such wouldn’t come about until the following year, when Prohibition was voted in. The fact that no one bothered to paint the new name over the outside sign in the 5 years between the vote and the flood photos may reflect the lackadaisical view that Lake Charles, like much of urban America, took of enforcing prohibition laws.]

I doubt J Euclide would’ve worried much about having to evacuate his family from their home. The town’s flooding extended well beyond the Moss St house, but only in the streets. Google Earth’s elevation stats today suggest that the Champagne house sits on land a good 4 feet higher in elevation than the store, which is 3 blocks closer to the lake. Since the streets were flooded, though, businesses and schools were closed. And if the photographer’s many photos are any indication, the kids were playing in the water, some gingerly in their regular day clothes, some in their swimming outfits, fully invested, and some in canoes and small paddle boats. Knowing Tisolay, I can see her, now 8, playing in the water, possibly with her family but more likely with Karl Krause and Bernard Levy, one of whom would surely have had a rowboat or canoe of some kind. My image of her sitting in the middle of the boat while the boys got in and out, pushing and pulling her through places in the street where they knew the water would be the deepest, is so acute, it’s almost like she’s telling me that my imagination got this one ‘spot-on’.

~~~~~~~ Ryan beyond Mill ~~~~~~~

Anyway, returning to our hero frozen in mid-stride, passing whichever building, wooden or brick, was on the 605-619 Ryan lot, J Euclide would have noticed that there were many tailors and barber shops, as well as a cobbler, just in that one block. The agricultural and livery businesses were plentiful as well, from implement stores, carriage and wagon warehouses for the big store he’d seen in the previous block, hay and feed stores, and harness shops. There were several groceries, a few meat markets and seafood stores, and a fruit stand. And this was all just in that one block. And during those years between 1903 and 1909, Adolph Meyer’s drug store (separate from the 10¢ store), Smith’s music store, a jewelry and watch shop, a hand printing shop, a wall paper and paint store, and a small restaurant might have made their appearance in time to greet J Euclide’s first walk. And of course, saloons.

Shortly before turning again toward the lake onto the last block of Division St, he saw the Little Gem Saloon, which would be taken over by a harness store within a year, after the Prohibition vote. I don’t know if harness shops and such made J Euclide pine for his treasured racing trotter back in Breaux Bridge, which I suspect he may have had to leave behind. But in a town where everything was within a 6 block walk, he probably didn’t have enough need for a horse to offset the expense of keeping it. Good news for the children, though, which he couldn’t yet know; the saloon to the left of the Little Gem would soon be a bicycle shop, and the one on the corner that he was about to turn away from would become a confectioner and ice cream parlor. The best news for the Champagne family, though, and my Tisolay in particular, either already existed or would soon, and would be there through all the years the Champagnes were in Lake Charles, right across the street from the Little Gem…. Smith’s Music store.

Behind the saloon on the corner, if he’d glanced back down Mill before turning toward the lake, he’d have seen the livery of Gill and Trotti, and their undertaking business next door.

Rounding the corner, across the side street from the funeral home, J Euclide would’ve seen Muller’s Big Store whose owner bought the beautiful Reid home on Hodges that Miss Maude grew up in. Then he’d have passed the First Nat’l Bank with its fine chiseled stone arches, often called the Stone Bank.

~~~~~~~ Toward the Lake ~~~~~~~

Turning onto the last block of Division before the lake, J Euclide again saw homes whose owners he knew nothing about and offices whose names didn’t mean anything to him. But thanks to the owner of the one across the street from the SPRR freight depot, fire chief Dick Gunn, and his desire for a picture of himself with the horse and carriage he raced to fire scenes with, we have a nice view of where J Euclide first worked in Lake Charles, the destination of his walk.

~~~~~~~ waterfront wharfs and warehouses ~~~~~~~

The ferry Hazel is seen at left, 2 blocks north of Division St, at the foot of Pine St, flooded out of its usual landing at Pujo St., 4 blocks further south. Lake Charles was quite accustomed to the Calcasieu overflowing its banks, but not to the extent it did in 1913. Hopefully, the boat has jury-rigged a set of planks as a ramp for the passengers to cross on.

The lakefront at Pine St had no waterfront warehouses or wharfs, and didn’t look industrial, but it was no longer residential either ever since railroad tracks had been installed for the spur that ran south to the Pujo St wharf. The photographer, who is standing on the tracks, was the civil engineer who photo-documented the town’s flooding, and the woman and baby in a pram, at right, are his wife and child.

From where J Euclide stood at the freight depot, though, he would have seen the wharfs of both Division and Broad St, since the two streets almost converged there, and big warehouses with loading docks, as well as a spaghetti bowl of tracks where railroad spurs fanned out alongside warehouse platforms that mostly belonged to wholesale grocery brokers. The biggest, Wall Rice Mill, had twin railroad spurs that passed in front of its loading dock and then turned onto trestles over the water for about 100 ft. He may have seen schooners docked at one of the wharfs, or many, with outgoing sacks of rice and piles of lumber lined up waiting to be loaded, and incoming crates of incoming cargo stacked up on the wharf waiting to be warehoused, all by men with dollies and mule-drawn wagons in a buzz of activity.

Far out on the lake, he might have seen the white sails of schooners passing the Division St whatf, bound instead for the lumber mills farther upriver, riding high and empty coming in from the Gulf, or low and laden going back out, most bound for Galveston, Lake Charles’ gateway to the West. Old photos make us forget the greens and blues of the water, the sky’s reflection in it, and the lush pine forest all around the lake, as well as the white seagulls and canvas sails gliding by on sea and air.

Something else J Euclide would have seen makes me green with envy. There were several early pioneer homes facing the lake, which now faced the Division and Broad St wharfs, throwbacks to the days of early settlement before the lakefront’s industrialization, and one of them was that of the town’s founding father, Jacob Ryan, built in the 1840s.

Very soon, possibly the same day, Tiwazzo and the girls, together with baby Stella (my Tisolay) would have taken a similar walk to find where to get their most immediate needs, including food. They’d have seen the same stores along the 600 block of Ryan that J Euclide had, noting the groceries and markets, and maybe the music store, and perhaps paying more attention to a furniture store than J Euclide had. But they’d have continued down Ryan for the whole 4-block strip of stores that ended where the church, city hall and courthouse clustered into something of a civic center.

~~~~~~~ (cont’d on the next post) ~~~~~~~

================================================================================

[for my own organization – 25 screen pgs, 35 photos – J Euclide’s walk to the SPRR, 8 . . . 607 Ryan, 3.5 . . . Ryan beyond Mill, 4 . . . Toward the lake, 4 . . . Waterfront wharfs and warehouses, 5.5]

The post First week: J Euclide’s walk to his new job appeared first on My Old New Orleans Family.

I can just see y’all as a family in those first few days, from the moment someone carried you across the threshold, J Euclide overseeing the carriage driver bringing in trunks and boxes and what-have-you, maybe bringing up the ones destined for the bedrooms upstairs while y’all looked around everywhere, opening every door, checking out the views from the windows. I can imagine Tiwazzo, Beulah and Carmen tired from the trip but excited, unpacking trunks and boxes in a new house, cleaning as they went, . . . trying to corral the energies of an irrepressible toddler (you). Maybe they had to stop every so often to redirect 2 curious boys who’d rather explore than put their things away or help their mother and sisters set up their new home. Tiwazzo might have been wondering about the first meal she’d have to have ready in just a few hours, wondering where the grocery stores, butcher shops, fish markets, bakeries, etc. were. I can see the boys looking out the windows, perhaps waiting for your father who may have walked over to the freight depot a few blocks away to touch base with his new boss.

My grandmother had never said anything about living anywhere else but 617 Moss, where she lived from around the age of 6 or 7 until she graduated from college, so I was very surprised to see in the 1910 census, when she would have been 5, that the Champagne family had first lived a block away, at 511 Moss St. She had no memory of the 511 Moss house that her family had apparently first moved into when they got to Lake Charles. She was 2 or 3 when they moved in, and 5 when they had to leave it. A quick look on Google Earth for 511 Moss showed me that it was gone, the site now occupied by a modern little cottage. It was on the 1909 Sanborn map, though.

~~~~~~~~~~ 511 Moss St ~~~~~~~~~~

It was a 2-storey house with a large 1-storey “L” off the back and a 1-storey verandah in front spanning the width of the house. The verandah had two sequential insets that followed the two recesses of the house’s façade. I would guess there were 3 bedrooms upstairs, a parlor, dining room, and kitchen downstairs, and 2 additional rooms in the back “L”. The “L” didn’t have its own verandah, and may have been more integrated with the inside of the house than an independent unit with its own outside entrance. There wouldn’t have been pantries or closets like today since they were counted as rooms, and houses were taxed by their number of rooms. Armoires and cabinets were used instead. The recessed façade and verandah seemed more decorative than a house built to be a rental would have been, and I wondered whether it had once been a private home with interesting verandah columns and Victorian brackets, maybe a gable or two, but I was content with Sanborn’s precise footprint of it.

Some time afterwards, though, I was looking at a photo of the Bel mansion I’d had for a while, from a post about the families that initially settled the neighborhood, and noticed something I hadn’t before.

It had been taken at an angle that included the side street where 511 Moss St would have been. And there, peaking out almost indistinguishably through the bare winter branches of a tree, from behind a white-picket-fenced hedge, were the dark shapes of a second-storey roofline and a 1st floor verandah roof, with vague hints of windows (you gotta want it).

The photo was dated 1905, only a couple years before the Champagnes would move in; before Tiwazzo, Beulah and Carmen would stand in the kitchen unpacking things into that house in the photo, peaking through the Bel’s winter trees. The view in this photo, from 118 years ago, was nothing like the view today which is blocked by rows of massive oak trees that, though lovely, hide any sense of the surrounding countryside or horizon. But Maude Reid gives me an inkling of how this photo represents a different town than any I could know today. “Looking to the right can be seen a few pine trees and one or two homes – showing how sparsely settled this section of the town was even at the time this picture was taken, 1905.” This photo is of my little 2½ year old Tisolay’s home almost exactly as she saw it and lived it, and it sorta makes the hair on my arms stand up.

I tell ya’, Ti. You may not have told me anything about this time in your life, but that doesn’t mean I couldn’t find out things in other places. I used to ask you stuff, and it was always, “Oh, I don’t remember” or “I never paid attention to such things back then”. Yeah, well, that was back in the ’80s, before there was any such thing as the internet.

~~~~~~~~~~ 1907 Sears catalog ~~~~~~~~~~

So often I find that Google rabbit holes, especially when they’re about things I wouldn’t have known to ask about, can be worth their weight in gold. One of those began with an old illustration of a wood-burning stove from the Sears catalog. Through that, I found that Ancestry.com had all the old Sears catalogs online… in particular, the 1907 catalog. And in one fell swoop, I got 1382 pages of visuals of my grandmother’s childhood, everything (and I mean everything) she would’ve seen and touched and lived amidst as she toddled along with her family to their neighbors’ homes, to church, to the schools and stores and offices in her family’s world. It gave me my first glimpse of the things in her own home that she watched her her sisters and brothers and parents use as they buzzed from room to room around her, and the day-to-day activities for which they were used. I rejoiced in the catalog’s precise and detailed illustrations. Just as informative, after I looked up the comparative value of the dollar between 1907 and 2023… (Ready? . . . sitting down?. . . one 1907 dollar would be worth $31.50 in 2023 dollars.) Anyway, just as informative were the prices and being able to grasp the relative cost of things that would have fit into the Champagnes’ limited budget, and the finer things she would have seen in her wealthier neighbors’ homes. The hype and hyperbole in the descriptions made for many eye-rolls and full-out laughs, but there were also informative explanations, diagrams, and cross-section drawings of how things worked, things we don’t use anymore.

Man oh man, Ti, have I ever fixed your wagonload of “I can’t remember”s!!

~~~~~~~~~~ stoves ~~~~~~~~~~

Anyone who knows me knows I’ve been into ethnic cooking since I was 16, and my mother and I ate our way from one end of Europe to the other. [* New Orleanians have a passionate appreciation of good food like nowhere else in America, and have come to expect world-class cooking.] Soon after I moved from the college dorm to an apartment, I started equipping my first kitchen from a local cooking school that had its own kitchenwares store. One whole room was devoted to cookbooks from all the countries we’d visited, and for about a year, I bought one from a different country with every month’s food budget, and cooked from it for 2 weeks, then decompressed with regular food for 2 weeks. Being from New Orleans, we’d taken visitors to historic houses and plantations for as long as I could remember, and I’d always loved the kitchens, with their massive, black iron, wood-burning stoves, the ones with beautiful floral curlicues in the heavy cast iron. The first time I asked Tisolay if her family’s kitchen in Lake Charles had had one, I was disappointed that she didn’t remember anything about the kitchen. For years I tried to get her to remember what kind of stove had been in her kitchen. Nothing.

So, fast forward to now, when I first stumbled onto the section of pink pages Sears put in the middle of their catalogs and found that it was an index, I made a bee-line for the stoves.

I was thrilled at the pages of crisp, detailed pictures, but got really excited when I saw that Sears had devoted nearly an entire page to a diagram explaining what all the little doors and slots and gewgaws were for. All the different models, each with various add-ons to choose from, made me wonder what kind of stove Tiwazzo was used to using and which features she would have seen as necessities and which as extravagant. I didn’t know, but given my foresight into the changing times and technologies that were about to set turn-of-the-century housekeeping on its ear, I knew what I wanted her to have. She needed one that burned both wood and coal since she now lived in a town and no longer had access to her father’s big tract of wooded land nor his variety of wagons in which to bring firewood home. And I wanted her to have a bigger stove than the one her father Adeo might’ve first put in the house down by the water when she first got married. I didn’t get extravagant, but with a family of 7, I did give her 6 burners and bumped up the oven to the middle of 3 sizes.

I chose a model with those specs, the Acme Royal, that came with different levels of bells and whistles, at different costs, and I used it to exercise both my understanding of how the stove worked and my grasp on the whole 1907-2023 money-comparison thing .

It wasn’t long before I started to see that a hot water reservoir was too much of a time saver not to spend the extra 2.85 ($89.77) for it. The high shelf, at an additional 2.36 ($74.34) and warming closet at 1.49 ($46.93) seemed unnecessary, but my reading had given me a sense of how labor intensive life back then was, and operating the stove in particular. Wow, but these monsters were a nightmare to use!

“Ashes from the previous fire had to be removed. Then, paper and kindling had to be set inside the stove, dampers and flues had to be carefully adjusted, and a fire lit. Since there were no thermostats to regulate the stove’s temperature, a woman had to keep an eye on the contraption all day long. Any time the fire slackened, she had to adjust a flue or add more fuel, and throughout the day, the stove had to be continually fed with new supplies of coal or wood – an average of fifty pounds a day. At least twice a day, the ash box had to be emptied, a task which required a woman to gather ashes and cinders in a grate and then dump them into a pan below. Altogether, a housewife spent four hours every day sifting ashes, adjusting dampers, lighting fires, carrying coal or wood, and rubbing the stove with thick black wax to keep it from rusting.” Digital History topic ID 93, Housework in Late 19th century America

And that was just the kitchen stove. There may have been heat stoves upstairs and a parlor stove that vented into the bedroom above. Most cost between $8 – $14, ($252 – $441) but could go up to $20 ($630.)

I liked the fact that many of these room heaters had a cook surface where a hot water kettle could be kept. Hot water on an upstairs stove, maybe in the central hall, might alleviate the need for so many morning trips up and down the stairs with pitchers of hot water.

And then there was the coal! Coal was delivered to the house and shoveled into a cellar or bin of some sort. At $5-6 a ton, which would be 40 days’ worth for the kitchen stove alone, that’s 12¢-15¢ a day, ($3.78 – $4.72).

You know what else Sears listed along with dimensions and prices? The weight!! These things weighed nearly 500 lbs., and it occurred to me that it would have cost a fortune to ship a massive cast-iron stove by train, even if J Euclide was an employee of the railroad now. And that was just the stove. Worse and more of it; Google told me that turn-of-the-century renters usually had to supply their own stoves for an unfurnished place. So, would Tiwazzo have had anything to cook on, even if they had been able to find food stores in the next few hours?

Well, they obviously figured it out. So let’s get back to what else would have been in Tiwazzo’s kitchen.

Since I’m used to thinking in terms of $10, $20, $50, & $100, etc., I soon figured out that taking the prices in the catalog, dividing by 3, then moving the decimal over two spaces to the right (multiplying by 100), got me close to today’s equivalent. Pretty soon 30¢ and 60¢ were the new $10 and $20. And $1.50 and $3 were just under the new $50 and $100. In any case, I’m putting the 2023 equivalents on some things.

I compared the above tinware set prices with what it would cost to get the pieces individually, and it really is an excellent deal, though there are a few things I wouldn’t use because I’d want them in another material. If I were Tiwazzo, I’d do what I did; visit the second hand store (in my case, flea markets), get a few of the old heavy iron things, then boil them clean and reprime them with seasoned oil in a warm stove for a few hours. And of course, for the sake of your knives, you have to have wooden chopping bowls and boards.

And come to find out, frying pans were called spiders then! Something about them originally having 3 metal legs to keep them up above the wood and ash of an open fire. Several of my vintage black iron pots are 3-legged, including a big Dutch oven with a tall-rimmed lid to hold coals on top for baking bread.

I saw a huge iron ham boiler in the catalog and wondered if Tiwazzo ever cooked ‘big’, like I do, putting away 11 qts of gumbo in the freezer, then remembered there were no freezers. She may have cooked big when she joined the Bourdiers at 617 Moss, when the household became 10-strong, counting the roomer, but a pot that big in iron is very heavy and lighter metals were becoming all the rage.

The sugar kettle made me think of things Tiwazzo and J Euclide would’ve seen being cooked on big open-air fires when they were young, back on the farm. Big cauldrons of gumbos, jambalayas, or boiled seafood at big outdoor Sunday dinners, holidays, weddings, maybe gatherings for community projects like putting up the frame of someone’s house. They also would’ve done alot with it during butchering season, like cook cracklins, render lard, mix boudin sausages, etc. Laundry was boiled, too, in their own pots. But would Tiwazzo still be doing big cauldron fires outdoors like this, either for food or laundry, now that stores were a block away and washing machines, albeit crude by today’s standards, were now available? It made me sad, somehow, to think that the outdoor tradition of the simmering cauldron at the center of a social occasion under the trees had run its course. George Rodrigue (of Blue Dog infamy) captured this Cajun tradition in some of his paintings, and my father’s uncle captured a family event outside under the oaks. My father’s father is standing at left amidst his 7 siblings, and old Papa Oscar Martin is in the center in a rocker, his back to us. Neither he nor this wife Corinne spoke English. Their grown children were all fully bilingual, but at this gathering, only their native French would’ve been heard.

~~~~~~~

Eventually, I became hungry for more than line drawings: I wanted color, I wanted context, I wanted to see the things used in the rooms they were supposed to be used in. So back to google I went, where I found period paintings and vintage photos of domestic scenes that brought life to Sears’ printed illustrations, and gave me a glimpse of my little Tisolay’s life as it might have gone by around these stoves.

Northern foundries and iron works put out trade cards, brought south by salesmen, that depicted idealized domestic situations and caricatured cultural portrayals.

I don’t know where the whole ‘humbug’ thing is from, but I suppose it can be said that the Rising Sun stove polish people were equal-opportunity caricaturists, laying their humbug across all racial, gender and socio-economic lines.

“What, Mary, haven’t you got the dinner, or even the table set yet?” “No, we have been trying all the morning to black the stove with that horrid old polish you bought yesterday. It was put up in the same shape and style as The Rising Sun, but is nothing like it, and is a mean miserable cheat.”

“Ah, my dear, dinner is all ready, I see, and I am early too.” “Yes, dear, we had The Rising Sun Stove Polish to use today. I am sure we can’t be happy if you get any other kind. No peddler can ever humbug me again with pastes and paints in boxes and bottles.”

“… no peddler can ever humbug me again… “

“I never knew I was so fair, what lovely eyes? what curly hair? And what a most distinguished air? In fact, I’m very dollish”, said Cinderella, as she gazed upon her face, entranced, amazed, with …… in the mirror she had raised with ‘Rising Sun Stove Polish. “

“My naughty sisters to the ball this evening go, their pride a fall … shall have. I’ll see them there and all their stuck up airs abolish”. … She met a Lord of high degree, who said ‘I ne’er can love but thee!’ .. So now she lives in luxury, through “Rising Sun Stove Polish”.

Look yere, old man! What kind o’ stove blacking you call dat? Ise been rubbin’ on dat stove all mornin’ an’ it don’t gib it a polish worf a cent. You jest git de RISING SUN STOVE POLISH right away, or dar’l be trouble. You think I got time to ‘speriment with such mud?

Alright, enough nonsense. Sears and Rising Sun has admirably slaked my 50+ year curiosity about black iron wood/coal stoves, but now it is beckoning me to come back and flesh out the kitchen.

~~~~~~~ kitchen cabinets & contents ~~~~~~~

Ok, who here doesn’t love the kind of kitchen cabinet that briefly allows you the delusion that your life is organized and orderly.

Triple the price for a Hoosier is too much to pay for their flour sifter, but it sure is tempting, what with the spillage mess and multiple transfer containers that would no longer be needed.

~~~~~~~ moving (cont’d), shipping, furnished vs unfurnished ~~~~~~~

Back when I was first musing over that first moving day, when everyone would’ve been unpacking something, or cleaning a place in the house where it would go, and Tiwazzo was wondering how she was gonna throw something together for dinner, I read somewhere that moving out of town, for all but the wealthy, meant having to sell everything you could and replace it when you got to your new location. So, did that mean that it wasn’t just the stove, but that they didn’t have any of their furniture? Did they even have a kitchen cupboard to unpack into? What about armoires and dressers for clothes? Did they even have beds to sleep on, those first few nights? They didn’t have built-ins or closets back then. Cupboards, cabinets, and armoires were where things went.

I soon learned that Lake Charles had a bunch of rooming houses, official and unofficial, the latter often run by widows with large houses and no income who fed their guests as well. So they could have stayed in one of them while setting up their house.

Still, imagining the Champagnes moving into an empty house was a bit of a shift in gears for me. The Sanborn maps from that time have several buildings labelled as second-hand stores, and it occurred to me that big money was being made in Lake Charles, especially after the railroad finally came through. Northern industrialists who got rich on Calcasieu Parish’ lumber were building grand mansions up and down Broad St and Pujo and Kirby, bringing with them a big-city culture with a more sophisticated mindset that included the arts, music, theater, literature, and an appreciation for fine things. And they could afford to ship their fine furniture down. Seeing their things, the wives of the newly-wealthy locals, would have surely ditched their old things and made their husbands keep up. I read in a Lake Charles history somewhere that furniture stores were only too willing to keep up, stocking furniture and fine things that this little frontier town had never seen before, so I imagine it wouldn’t have been long before the discards were cascading into second-hand stores.

But, my God, did the Champagnes really have to start from scratch in an empty house, living in a roominghouse until they could buy furniture? I just don’t see Tiwazzo being able to afford replacing everything she left behind, even second-hand, on a lowly railroad clerk’s salary. I found a graph of comparative salaries of jobs from 1910, and J Euclide’s job as railroad freight clerk, a relatively low-paying job, would have made him about $600 a year, equivalent to $20,000 today. Back then, 80% of what most people earned was taken up by rent, food, and clothing, food taking up half of that. So of the remaining 20%, say the Champagnes put 10%, $60, toward furnishing their new house. I can’t know what second-hand opportunities or prices Tiwazzo would’ve found, but the stove I would want Tiwazzo to have, new, would have eaten up a third of that. Besides, unlike people moving out of town who have some money from the sale of their things to buy replacements with, many of Tiwazzo’s things back on the farm had likely belonged to the house her father built for her when she got married. No, I think they’d need a place furnished with at least the bare necessities of furnishings. And if that were the case, maybe, if the Champagnes were unpacking their things into a furnished house, Tiwazzo and the girls might have been as free as I’d originally imagined to think about where to get things for dinner after all, and start their new life in a furnished home that very day, and explore their new town.

~~~~~~~ the light dawns ~~~~~~~

With the joy of seeing tidbits of Tisolay’s childhood on the pages of a 1907 catalog came twinges of guilt over the scope of my ignorance. It didn’t just show me the extent to which back-breaking, hand-wrenching labor was still the only option in running a household in 1907, but it symbolized the extent to which I didn’t know the forces that formed her. What had initially sent me off hunting for pictures of things that would have been in a 1907 household was a particularly “Duh!” moment in my first musings about their move. Maybe it was because I had just made a big move myself, to Oregon after a lifetime in New Orleans, that I envisioned the family divvying up boxes, leaving clothes boxes upstairs in front of the bedroom armoires for later, maybe digging out the basic toiletries to put in the bathroom. Then because hunger would set in before any other immediate need, the girls turning their attention to the kitchen, helping Tiwazzo unpack pots into their kitchen cupboard, wiping down surfaces. I had such a clear vision of them letting the rust run out of the unused pipes of the kitchen sink first, then when the kettle was finally unpacked, someone rinsing it out, filling it, then putting it on the stove straight away. Surely the white enamel drip pot would emerge before the water boiled. I wondered if they’d thought to pack a little coffee for that first day, like I often did for a trip to someplace that only had bad watery coffee, putting coffee in a ziploc.

I’d had in the back of my mind an image of a moving truck out front whose movers had finished bringing in beds and armoires and tables and putting everything in place, hooking up the stove, etc. Then the light dawned. Wait… reality check. Water from the sink to fill a tea kettle? A stovehooked up and ready to heat the water? Hooked up to what? There was no sink. There were no pipes. There was no bathroom. For all but the wealthy, 1907 life had no plumbing, no electricity, a cistern outside for water, and an outhouse for you-know-what. This caused a deep shift in my vision of Tisolay’s childhood. I really only knew her in the present-day context and the stories she and my mother talked about from when Tisolay first married Granddaddy, left Lake Charles for New Orleans, and had my mother.

Lake Charles had only recently started running underground drains beneath the curbs of Ryan St and its intersections where only boards over a rain-filled ditch allowed people to cross the street at the corners. New construction for the wealthy northerners had all the latest technologies installed, but they were only beginning to hook these magnificent homes up to the city water or sewerage lines, themselves under construction. Wealthy locals with older homes, like the Krauses next door and the Goos family on the corner, had the money to retrofit their houses with hot and cold running water all through the house, and Sears carried the latest in sinks, tubs, and toilets for them, just as they carried the older necessities which the majority of people still needed, like the Champagnes. It would be a while before the average homeowner could modernize their old homes in this manner, and even longer before it was financially worthwhile to outfit a rental unit with plumbing.

Oh, God. Tisolay. How dense can I be! I’ve studied your ancestors for so long that their back-breaking, labor-intensive lives, and the primitive tools they had to work with have has become second nature to me. And since I was born, you’ve been telling me stories about your life in New Orleans since you left Lake Charles to marry Granddaddy. But studying the past looking forward and the present looking back, it never occurred to me to think about the point where the two meet, which happened to be when plumbing and electricity came into use and changed everything about life as we knew it . . . which happened to be your childhood years, which happened to be the years you wouldn’t talk about, the Lake Charles years.

Still, how could I not see? Carmen and them wouldn’t experience much lifestyle change between the early years of Lake Charles and where they were raised, on the farm where no one had plumbing or electricity. But you would’ve started seeing the new technologies and the resulting lifestyle changes during your formative years, in the homes of your wealthy friends, in Karl Krause’s house right next door. I think I know when you finally saw these changes happen in your own home. The 1919 Sanborn shows changes to the back porch of the house that indicate it was probably between 1915 & 1918 when one end of the kitchen porch was closed in and retrofitted as a bathroom, and a second-floor duplicate of it built on top of that. Your formative years must have been defined by the awareness of both lifestyles and the dizzying parade of inventions and advancements that made change the rule of the day. How is it you never said a word about all this richness of experience and perspective, especially when it became evident that my persistent interest in your ancestry was about to change the direction of my profession!

Nevermind. Here endeth the scolding….. maybe.

It took some doing for me to imagine my grandmother’s day-to-day life without plumbing or electricity, since I’d only known her in the modern house she was in when I was born, the house I inherited 47 years later. I still don’t know why since I had no trouble imagining her mother, Tiwazzo, growing up on the farm in Breaux Bridge in a house with no bathroom, bathtub, toilets,… bathing from out of a pitcher and bowl on a dresser and using an outhouse. But Tisolay? The utilities during her childhood consisted of kerosene for lamps after dark, ice for the ice box, and wood or coal for a stove that did triple duty cooking, doing laundry, and bathing people. How surreal is that compared to the machines, computer centers, internet, robots and AI that are sucking every drop out of our overworked power grids today.

~~~~~~~~~~ no running water ~~~~~~~~~~

A jarring image of her early life, provided by Michael Savad again, showed me what it really meant to have no running water in the kitchen.

A ‘kitchen sink’ would actually have been a table or cabinet with raised sides, big enough to hold big basins, buckets, and bowls, as well as pans and pitchers. Containers came in an endless assortment of sizes and materials (tin, wood, earthenware) because jobs that required water came in an endless assortment. Buckets of water for cleaning would be carried in one at a time from the cistern or well outside. And since it had to clean the dishes, the house, the laundry, the people themselves, and then have to be hauled out again from bedrooms, house cleaning buckets, kitchen washpans and off the stove, it was used sparingly and often reused. Buckets of water for consumption and cooking were hauled up onto the stove or to a table under which another array of bowls and pans awaited for all manner of food collecting, preparation or cooking. The cabinet top usually had a hole in the bottom for any water that spilled into it and an empty bucket inside the lower cabinet to catch it. Sometimes a metal lining for the table top and sides, and the hole in the bottom, turned the table itself into a basin of sorts. I suppose lifting 40lb buckets of water up onto tables or the stove wouldn’t have been anything new to Tiwazzo. And just before moving to Lake Charles, she would have gotten used to carrying water up and down stairs from the few years they lived in a two-storey house in the little town of Parks a few miles down the Teche.

Other kitchen sink scenes of Savad’s gave me hope, though, that things might not have been so hard . . . that a basin cabinet could have had a pump jack mounted to one side, connected to a cistern through a pipe under the house. Sears showed me that pumps were indeed available in 1907 for cisterns as well as ground wells. Whether rental houses merited being equipped with kitchen water pumps, I don’t know.

~~~~~~~ kerosene ~~~~~~~

Savad’s kitchen sink contained a detail, a candle sconce with a tin reflector backing, which reminded me that Tisolay’s house wouldn’t have had electricity either. Electric lights, first suspended over Ryan St intersections, then fitted to a streetcar line and major business buildings, had only just started to spread to new construction for the wealthy, much like plumbing.

The idea of kerosene lamps gives me chills, and they must have been one of the more dangerous parts of everyday life. They did cast a wonderful glow over a room, though . . . table lamps, sconces, ceiling-mounted lamps, and the very dangerous hand-carried kind.

Norman Rockwell makes it look quite genteel, filling all the lamps in the house, and clipping or replacing their wicks. But there was nothing nice about cleaning the black soot from the inside of their glass chimneys, to say nothing of the air-borne soot that gradually settled on the curtains and rugs and furniture and whatever else.

A 5-gallon can of kerosene costs 50¢ ($15.75). If 1 lamp around a family table was lit for 4 hours a night (dad’s reading, mom’s sewing, kids are doing homework or playing a game), it would use about 3 quarts a month, and a 5 gallon can would last about 6 months.

~~~~~~~ ice ~~~~~~~

Ice was delivered every few days, usually in 50lb blocks which would’ve cost around 12¢ ($3.78) apiece, which would be about $1.44 ($45.36) a month. The delivery man would carry it into the house with tongs and heave it into the ice compartment of an ice box. Ice boxes were surprisingly expensive, more than those big cast iron stoves sometimes.

There is a photo of a Lake Charles ice delivery wagon in 1910 with a man and two boys. It is stamped as part of the Gerdsen Family Collection, and it’s possible it was a Gerdsen family business, or they were affiliated with the city’s ice company, which was owned by the Bird/Landry families that, unbeknownst to Carmen yet, she would marry into.

The Gerdsens, Danish/German Foehr Islanders brought to Lake Charles by Capt. Daniel Goos whom I’ve told you about, settled around St John’s Lutheran church a few blocks up Moss St from the Champagnes. (Tisolay’s neighborhood had once been informally called Germantown.) And since ice was generally delivered several times a week, the Champagne family might have known this man and the boys quite well, especially since they were the same ages as Presley and Roosevelt.

After a day or so, the ice had melted enough through the little hole in the bottom that you could pull the pan out and drink it . . . so good and cold in the summers.”

Is that where you got your thing about ‘ice cold milk’?

That happy chirp, “How would you like some ICE cold milk?”, was such a beloved part of my childhood soundtrack that even after I grew up, I never had the heart to tell her that when something is really ice cold, you can’t taste it. Like vanilla ice cream; if you let it get a little soft, the flavor of the vanilla really blooms. I’d eat milk in ice cubes, though, to have a recording of her asking me that, just one more time.

“Ohhh, the ice cream! We’d sit on the back porch and crank and crank til our arms ached. So sweet. .. and yes, ICE cold.

And milk was delivered too, but it was in big metal jugs that someone had to come out to the wagon with a pitcher or bucket to get. Before there were bottles”

~~~~~~~ horse and buggy salesmen around the neighborhood ~~~~~~~

“Coal was delivered to the house, too, in a big wagon that the man brought round the back of the house where he’d shovel it into the coal bin. Sometimes my Daddy would pick me up and we’d go outside to talk to the man, but he really just wanted to say hello to the horse. Farmers came from the country and drove through the neighborhood, too, with their fruits and vegetables early in the morning. People sometimes paid him with chickens and eggs in trade, so we sometimes got eggs from him, too.”

I have a hard time seeing gentle, ladylike Tiwazzo buying a live chicken, wringing its neck then chopping it off, plucking it, gutting it, etc, but that would’ve been the normal course of the day on the farm, wouldn’t it. They didn’t have a butcher a block away.

“All sorts of things came to the house in horses and wagons. It was all things you could get in town but that Mama said cost more in stores, like scissors, umbrellas, mirrors… hairpins and combs; everyone had long hair then. Sometimes it was magazines and books, paper and pencils. There was one man who brought sewing things, like buttons, needle and thread, ribbons, patterns, and fabrics… curtains and sheets if he had room. He always stayed and let you look all you wanted, and if you brought your scissors and kitchen knives out, he would sharpen them while you looked. Neighbors would come out, the women, and visit while they looked through patterns and fabrics together.

There was one with medicines… tonics, they called them.”

“There was a man with cleaning things, soaps, brooms & brushes, mops and buckets and washtubs of every kind… and those rolling rug sweeper things.”

“There was a handyman who went around with all his tools and different supplies. Everyone had a song to call out what they were selling, and he sang out the things he knew how to fix. He always had screens because of the mosquitoes. He could sharpen things, too, but I liked the man with the ribbons and buttons.

We had a pie man, the Boohoo man. He didn’t have a horse, just walked around wearing an old top hat and long black coat someone gave him. Said when you ate one of his wife’s pies, you cried when there wasn’t any more.”

Now what was so hard that Tisolay couldn’t just tell me little stories like that?

~~~~~~~~~~ bathing ~~~~~~~~~~

I can think of 100 ways a conversation could’ve started. “Oh, that’s like the pretty flower pattern on the pitcher and bowl we had on our dresser.” Or some such. Anything. It would’ve just taken off, so easily. ~~~ “Oh, no, not for drinking, for bathing. There was a dresser across from the bed with a big pitcher and bowl, and we’d sponge off every morning with a wash rag from the bowl. Tiwazzo would bring up a pitcher of hot water every morning.” . . .

“. . . We did everything there, fix our hair, brush our teeth… “(that certainly would’ve elicited a comment or two, the idea of brushing your teeth in the bedroom).

“. . . And there was a mirror. Papa shaved in front of his.” ~~~ He didn’t shave in the sink? ~~~ “There was no sink; there was no bathroom. Only rich people had bathrooms.”

Pear’s Soap’s version of “Woman Taking a Bath“, with its Victorian taboo against nudity even in the bath, was a far cry from Degas’ more realistic (read: French) depiction. I wonder where 1907 Lake Charles fell on that continuum being on the far edge, but not really a part, of French Louisiana.

There was no such Victorian prudery on the other side of the pond; few European Impressionists could resist the beauty of a woman’s body at the bath.

Sears even taught you things with what they left out of their catalog, like how fast plumbing technology was changing America.

In 1898, all different kinds of portable tubs were available, with only one semi-fixed one that awkwardly folded up around its pipes like a Murphy bed. But by 1907, there were no portable tubs offered anymore, only the one whole-body ‘Plunge’ tub, and the rest were for plumbed bathrooms, clawfoot tubs, etc. Only the all-purpose round washtub remained, the kind you can still get today.

Who bathed you? Did Tiwazzo? Beulah?

Did you ‘graduate’ from being in your parents’ room as a toddler, maybe being bathed in their tub, to living in your sisters’ room, where I presume bathing duties periodically fell on them? You never talked about Beulah, and it seemed like you two didn’t spend much time together. She was 16 when you were 2, so maybe her mind was too steeped in the world of boys, or more serious things, to really get to know her baby sister.

Carmen was 13, though, and we already know how close you two were. Did she bathe you?

My favorite Pear’s ad makes me imagine Carmen, as you grew up, putting the bowl down where you could reach it and teaching you how to bathe yourself, .

When your hair started getting really long, after Beulah graduated and became a working girl, was it Carmen who brushed your hair and got you ready for school?

~~~~~~~~~~ (aside) ~~~~~~~~~~

Tisolay loved Pear’s, so I grew up with it. She had it in her twinkly silver and crystal bathroom, along with her 2 Dresden figurines, and it looked like a giant amber jewel, completely clear. I remember holding the soap up to my eye and looking at her through it?

Those figurines were all still there 40 years later when she died, albeit a good bit worse for wear, covered with decades-old rings of yellowed scotch tape she would put around the arms and one of the necks when they got knocked over. She fixed everything with scotch tape. I don’t know how I was never one of the ones who broke one, because Tisolay would lay me down across the vanity with my head hanging back into the sink and wash my hair, with all those delicate breakable things maybe pushed a few inches back against the wall, nothing more. Who knows, maybe I was. She would never have told me so, though . . . just stuck a piece of tape around it.

If you stood in front of the sink, you saw the back of your head reflected from the medicine cabinet mirror behind you, but if you opened the medicine cabinet door just a bit, a magic portal opened up in the mirror in front of you with the front of your head, then the back, then the front, on and on, through a twinkly pink and silver wormhole that curved off into infinity.

A year after she died, Hurricane Katrina hit, and repairs ripped that mirrored wall out. I didn’t know that I would never live in that house again.

Pear’s soap and Dial shampoo in the triangular orange bottle; I’d know both those smells anywhere.

~~~~~~~~~~ Cisterns, outhouses, and bathing in the kitchen~~~~~~~~~~

Anyway, back to the conversation we could’a had, but didn’t , about there being no water in the house. “That’s right. All through grade school, our water came from a cistern outside the back door. Mama had to… ” Yep… I’d’a stopped you right there. I loved cisterns, and you knew that. “Wait a minute. You had a cistern? Remember that day when I came back from meeting Yola with the shots of Adeo’s house [Ti’s grandfather], and the one with Geraldine in the back yard with the cistern off the back steps?.. the one where she’s holding the kitten up to her face? Now, what would have been so bad about telling me about the cistern at your house? ~~~— No, you didn’t know them. Yola was Adeo’s baby sister’s grandchild, your 2nd cousin several years younger than you. She went to live with Tante Sin and Adrien after Adeo died when she was in her early teens . . . something about trouble with her new step-mother. Never left, brought her husband to live there, had Geraldine… they stayed until Tante Sin died in 1962.

I did love cisterns, the raised, wood-barrel kind on a round brick base, connected to the roof by a gutter, usually right off the kitchen door. A few old houses in the historic districts in New Orleans still have theirs, though they aren’t used anymore. I found the circular brick base of one under about a foot of dirt in the yard of my old Victorian on Magazine St when I was digging to find out why the yard wouldn’t drain after a rain.

Ruins of old Acadian houses I used to see up and down Bayou Teche often still had the remains of theirs. That was back in the 80s, though; they’re gone now.

I may know who built your cistern, and his shop is on the Sanborn maps through 1898. He was one of only 2 in 1895, a few years after 617 was built, and had been in that shop for at least 15 years. When you were a girl, everybody but the rich still had cisterns, though not many were being built anymore. You would’ve been running in and out of Karl’s and Bernard’s houses all the time, and they were all well-off or outright rich. That picture of you over at the Bel mansion on the corner, for Della’s birthday party?.. Jeez, that house must have seemed like a castle to you.

Was she uncomfortable when they came to her house? I really don’t see embarrassment over something like not having plumbing and electricity causing her to never speak of her childhood. I understand that something very sad was a part of her home life, that she was the target of a bully in her own home, and I ache for her. And I know she had a good reason for not wanting to talk about it. It’s not that I don’t respect that, at least I hope I’m not disrespecting it. But she threw all the good out with the bad, and the majority of it was good. And it killed me that she was ashamed of her life and of being Cajun, with their hard-won heritage and the incredible, ‘what-are-the-odds’ resurrection of their culture in Louisiana.

Hell, Ti, I left my job and my field, went back to school, went all the way to Nova Scotia, found your 11-x-gr-grandfather’s house cellar site, took a filler stone out from between two boulders at the bottom of the cellar, the layer I know he would have laid with his own hands back in the 1670s, and I put it into your hand. ‘Thou shalt not be ashamed of who you are. You are a work of art’. Besides, I was always able to make you laugh about things, and give you a different perspective. Even there at the end, when you were so scared, forgetting who people were. We had some pretty hysterical laughs, right up to the end. And… it’s just… I can hear your voice, how you’d sound having fun with it, … messing with me with that wide-eyed deadpan look, holding it as long as you could before cracking up.

“We did take baths, you know… (wait for it)… on Saturdays in a big washtub downstairs in front of the stove; the girls first, while it was still clean”. Oh, ewww! “It wasn’t so nice by the time it was Roosevelt’s turn.” And you’d watch my face as I got more and more weirded out. “Of course we had clothes on. We wore a bathing gown, light and loose.

J Euclide and Tiwazzo probably had a small tub of their own in their room, for a little privacy. I wonder if Tiwazzo helped bathe J Euclide like the French miner’s wife.

“Upstairs, at the dresser, we just bathed under our nightgowns. The bowl and pitcher were part of a set. There was a soap dish and a mug for our toothbrushes, all with the same flower pattern.” Oh, you’d have had real fun delivering the coup-de-grâce).

“Even the chamber pot, except we kept that under the bed.” ~~?!~~ “Well, of course! You don’t think we went out barefoot to the outhouse in the pitch black and rain, do you? And the next morning, you’d take it to the outhouse and empty it.”

Oh yeah, right, YOU brought it out … little miss baby-of-the-family, apple-of-everyone’s-eye, don’t-know-what-a-can-of-Comet-is!

Man, I just can’t wrap my head around Tisolay going to an outhouse as a regular part of her life. I gotta say, though, that I love the little child’s seat from the Nevada folklife museum(below). And I guess we know where one of the most likely places to find a Sears catalog was… albeit not in its complete form.

~~~~~~~ laundry ~~~~~~~

Of all the labor involved with doing everything by hand and from scratch, everything I’ve read says that laundry was the most hated part of turn-of-the-century housekeeping. Without electricity for the washing machines, water heaters and irons we know today, everything about laundry was a nightmare. And it involved the stove as well. In fact, it monopolized the stove for most of the day, and some followed a tradition of doing weekly laundry on Mondays because the Sunday dinner could usually be stretched to provide Monday night’s as well. Clothes that had been set to soak the night before, then boiled that morning, would be lifted from the scalding water with a stick or tongs into the tub, where a washboard awaited, or a machine. How often did things fall on the greasy floor in front of the stove? How often did they plop back into the pot, splashing scalding water over Tiwazzo;s hands? Grueling work, and the clothes haven’t even touched soap yet.

The question is… did Tiwazzo stick with the old ways and scrub with lye soap that did God-knows-what to her hands? Or did she have a machine? Whether she did or not, I’m gonna assume she had a wringer (they called them mangles?) which could fit either washtub or machine. And I’m also gonna assume that she had a laundry boiling pot on her stove, a large oval pot that fit over a front and rear burner.

Surprisingly, or maybe not so much, I found no evidence that Degas, Mary Cassatt, Toulouse-Lautrec, or Picasso were ever inspired by the beauty of a woman heaving heavy dripping blobs of scalding wet clothes out of a boiling pot on the stove with a stick. There were no vintage photos either. But there were trading cards.

Some of these cards show a housekeeper working together with the lady of the house. I don’t know if the Champagnes had a housekeeper of any kind when they were in their first house, still by themselves. But these cards make me wonder if the woman Tisolay remembers as a cook actually did the whole housekeeping thing, including helping Tiwazzo with the laundry. It also makes me wonder about the dynamic between the sisters, since Mathilde was 11 years younger than Tiwazzo. Did she provide the second set of hands that made the job easier, or did she fall back on her role as Tiwazzo’s baby sister?

The only realistic image that gave me a hint of what a laundry day might have looked like in the Champagne household wasn’t of a laundry day at all, but of a canning day. Or rather the day after, after the mess had been cleaned up and everything put away except the shiny colorful jars of goodies spread across the tabletops.

Tisolay said several times that her daddy loved puttering in his vegetable garden, and everyone back in rural Bayou Teche had a vegetable garden, so I guess Tiwazzo canned her husband’s vegetables. Tisolay couldn’t boil an egg, and after she married Granddaddy, wasn’t allowed to, but she was a wonderful gardener (though for flowers and ornamentals, not vegetables), and she might have gotten her love of gardening from him. With 7 people, he may not have had a lot left over to can. Who knows.

But look at Michael Savad’s picture, an old black-and-white photo that he has breathed life into. Hidden behind the stove in the corner is a bunch of oversized pots and pans sitting on a bench wringer. The big pot on the stove, probably used to steam-seal the canning jars the day before, would’ve done double duty as a laundry boiler if the regular larger oval laundry pot, the kind that sat on two burners, weren’t needed. If Beulah were asked out on a date for that Saturday, and the dress she wanted to wear were dirty, and laundry wasn’t til the following Monday, she might’ve put it in that pot.

She ‘d have left the wringer where it was, with everything on top of it, and wrung it out by hand. In south Louisiana, where it rains frequently, and even on sunny summer days, 90% humidity routinely left clothes smelling moldy before they could dry, laundry was often dried in the kitchen on a long line strung from wall to wall. Beulah wouldn’t have needed to string the line up, though, cuz there was a fan-style drying rack high up on the wall above the pots in the corner, used for small things and individual washings. Barely recognizable, on the upper shelf above the stove’s warming closet, was a sad iron for after the dress was dry.

I can imagine how this kitchen would look laid out for laundry day, with two big washtubs on the table for soapy water and clean rinse water, and a wringer on the end of each one. Maybe a basket after that to receive the wrung-out clothes, and at the foot of the table, a self-standing radial-arm drying rack. If they had a wringer, maybe the table was pushed back and the wringer set up alongside the stove. Tiwazzo would’ve had a clothes line outside, and a line to stretch across the kitchen when needed, and it would’ve been a juggling act, dashing clothes and sheets in and out between rain showers. Maybe the table was where the ironing was done.

“Sad” irons were solid iron and heavy (sad being archaic English for solid), and had to be heated on the stove. They were sold 3 to a set and used all at once, rotated as they cooled. Many had a single interchangeable handle that didn’t get as hot as the solid-cast model.

There were small pot-bellied stoves made especially for boiling laundry in big wash basins, whose “belly”, rather than being round, was multi-sided with flat facets that each held an iron up against it. These were most likely for larger use than the single family, perhaps a hotel or boarding house, or a laundry business.

~~~~~~~ laundry and the psychology of class distinction (*who knew!*) ~~~~~~~

No, Tisolay, you know what? What if the real question isn’t so much whether Tiwazzo had a washing machine to do the laundry or not, as whether she did her own laundry at all. I’ve always been puzzled by you saying that Tiwazzo didn’t cook and never taught you how to cook… that you grew up having a black woman for a cook. Weird, partly because Cajun French women, and men for that matter, were famous for their cooking, but mostly because you always said that there was never any money for anything but the necessities. Yet, there was enough to pay a cook. Which leads to the question, would Tisolay give the job of cooking to someone else, but keep the far-more-obnoxious job of laundry?

It led to a lot of questions, actually. Was Tisolay using the word ‘cook’ euphemistically, because after 8 decades, she’d finally learned the current political incorrectness of the word ‘maid’? I don’t think so. But they surely didn’t have two separate women doing the cooking and the cleaning/laundry. The real question, though, was why hiring a cook was not in the same category as other luxuries you said your family couldn’t afford. Why did Tiwazzo and Mathilde think that regardless of how meager J Euclide’s salary may have been, and the fact that there were 2 ‘women of the house’ who could’ve split the dutieswork, hiring a cook was still a necessity, not a luxury? Then I thought about Tiwazzo and Mathilde’s childhood back on the farm and what their mother Ada would’ve been like, being the baby of 22 children in a well-to-do, slave-owning family. She would’ve been taught how to cook, but she’d have had a cook whom she taught how to cook. And she’d have taught her girls, expecting them to teach their own cooks how to cook. Ada got married right after the war was over. How did she raise her girls? Maybe I needed to look at what little I knew in a new light, maybe take the ramifications of the Civil War and the farm’s loss of their labor pool more into account than I had been. I knew that it decimated Louisiana’s farm economy, but that was 40 years before. Louisiana had recovered. What was I not seeing? Okay, bear with me here.

Ti, you remember the picture of Adeo’s house up by the road, how plain it was? I was so excited when Yola gave me a picture of your grandfather’s house, the house you remembered visiting so vividly when you were 5. But I was a little disappointed, too, that it wasn’t one of those classic old Acadian houses, with the staircase on the front porch going up through the ceiling into the steep overhung attic that was the boys’ garçonniere, and the porch wall with its whitewashed bousillage between the beams.

Yeah, I seriously freaked when I went to the Acadian Village outdoor museum and saw that one of their restored houses was Ada’s uncle Narcisse Thibodeaux’s house, built in 1820 when he got married. (He was Adeo’s great uncle, as Ada’s mother was his aunt.).

Then there was Tidouce’s house next door to Adeo which had been built by her grandfather Omér, Ada’s older brother, in 1851 before the war. Tidouce’s daughter Verna was the cousin that Tisolay told me to look up when I first visited Cajun Country and didn’t know anybody. Verna brought me to Tidouce’s house that first week because they were packing it up to sell, right after Tidouce died, but it was at night and I never got a picture of it. Then it was gone, bought by someone who moved it to another parish and restored it. But I remember it.

I remember the tiny, dangerously steep staircase in the livingroom, almost like a ladder going up to the attic, which must have been the staircase from the front porch. Maybe the garçonnière stairs came inside when Tidouce’s parents realized she would be their only child and there’d be no need for a separate boys’ quarters with its own entrance. Verna had been an only child as well, so it was never needed outside again. I also remember the thin black threads of 130-year-old moss sticking out of the livingroom walls all along the door frame where the bousillage had crumbled away, taking the wallpaper with it and dropping grit all down the arm of the sofa. So many layers of wallpaper? And I thought it was a riot that the top layer was like this psychedelic 1960s Peter Max design, big orange flowers. I can’t imagine Tidouce sitting still for that, even if she were as true to her name as everyone said. (Tidouce means little sweet one.)

Anyway, Adeo didn’t build a traditional Acadian house for Ada, and I’ve always wondered why. It took me years to put various facts together surrounding not just the family history but the history of St Martin parish. Turns out getting married on January 14, 1869, right after the Civil War, was only the start of it. A Yellow Fever epidemic 2 years before had swept through the family, particularly his uncles who would’ve communally helped build his traditional Acadian house. They were also the men who’d been farming the land that supported the family while the young ones were off at war. Adeo returned 2 years later to a farm that no one was farming and a family that had lost its income and labor pool, both black and white. Soldiers from the Mississippi River Valley above New Orleans were returning to find their former slaves gone to more racially hospitable parts of the country or trying to carve out a niche of their own in the new Reconstructed Louisiana, but Adeo returned from the war to find many of his grandfather’s former slaves still on the land, nowhere to go and no way to go there. St Martin Parish, the oldest French enclave west of the forbidding Atchafalaya Basin, had much less contact with the English language, and the slave population even less so, and when they were freed, they were not only cut off from the housing, food, clothing and health care they’d once gotten from Adeo’s family, but also the language skills that would’ve enabled them to go elsewhere. So they stayed as Adeo’s share croppers, working the same fields they always had and paying rent for the cabins they’d always lived in, on the far west edge of the Thibodeaux property where the cane fields begin to sink into the swamps around Lake Martin. Signs of where their homes were, over 150 years ago, are still visible in the vegetation growth patterns.

Adeo may not have had the money to build what he could have before the war, but he had a population of sharecroppers to work the land. And because of the mass family death in 1867 necessitated a repartitioning of his grandfather’s estate, I suspect the few surviving heirs made a little bit of money from the sale of the land that had belonged to the many unmarried aunts and uncles who had no heirs, which his father eventually bought for the sons of his second marriage, Adeo’s half brothers. The wives and daughters of the newly-freed Black Creole families were desperate to earn what pennies they could for their families and took what work they could cleaning houses and cooking for nearby white families, as they had before, at rates far lower than they could’ve gotten had they left. Did Ada, the baby of a huge family, know how to do the hard work of keeping a house? Did she teach her girls to keep house? Or did Adeo pay someone pennies on the dollar to keep his house? Did Alicia (Tiwazzo) and Mathilde grow up amidst what was, in essence, a similar version of the social structure that existed before the war, keeping the women of the Black Creole families in the servant class?

Whatever the reason, your granddaddy Adeo didn’t build your grandmother an Acadian style home like the ones they’d grown up in, but he did enlarge it with a side extension which I’d imagine is where your family stayed when you went back to visit in the summer of 1910, since Adeo, Tante Sin, and Adrien were all still there.

You had some pretty great memories of that house, considering you were only 5 the last time you visited. I love that you remembered him as Yépope, which I assume Beulah and Carmen, his first grandchildren, named him, a corruption of vieux papa, “old” papa, as opposed to J Euclide, who was just plain papa. You remembered the big oak down by the water that I’d study under 70 years later, and the long tire swing in the pecan tree next to the house up by the road that swung you so far out. You even remembered the two cedars that Tante Sin planted on either side of the front steps 5 years before, little scrawny things she’d planted when she married Adeo. They became lush beauties in the 1964 shot, and then served as markers for me in the 80s when they were the only things in a solid field of swaying red grass to indicate that a house, barns, a cistern and water pump, countless little out buildings and sheds, animal pens and coops, and a family had once lived there. Mostly, though, you remembered the train that passed behind the house, right before the cane fields started, and how it passed so slowly that the conductor was able to say hi to everybody as he tossed their newspapers into their back yards. You remembered running out the back door for miles, through grass twice as tall as you to meet the train, when you heard the conductor blow his whistle way far away to signal that he would soon be there. 

She didn’t believe me when I told her that the yard, though big by city standards, was just a regular-sized, fenced-in yard, and the railroad tracks were right there at the back of it, just a minute’s stroll from the back door.   “They must have moved the tracks!”. Memories of a 5-yr-old who’s only 3½ feet tall. What a charming thing to see something through your grandmother’s eyes, but when she was only 5 years old, 60 years younger that me now.

Wait… You were 5… that trip was in June of 1910… dear God, that was 6 weeks after Lake Charles’ terrible fire!! Oh, wow, Tisolay, was that what that visit was about? Was the reason you remembered it so well because you stayed there for longer than you remembered?..like the whole summer? The following year, the 1911 directory showed that y’all were no longer in the spacious 2-story house at 511 Moss St., but had moved a few doors around the corner to a tiny cramped cottage that your mom & dad would never have moved a family of 7 into if there’d been another option. I’ll bet your landlord needed the house, maybe because he’d lost his own home, or maybe because he was raising the rent to what a wealthy, suddenly-homeless family would be able to pay. I’ll bet you anything your Daddy sent y’all back to Breaux Bridge to stay with your grandfather because he was looking for another place from that impossibly small house on Mill St.

I imagine Lake Charles was something like New Orleans after Katrina… businesses and stores destroyed, the town lawless, and armed looters roaming the wealthy neighborhoods around the town center where grand homes, though unlivable, were still full of expensive things. The town center itself; City Hall, the Courthouse and all their records, the main Catholic church and school, and ironically, the fire department, was dust in the wind, flat land blocks of wood ash and twisted pipes, the occasional chimney or cistern standing alone. There weren’t enough policemen to control the disarray, and hundreds of panic-stricken homeless people had lost everything they owned, many of them wealthy, some no longer so, but most of them ill-equipped for homelessness and life without servants.

Is that what happened with Tiwazzo and Mathilde? Helpless women who’d always had servants and never learned how to cook or clean? Or was it not so much an inability as a conscious choice not to do housework, to hire someone else to do it, the last vestige of their status as descendants of one of the founding Acadian families who became one of the wealthier landowners in St Martin Parish, and the only way left to them to claim the dignity of what their ancestors had once been.

Back in the 1980s, when I was just starting to cook myself and collecting cookbooks from places Mother and I had traveled to, I told you about this new interest, as I did everything else. I’m not sure how much I noticed at the time, but looking back, I remember a certain silence about my cooking where you were usually excited about anything that excited me. I had no experience with disapproval from you, so I may not have recognized that that’s what your silence was covering up. I teased you for being out-of-step, thinking that cooking was something a servant did, not a hobby for someone above a certain class and education level. And I knew you loved being the wife of a well-to-do banker high up the social ladder of New Orleans society. But it never occurred to me that there were deeper historical roots over many generations behind what I thought was silly snobbery, and that it might not be so much an expression of status and wealth as the shame, or leftovers of your mother’s shame at having lost it.

Is this why Tiwazzo didn’t cook? You always spoke of her as so delicate and genteel. Was this ‘code’?… that she was a lady, and ladies didn’t cook or do laundry?

Wow.

None of this negates the picture I’ve been building in my head of what my grandmother’s home might have looked like, how it was furnished, which technologies informed her childhood lifestyle, etc. But when I started a chapter about finding my grandmother in a 1907 Sears catalog, little did I know that it would end with a real shift in my own mindset regarding the division of labor in Tisolay’s home, the socio-economic effects of the Civil War in my own family, and the psychology of perceived class stratification. Hmmm, building wild hypotheticals and theories about people based on nothing more than a few sparse facts, filling in the rest with correlations and circumstantial evidence regardless of accuracy, has nonetheless furthered my concept of my grandmother’s childhood. But is it right to hit the ‘publish’ button and put it out there? I could be completely wrong, and I hope the spirits of my ancestors don’t visit me in the night and kick my ass, which I could well deserve.

On that note, I’m shuttin’ this one down, but only til Part 2, which visits the rest of the house.

~~~~~~~ cont’d on next post ~~~~~~~

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[for my own organization: 58.5 screen pgs. — Moving, unpacking, 511 Moss, & 1907 Sears catalog – 2 . . . stoves – 15.5 . . . kitchen cabinets and contents – 3 . . . moving(cont’d), shipping, furnished vs unfurnished? – the light dawns – no running water, 5 . . . kerosene – ice, 6.5 . . . horse and buggy salesmen- 3.5 . . . bathing – cisterns, outhouses & bathing in the kitchen, 11.5 . . . laundry, 7 . . . laundry and the psychology of class distinction (*who knew!*), 4.5

The post 1907-1912, the forgotten period- pt.1 appeared first on My Old New Orleans Family.

What if the drayman, with his wagon backed up to the loading dock at the foot of Hodges St., were finished loading the Champagnes’ trunks and boxes and antsy kids, and simply led his horse straight down the loading ramp onto Hodges, never mind Railroad Ave. He’d pass John Isaac’s Southern Pacific Lunch (something) as before, but this time on his left. The whole right side of the first block was a bare field, apparently owned by the depot and left bare, presumably for parking carriages and wagons, picking up and dropping people off, and all the waiting in between. The left side was built up, but it had a different feel to it than the first block of Moss St with its shanties. It was more commercial, like a continuation of Railroad Ave businesses that wanted one last shot at catching the eyes of the newly-arrived or not-yet-departed, or those waiting in between, all parked right in front of them. Restaurant after restaurant targeted the hungry. It took a bit of work if you were a restaurant wanting to feed those who had to be in, fed, and out in 20 minutes, the time it took the train to take on its next load of wood and water. There were also soft drink shops, which made me remember a photo I’d seen in the archives a while back. The map that identified these buildings as soft drink shops was published in 1909, only 2 years after the Champagnes arrived, but something relevant had happened in between, in June of 1908, that may have made “soft drink stands” out of what had been saloons. There was a cluster of photographs of the event that merited captions from our intrepid Maude Reid, each with a slightly different slant. I’ll let her tell you.

~~~~~~~ the Prohibition vote ~~~~~~~

Podrasky’s, which at various times was a gen’l store, a restaurant and a boarding house, was about 4 blocks east of the depot. The day before the vote, there was a parade that marched down Ryan St to the Courthouse, where the voting took place.

“Headed by the First Regiment Band of Lake Charles, a parade of women and children, hundreds of them, marched down Ryan street waving flags and carrying transparencies with mottoes urging voters (men only) to vote out saloons in the town. Shelby Young, an attorney, and O.A. Throner, Methodist minister, headed the parade. This parade took place the day before a parish vote was taken on the liquor question for Calcasieu … Even the sisters from the local convent marched in the parade – for the first time – heading a group of little girls with banners asking that the voters ‘Protect Our Homes’ and ‘Vote for Us.'” – Maude Reid

Well, Ti, here’s another one I can’t imagine y’all didn’t at least stroll over to Ryan St to see, a parade passing by on the day before the vote. Hmmm… June 8, 1908 was a Monday; would your dad have been allowed to leave work at the freight depot and meet y’all half way at Ryan St? It may have depended on the train schedule, which wouldn’t have changed for a little voting parade …

[… she laughs, having grown up in New Orleans which unapologetically grinds to a halt for the whole week of Mardi Gras, mystified that the rest of the country expects to find us still at our desks when their phone calls come in.. No, trains don’t change their schedules to accommodate parades there either; I’m just sayin’.]

I’m looking at the crowds of people. Are you in there somewhere, in Tiwazzo’s arms, or Beulah’s? Are you in the actual shots somewhere? Probably not. I recognize those stores, and they were in the 700 and 800 blocks of Ryan, west side. They’d have passed you back at Division or Mill St. Plus, y’all wouldn’t have been on the west side of the street.

I wonder. If your dad couldn’t come get y’all, would it have been proper for Tiwazzo to take y’all by herself, or would there have to have been a male escort? Presley would’ve only been 11 at the time. Surely, though, she could’ve walked the few blocks to the grocery store or meat market, and the parade wasn’t any further than that. You mentioned once that y’all had a cook, and you may have said that Tiwazzo didn’t cook. Grr – I don’t remember. Did she do the grocery shopping? Maybe it was Mathilde who didn’t cook and had hired a cook? How I wish I knew more about your family life back then.

[I wouldn’t question the assumption that Tiwazzo was a traditional Cajun French cook if it weren’t for the fact that Tisolay never cooked a day in her life. Tiwazzo never taught her. And Granddaddy would’ve had a conniption had he ever seen her with a can of Bon Ami (like Comet) in her hands. He considered her job to be practicing the piano and raising my mother. That’s it. And keeping him company. In their elderly years, their long-time housekeeper retired, and Tisolay, in a rare existential moment, began to question her value as a wife if she couldn’t even cook her husband a meal. So she decided she was going to take over the cooking. I don’t remember how it happened, or what she did to the stove, but Granddaddy told the painters to leave the carbon star on the kitchen ceiling for last so Ti would be reminded to never attempt something like that again.]

Ah, Helen. Fifty years later and I can still smell your fried chicken. Standing there in the kitchen singing church spirituals, but in place of ‘Jesus’, it was ‘Laura’. “Ohhh, Laaaaaaaaaura, Showmetheway”.

Anyway, I know you were only 3, but that day may have had you in the midst of a rather celebratory atmosphere, and having nothing to do with the temperance parade. June of 1908 was when Beulah became the family’s first high school graduate. The 1940 census told me that Tiwazzo only finished the 6th grade (though her handwriting was exquisite, wasn’t it!), so why wouldn’t she be proud and feel like taking a stroll down to a parade. If your Daddy didn’t have any trouble leaving work, maybe he came and got y’all for a family outing, so you could walk with him down to the courthouse when he went to vote. How would he have voted? I never heard you mention anyone in the family being a drinker, and I know your daddy was an easy-going guy. Maybe he went ahead and voted for the family-friendly thing, though it may not have been a passion for him one way or the other. Who knows, though. Tiwazzo couldn’t vote, but she could have influenced him.

Another of Maude Reid’s captions – “Here is a picture of the old-time ‘hacks’ that were used for passengers in our town until automobiles became popular. Here they are lined up for an election to outlaw saloons in our town. Lake Charles women were very active in this campaign and they were successful in having Lake Charles voted dry. The numerous saloons went out of existence.”

Well, Miss Maude, I’ve heard otherwise. Lake Charles probably did what the rest of America did and sent their booze underground, in the guise of, say… soft drink stands and restaurants. Just a few years before that vote, a group of Lake Charles men had a photo of themselves taken in front of a Railroad Ave saloon a few blocks east of Podrasky’s that the Champagnes’ train would have passed on the way in. Miss Maude seems to have enjoyed captioning this one, since she added to it several times over the years.

Chicken Thief Bunch, ca.1905, – “Photo taken in front of Richard Sarvaunt’s restaurant & bar on “Battle Row” between Reid & Kirkman. Notice the board advertising “Oyster Stew”, 10 cents. . . . . The bench that ~~ are sitting on, I was told by ‘Red’ Carlson, was not meant to be used for lying down purposes. It was alright to sit on it as long as you wished but if you dared to lie down, you would be instantly and none too gently knocked off. No place for drunks to sleep. . . . . This group got their name because they had been known to be careless as to where they got various birds, chickens or turkeys that they brought in to the restaurant from time to time, to be prepared for their delectation along with frequent mugs of cold beer. . . . The hawker was employed by the Battle Row saloon keepers to bring into town, every Saturday pay day, mill workers to be relieved of their week’s wages.” – Maude Reid

Miss Maude, you did have a way with words. But the restaurant sign doesn’t actually say ‘& bar’, it says ‘short orders’, another highlights oyster stew, and ‘Cigars and Tobaccos’ is elegantly advertized on the window glass. ‘Sodas’, ‘pies’, and ‘coffee’are painted on the wall… this place wouldn’t have had to skip a beat!. The chicken thief bunch wouldn’t have had to, either. I’ll bet the policeman seated at far right, his badge quite visible, kept right along going as he always had. I wish the 1903 Sanborn map, before the 1908 Prohibition vote, had written in the names of those 1909 ‘soda shops and restaurants’ that were along that first block of Hodges, cuz the signs out front when the Champagnes rode past, that’s what they really were.

The second block brings us back to the Foehr Islanders and the pioneer style houses from the early days of Lake Charles.

~~~~~ the Bendixens ~~~~~

Volkert Heinriche Bendixen and his wife Johanna, 25 and 23, were betrothed but not yet married in 1872 when they climbed into one of Capt. Daniel Goos’ ships and crossed the ocean, together with many others from their homeland. The Frisian Islanders were unhappy with the recent transfer of their homeland, formerly, Danish, to Germany, and many families took the opportunity to send their oldest children, sometimes grown with families of their own, with Goos to Lake Charles and Galveston, Goos’ two centers of operation. And as these pioneers settled in, they brought other family members over, which is what Bendixen did, being the oldest son, eventually bringing all his brothers and a sister over. He was a carpenter for Goos and worked in one of his concerns in Vincent, a tiny settlement on the west side of the river south of town, possibly cutting trees since the mill was back in town. Many Foehr Islanders were loaned the fare for the trip by a family member who sponsored their immigration to Lake Charles, which in 1872 was $65, then worked for them, living with them for free, until the debt was paid. It would have taken longer to save the money to buy land, then build a house. I don’t know if this was how things were for Volkert, who by then was going by the name of Henry, but he was paid $20 (in silver dollars) a month for 14 hours labor a day, and worked for 9 years in Vincent before building the house on Hodges St.

In late 1880 or early ’81, though, he bought a plot of land in town, in the neighborhood where his fellow countrymen had settled, later known as Germantown because of them. It was 2 blocks from the German church, around the corner and across from a trading post. He must have been able to transfer to one of Goos’ work sites in town, because he told Maude Reid that, “he cleared the land of pine trees – cutting down one each evening after laboring during the day in mill work – until he cleared a space for this home.” According to Miss Maude’s caption to a companion photo of the Bendixen house, he continued on like this, clearing the way for a garden.

The house he built in 1881 was in the pioneer style traditional to early Lake Charles architecture. The railroad had only just finished cutting its way through the forests and swamps between Houston and New Orleans, connecting the major port cities for the first time.

By the time the Champagnes got to Lake Charles, Henry was 60, Johanna, 58, they’d long ago buried their two little boys, and one daughter had married and left Louisiana. Their last child Emma, however, though she was preparing for an upcoming marriage to a Seventh Day Adventist pastor, was planning on remaining there with her parents and her new husband. Though Bendixen’s house was already a corner property, he built, some time between 1903 and 1909, a Seventh-Day Adventist church on the corner of the corner right in his front yard, uncomfortably squeezed between the house and the intersection. I wondered which came first, the church, then the pastor’s courtship of his daughter, or her marriage, then the construction of a church for his son-in-law. If he built the church to try to keep his last child and her new family with them, it worked, at least for the first 10 years of their marriage. But why build it where it was, invasively close, right up against the left side of the front porch where it blocked not only the light onto their porch but their view of the intersection with all its social flow of passing neighbors and friends?

Forgetting that I’d already found the church on a 1909 map, I wondered whether it could have been built where it was as one of those dire consequences of the 1910 fire that required fast action… like maybe his son-in-law’s old church had gone up in flames and land close to the town center had skyrocketed in price. I don’t know why the idea flashed into my mind to look up whether the 1910 census, which listed the church next to the Bendixen home as having already been built, had been taken before or after the April 23rd fire of that year. But I found the date in the upper corner of the page, and my blood ran cold.

I may as well have been looking at a 2001 census for Manhattan’s lower west side and seen that the page that some census-taker had carried around from place to place all morning, in the shadow of the Twin Towers, had been written on “9/11” of 2001, minutes before two Al-Qaeda-highjacked planes flew into them. Because the guy had been going from house to house, ticking off the little boxes on that day’s pages when he heard the alarm bells go off. The date at the top of the Bendixen’s 1910 census page is April 23. I almost expected to see a jolt in his handwriting, and little seared holes burnt into the paper.

Anyway, regardless of when the church building was built, it was taken down soon after the church transferred the pastor to a new town in 1917, taking the last of the Bendixens’ children with him. Before she left, though, the family took the opportunity to take a road trip to California to visit the Bendixens’ other daughter.

By then you were 12; you’d probably seen this car going by with him in it, maybe he waved, missing the time when his daughters were your age. He’d watched you grow up. He died the year you married Granddaddy and left.

That trip may have been the last time all four of them were together, because 2 years later, when he was 72, Henry’s wife Johanna died, on Jan. 1, 1919… (Happy New Year, Henry)… leaving him alone in an empty house for the first time in his life. A year later, the 1920 census shows him listed as a lodger in his own house, living with a family who’s renting from him, and he’s no longer listed as working. Ditto in 1930, but with another family. In the summer of 1931, he went to New York to visit with his daughter Emma’s family, intending to return before winter, but he didn’t. In November of 1931, he was killed in a car accident, run off the road coming back from a Seventh-Day Adventist church convention.

~~~~~

Past the Bendixens on the left, there were, and still are, two homes that are very different, one quite creative in its woodwork, the other simple, long and skinny with a dogtrot porch running along one side (since closed in) that was probably built as a rental. Both were rented at the time the Champagnes first rode by, though, the simpler one rented to the Railroad Ave merchant E G LaBauve, whose dry goods store the Champagnes would have seen back at the depot.

Then at the end of the block on the right, there was, and still is today, another house that Maude Reid captured in one of her freeze-frame memories.

W W Durbridge, a man from New Orleans who’d been hired as a switchman by the Kansas City Southern railroad, was renting the house in 1907 when the Champagnes’ carriage first passed by. Long the home of Judge A J Kearney and his family, originally from the fishing community of Cameron on the Gulf Coast 30 miles south of Lake Charles, 1907 saw the house rented out temporarily during a reshuffling of the grown children after their widowed mother moved a few blocks away. Their son Johnson Kearney would marry late in life and move back in and raise his family there through the 20s, all younger than Tisolay. The above shot of the family was taken in 1894, 7 years after the cheerful, well-respected judge’s death. And Maude Reid, 12 years old at the time, remembered them all.

“Mr. Kearney came to Lake Charles from Cameron and was district attorney at one time, in the 1880’s. One of Judge Kearney’s sons was M. D. Kearney who had a drug store on Ryan street in the 80’s and 90’s. This picture taken in 1894, after Judge Kearney’s death, shows his wife and children. Left to right, they are – Milledge, Belle, Irene, Laura, Mrs. Kearney and Johnson Kearney. Upstairs, taller than the door, is Charlie Kearney. The house is still standing [1935], practically unchanged, in the possession of an Italian named Sam Navarro.” – Maude Reid

Long shaded beneath lush tall trees that were stripped to their bare bones by the 2 back-to-back hurricanes of 2020, the house now stands baking in the merciless Southern sun… but stand it does, still.

~~~~~ the Perkins family ~~~~~

The 2020 hurricanes took out many of Lake Charles’ magnificent 150-yr-old trees, some much older, but it is only because of that that Google Earth was able to give me a full view of this next great architectural hodge-podge, the Claiborne Perkins house that greeted the Champagnes on their left as they crossed Lawrence St into the 400 block.

There weren’t yet many trees tall enough in 1907 to obstruct the view of a house, so today’s post-hurricane view is probably much like when they saw it.

If Sanborn is any indication, the house itself is much the same as well. Its scale befits the family living in it. Claiborne Perkins was the 5th generation of his family in Calcasieu Parish. His gr-gr-grandfather Rees Perkins was the first justice of the peace in the parish that was mostly wilderness before Lake Charles was even an outpost.

Sometime around 1818, he built the storied Perkins Ferry just north of town that serviced Texas ranchers driving their cattle to New Orleans, sometimes carrying 2000 head across the Calcasieu in a single day. Maude Reid makes note on a photo from the 1920s of the ferry carrying a car, being pulled along a rope that spanned the river, that the ferry was still in use over 100 years after it was established, which would’ve been through Tisolay’s teens.

Did you ever get on that thing, maybe with a bunch of friends, and help pull it along the heavy soggy rope that guided it to the other side?

When the Champagnes’ carriage passed gr-gr-grandson Claiborne’s house, there were a lot of kids around, the ones still at home being the same ages as Tisolay’s older siblings, but none near her age. Mr Perkins was 47 and the Hodges St house was full of children then, but he, his family and his house were soon to lose the heart of the home when his wife Nancy died a year and a half later at the age of 45. If he were at all in need of his four oldest daughters’ help in running the house and raising the youngest 3, he didn’t have it for long. A year after their mother’s death, three girls had left home, and the fourth was getting ready to get married and leave. Even the children next door, the orphaned Runte children whose uncle took over their tutorship and let them rent the house under the care of their 19-yr-old sister Mary, had gone, taken in by Mary’s new husband Simon Baker Jacobsen down the block on Moss.

By the time baby Stella was old enough to know her neighbors, she would only have known Mr Perkins as a widower whose life had changed a great deal.

Across the street from the Perkins house, flush up against both corner sidewalks, was a 2-storey grocery store with a shady awning extending out over the Hodges St. entrance. It was nearing, or at, the end of its indeterminate lifespan as a grocery store in 1907 when the Champagnes drove by. Because by 1909, Sanborn shows the 2 storey structure as being moved back from the street, more toward the center of the lot, the awning removed, and having a new double verandah, full width, across the front. Mrs Cecile LeBlanc had opened up a boarding house.

Next door to Mrs. LeBlanc’s boarding house was a rental cottage with nice Eastlake gingerbread trim at its roof peaks. The Masons didn’t have any children, and they were only renting for a while in Lake Charles, as he was a railroad engineer that the company moved around. Today, like so many others after the 2020 hurricanes, it is no longer shaded by the tree we see here in the 2019 photo, which now only exists in photos.

A couple houses further down from the Masons were the Richardsons.

Clement Lanier Richardson was a doctor from a family of doctors in N. Carolina who came to Louisiana in the 1860s, and Lake Charles in the ’80s. Maude Reid captioned this 1895 freeze-frame of his family in the 1930s:

“This house built in 1883 by Green Powell, occupied by the Cagle family, then bought by Dr. Richardson in the 1890’s. Mrs. Richardson is on the gallery with her daughter, Mary, beside her. In the garden Dr. Richardson is holding Helen, …Shaler and Lanier are at the right, behind them stands Willie Richardson.”

When the Champagnes passed their house 12 years after this shot, the good doctor was a comfortable 65 and his wife Emma was 57, with only their last two teenagers still at home. Their oldest 3 had given them grandchildren, but none that lived in Louisiana.

~~~~~ The Hutchins/Reid clan ~~~~~

Across the street from the Richardsons was the ‘old Hutchins home’, as described in Maude Reid’s photo caption, home of William Louis Hutchins, Jr., who by 1907 was an elderly widower, his children grown and gone, all but the 17-yr-old daughter by his second marriage still living with him.

I don’t believe Miss Maude’s date on the photo, though. It is built in the old pioneer style, but the 1895 directory states that, “in the early part of 1883 . . . the houses owned by J.G.Powell and Judge D.J.Reid were the only houses east of Hodges Street.” I know both those houses. Plus, little hints of events surrounding its construction, which was a protracted affair, suggest it was completed around 1882-1884.

I think that the house currently on that site is the same house, which would make it roughly 140 years old.

Its porch has been closed in, which we’ve seen before, but the doorway and its side lights are the same. The roof has had a gable put in, fleshing out a 2nd floor space, but it still has its original two-window configuration on the north side. Most telling is the slender rear wing that extends off from the back, a bit off center, indicating that a porch had once balanced out the central position, just as it’s drawn on the early 1900s Sanborn maps. Strong bones these old houses had.

I don’t know if Lawrence St (now Pryce) which the Champagnes had just passed represents the property line that David Reid drew between the land he sold in lots to the Foehr Islanders in the 70s and the land he retained for his own family. South of Lawrence St, though, the story seems to shift from the Foehr Islanders to two families of English extraction, both by way of N. Carolina, then St Martinville in Cajun Country, though I haven’t found any evidence that they knew each other before reaching Lake Charles. David John Reid, Sr. and William Louis Hutchins, Sr. were also both in their early 30s in the 1850s when they moved their young families to the backwoods outpost of Charlestown, and both had young sons, Jrs, named after them. Reid we know as a builder of ‘colorful character’ who went into politics only because of an injury.

Legend has it that David Reid built this house, or at least started building it, early on. Frequently, throughout her wealth of writings, his granddaughter Maude says with pride about many of Lake Charles’ oldest houses (still extant when she was writing in the ’30s and ’40s but now gone) that “Grandfather Reid helped build this house”. One of her favorites was the old ‘Babe’ Rosteet home. From several shots and captions of the house, she tells us that the original house, built in the 1850s by her grandfather for Joe Charles Sallier, still existed in the center of the Rosteet house, which was built around it in the 1890s.

Joe Charles, son of Charles Arsene Sallier, the early settler that Lake Charles was named for, adopted a little girl left in his home for a few days by her father, a widowed friend moving to Texas with his only child. He had gone ahead for some reason and never come back, and everyone assumed that he’d been killed before he could return for her. The Salliers had no children of their own and the girl inherited the house, married Miguel Rosteet, and raised her family there, including ‘Babe’… who was a boy, by the way. Babe’s widow, Grace Lebleu, is pictured here with her friend Lorena H Walker, William L Hutchins’ middle daughter, in front of the house that ‘Babe’ expanded for her after their marriage some 50 years before.

I found the story of the orphaned girl that Joe Charles adopted poignant, but when Joe Charles was 13, something happened that really is, officially, the stuff of legend. His father, the original settler, had been one of Jean Lafitte’s captains sailing as privateers for one government or another, and sometimes for a fictitious government under forged papers. When Sallier settled his family on English Bayou north of Lake Charles, he served as a ‘fence’ for Lafitte’s stolen goods but also as a close friend whose family welcomed Lafitte into their home on the occasions when Lafitte sailed up the bayou to unload his ships into Sallier’s warehouses. One of Sallier’s children would later write down some of her memories of Lafitte’s visits. Like much of south Louisiana, Lake Charles didn’t ostracize Jean Lafitte as a pirate, but considered him a savior whose loot often saved New Orleans from crippling embargoes by the British. It was his fleet, offered to Andrew Jackson in exchange for amnesty, that won the Battle of New Orleans for the city. The lore, possibly exaggerated, is that Lafitte was in love with his good friend’s wife. Historians find no evidence of an affair, however, and simply feel that Sallier’s shooting of his wife the day before Christmas of 1819, when he saw her and Lafitte talking together, laughing, was a fluke flair of jealousy. Some say he saw his wife fall, then ran away in horror on his horse and never returned. Documentation exists that he started a new life elsewhere and had a child with a Native American woman, who would in turn have a daughter, Clothilde, who would briefly marry (and make life miserable for) John Martin Reid, the Judge’s even-tempered younger brother. (Still with me?)

Interestingly, the family today is in possession of the amethyst brooch Sallier’s wife was wearing, possibly a gift from Lafitte, which still shows the marks of the bullet that hit it, knocking her over but not killing her as her husband had thought. Today, Contraband Bayou which flows through the southern part of Lake Charles into the lake is named in Lafitte’s honor (and has been much dug up by treasure hunters because of it), and the town holds a festival every year called Contraband Days in which the mayor is made to ‘walk the plank’ by the pirate-costumed population. Usually, this simply means being pushed, or pre-emptively jumping, off the town wharf.

While Reid was still building houses, before his political career had started, William L. Hutchins, a young newspaper printer from a family of printers in Opelousas, was settling into the new pioneer outpost at Charley’s Lake and starting up Calcasieu Parish’s first newspaper, the Gazette. He did not live to see the boom town that Lake Charles would become, dying 2 days shy of his 43rd birthday in 1865, but he did live long enough to see his son return from the Civil War. W L Hutchins Jr. enlisted in 1861 as a Confederate sailor when he was 17, re-enlisted in ’62 with the Cavalry, then was transferred to the marine department where he served aboard several vessels until the last one fell to Union soldiers. He was put in a federal prison in New Orleans, which had fallen to Union forces very early on, and his escape was noted in an 1891 biography of noted early Louisianians. I found a painting by Louisiana artist Robert Rucker that goes nicely with it.

“After remaining [in prison] for six months, he made his escape by boring a hole through the brick wall of the prison and made his way to Bayou Sara [near Baton Rouge] on the steamer “Empire Parish” as a deck hand. From there he went to Tunica Landing where he crossed the river and made his way through the Atchafalaya Swamps to Morgan’s Ferry. From there he went to Washington, La, thence home, on board the gunboat previously mentioned.” – William Henry Perrin, 1891

Hutchins Sr. did not, however, live long enough to see his son marry into a family that would become the ‘movers and shakers’ of Lake Charles civil service, the Reids. Despite the many difficulties people had with the temperamental DJ Reid, his daughter Eugenie’s marriage to the intrepid jail breaker just months after his father’s death was the first of several Reid/Hutchins partnerships that would bear fine fruit in Lake Charles. The town’s newspaper editor now gone, and Reid the new owner of the paper, Reid hired his son-in-law’s uncle Bryant Hutchins, a newspaperman like his deceased brother, to publish a new paper. The two Hutchins families, uncle and nephew, and the newspaper, are referenced in an 1870 drawing of the settlement’s main block of stores and businesses at the time.

Oh, look, Tisolay. Louis S. Leveque’s house is in there, too. You didn’t know him; I know. Ask Carmen, she’ll tell you.

Besides depicting Hutchins Jr’s general store, his uncle Bryant’s newspaper office, and the Lake Charles Hotel that was run by his aunt Marie Adeline, it also mentions Louis S Leveque. Bryant Hutchins and Judge Reid’s partnership at the Echo had been a trio, the third being Louis S Leveque whose building is in the drawing, and whose sister’s grandson, fifty years later, would marry my Tisolay’s beloved sister Carmen. But you knew that.

Anyway, at the time of this drawing, W L Hutchins, Jr, a 26-yr-old merchant with a store on the lake’s edge, was living with his 23-yr-old wife Eugenie, a toddler, and a newborn in a house built and given to them by her father DJ Reid. It was on a curve of the river north of town, next to a lumber mill that Hutchins owned.

There’s an 1890s photo of the north riverfront from the vantage point of the Hutchins home, though they’d already moved to Hodges St. The little skiff in the right foreground is floating in a blanket of lavendar-spiked water hyacinths. Miss Maude describes the house as “charming, very pretty and rustic, on the bank of the Calcasieu River north of town, with a great yellow climbing rose covering the front gallery which was wide and cool. The children, however, were always sick with chills and fever and it was suspected that the place was malarial. The miasma from the river was considered unhealthy (never having heard that mosquitoes might be doing the mischief), so Grandfather Reid, who had begun the erection of a comfortable cottage on Hodges St, gave the unfinished home to his daughter Jenny”. I love how Miss Maude finished the last sentence, as it so discretely understates the amusing history behind the ‘old Hutchins home’ on Hodges St and the role played by DJ Reid’s own home only a block over and down. It also understates the best-documented hot-head among Lake Charles’ founding fathers. Too bad for him that his granddaughter turned out to be the town’s prime legacy keeper and story teller.

~~~~~ the Hutchins and Reid homes ~~~~~

We know that Reid’s career as a builder ended when he was accidentally shot… some say in the arm, others say in the foot, but he kept his hand in, possibly using his sons for what he could no longer do. Reid family lore concerning the Hutchins home on Hodges St has it (though I have my doubts) that he was in the middle of building the house for his wife Mathilde as a surprise, since she’d been complaining for 2 decades about the “crudities and inconveniences of the primitive home Grandfather had first built when he came to Lake Charles in the ’50s, and which he had never improved. Finally, one day in a huff, she picked up her bonnet and left him – going to her daughter Jennie.” This and the following quotes and information are from Maude Reid’s family biography in the McNeese archives. Discovery of it is thanks to Trent Gremillion, Miss Maude’s present-day counterpart as haute Lake Charles historian extraordinaire.

Miss Maude describes the Reid home that her grandmother Mathilde found so uncomfortable as being still on the edge of the forest where the streets had not yet been cut through, which indicates that Lake Charles, a north-south strip along the east bank of the lake, was barely 3 blocks deep, with the forest only cleared maybe a block further. The house had four rooms downstairs with two bousillage fireplaces at each end (mud and moss squished into a wooden chimney frame like plaster), and was divided down the middle on the bottom floor by an open dog-trot breezeway connecting the front and back galleries. There was a set of porch stairs on the back gallery that led to an attic where the boys slept when their father, a multi-faceted entrepreneur as well as a judge, was using the residence as a courtroom and general business office. The kitchen and dining area was in a separate one-room log cabin with an adobe fireplace about 30 feet away.

I’m with Madame Reid. It sounds like a lot of exposure to bad weather rushing through a wind tunnel barricading one part of the house from the other, never mind having to run 30 ft to the dining room to eat, several times a day . . . for more than 2 decades . . . in hurricane country. Building a house that sits half-finished for 20 years, but suddenly it’s a present for his wife? Yeah. So she left, the judge stopped work on the house, never spoke to his wife again, and gave the house, unfinished, to his daughter Eugenie (Jenny) and her husband, William L Hutchins, Jr. In his defense, though, Miss Maude makes note that it was a stress-ridden time for the judge, the end of the 1870s.

“In 1880, David John Reid became a candidate for the office of Sheriff once more – a position that by this time had been more important to Southwest Louisiana and Imperial Calcasieu than that of the Governor of the State. But Reid was defeated for this office – the first election defeat that he ever suffered – and the last. I have been told that Judge Reid never forgave Thad Mayo for the part he played in the campaign when the contest was between himself and Dr. Munday for Parish Delegates to the Constitutional Convention of 1879 [the convention that abolished the position of judge that Reid had held for decades]. Many years later, Mrs. A. M. Mayo [Thad’s nephew’s wife] told me the following anecdote. It seems that among all the horses, sheep, goats, hogs, etc., Grandfather had a number of pea-cocks, the admiration of the village. These pea-cocks used to strut about the grounds, with tails spread out, making a noise very much like – may-oo; may-oo – and after their political quarrel in 1879, Grandfather’s attention was called to the noise these creatures were making and how suggestive it was of his enemy’s name. He immediately had the fowls killed, saying that he never wanted anything about him that even remotely suggested Mayo…. I may add, parenthetically, that I consider this story apocryphal. I refuse to believe it!” – Maude Reid biography, McNeese archives

Miss Maude was born the year after the judge died, though, and never got to meet her irascible grandfather for herself. There were others, however, who described the judge mellowing with age. In his obituary, someone wrote that, “… he was ‘a good hater’, and strongly intolerant towards those who incurred his dislike, though, in the last few years of his life, he buried many of his old resentments, and made friends of many who were formerly his enemies.” Perhaps “Mayo”-screaming peacocks were just more than he could stand.

Mellowing in one person’s view notwithstanding, the 1880 census clearly paints a picture of the divided family dynamic surrounding this difficult man. The Judge is retired and living in the old Reid home, wind tunnel and all, with only his youngest two teenage sons with him who can now sleep downstairs where the judge’s offices had been. The attic now free, Reid apparently considered his wife’s departure permanent enough to have rented out the space to 5 working men, in boardinghouse fashion, with the help of an elderly widowed black woman for a live-in housekeeper who I imagine slept in a corner of the kitchen outside. In another house, the census finds his estranged wife Mme. Reid, 58, and his older son David Jr, 22, living with his oldest daughter Eugenie and her husband WL Hutchins Jr., now 32 & 35, in their charming cottage amidst the malarial miasmas on the river north of town, next to Hutchins’ lumber mill. David had been out of his father’s house for 6 years, since he was 16, first living with his Uncle John, the Judge’s brother, a man described by Miss Maude as amiable, and neither ambitious nor power-hungry “like his brother David”. John often employed his nephews at his butcher shop, and took them in when they ran away or were thrown out by their father, as David was. When William Hutchins gave his young brother-in-law a job at Mount Hope Mill; that’s probably when he went to live with his sister. David was listed as a clerk in 1880, but it didn’t say where. But the old judge may have regretted his behavior toward his son, because before his death in early 1881, he got his son a job with the city government. In any case, it must indeed have been a spacious house because, together with a houseful of 7 children between 12 and 1, they also have a guest living with them, May Helm, a schoolteacher from Galveston.

William L Hutchins, apparently a devoted big-brother figure to David, not only gave him a home and a job, but he also ended up finding the young man a wife, doing so in the capacity that earned him the nickname Captain Willy. And indeed, the marriage was one of the finer ‘apples to fall from the tree’ of Reid/Hutchins partnerships. Somehow, between running a general store and owning a lumber mill, William L Hutchins found time to captain a mail boat that ran between Lake Charles and Cameron on the gulf coast, going down one day and back the next, twice a week. He had befriended the Helm family from Galveston, a widow and the two grown daughters she’d followed to Cameron where they’d gotten jobs as school teachers, and often enjoyed supper with them. But in the summer of 1879, the tiny coastal village was wiped out, first by a hurricane whose storm surge washed much of the village out into the Gulf, then a typhoid epidemic which one of the Helm daughters, May, barely survived. (In her fever, she kept hearing the village carpenters hammering at what she was told were people’s homes being repaired, but were actually coffins being built from morning to night). After the storm, Capt. Hutchins heard that Mrs. Helm was planning to move her family back to Galveston. Hoping to prevent this, he offered to bring the ordinarily lively, fun-loving girl home with him for a few weeks of recuperation and a change of scenery. Maude writes amusingly of her dad’s courtship of her mother May and his propensity for practical jokes. May, whom Maude describes as “irrepressible, finding fun in everything”, must have delighted in witnessing, shortly after her arrival, David drawing a devil’s face and mustache on his big sister Eugenie’s infant son with charcoal from the fireplace. Eugenie, who’d said nothing, waited until the household was asleep, then crept into her brother’s room and beat him up with a stick. May almost threw away David’s letter proposing marriage, thinking it was part of one of his jokes. I imagine Eugenie’s mother Mathilde heard a great deal more laughter in her daughter’s home than in the Judge’s.

Oddly, May and her piano music charmed the Judge, and he would visit her in the bustling Hutchins home on the river, sometimes bringing others to hear her play for them. Once, lifting the lid of the piano for one of them elicited the response, “Look! The durned thing’s got teeth!” I suspect May could well have played a role in his eventual rapprochement with his son. The old man didn’t live to see his son and May married in December of 1881, though, because the previous February, at the age of 57, the cantankerous Judge Reid breathed his last. Nor did he live to see the ‘new’ Hodges house finished and the Hutchins gang moved in, which they did a few months before the wedding. But then, he also didn’t have to live through the loss of his oldest girl Jenny (Eugenie), Hutchins’ wife, the big-hearted (by all accounts!) daughter who never got to live in the house her father’d given her, instead following her father to the grave 2 weeks after him, taking with her the Hutchins’ 9th child born just 4 days before.

~~~~~ Hodges and Pine intersection, 1880s construction ~~~~~

Her husband and brothers David and Jack did, though, and timing suggests that that’s when they threw themselves into construction projects on 3 of the 4 corners at Hodges and Pine. The Hutchins house was built and moved into by the end of 1881, finished by David and Jack and their sister Mary’s husband Peter Broderson (one of the Foehr Island seafarers), in time for David and May’s wedding. In the Spring of 1882, the young Broderson family moved to Oregon, taking the Judge’s widow Mathilde with them.

William Hutchins was not absent from the construction boom on Hodges and Pine, though he was not a builder as the Judge had trained his boys to be. When Eugenie died at the start of 1881, I’d imagine the long-widowed Marguerite Eulalie Hutchins, who’d been living with her daughter’s family, moved into her son’s home on the river north of town to help with the kids. In January of 1883, though, William L Hutchins got remarried to Lizzie Hennington, whom he may have met through her older cousin Leanna, the wife of Dr. Abram H Moss who’d just bought the old Reid home and was building a new house there.

I think it wasn’t until then that he had a little cottage built for his mother, catercorner from the house he would soon be moving his family into. While it was similar to the old Hutchins home in its pioneer styling, begun by the Judge back in the 1860s, it was obviously finished after such Victorian features as bay windows and ornamental column brackets were found on even the simplest of houses. And that would most likely have been after the 1880 completion of the railroad that first opened Lake Charles up to the architectural influences from both Houston and New Orleans.

Maude Reid knew her Uncle Willy’s mother, the Widow Hutchins, when she lived there, and knew the tenants who came after she died, some of whom she wrote of with affectionate familiarity.

“The MacIvers were neighbors of ours when we lived on Hodges street. Mr. MacIver, a quiet little Scotchman, was a piano tuner; his wife was a lively little Jewess from Philadelphia. They are shown sitting on the porch in the picture. This house originally belonged to Mrs. Wm. Hutchins. It was occupied before the MacIvers took it over by a family named Folks who had two boys, Ernest and Luther. The house has now been moved back on Pine street and is a wreck.”  – Maude Reid

In 1884, David won his father’s lucrative position as both sheriff and tax collector, the latter earning him commissions, so he hired a couple of his friends to build a different kind of home for him and May, one of the finest Victorian homes in Lake Charles up to that point.

Miss Maude writes fondly of the house that she and her 3 younger siblings grew up in, as well as the magnificent garden to one side of the house. The pride and joy of her father, he’d designed it after Jackson Square in New Orleans. A lush orange grove opposite the garden was home to a crane who lived and roamed free, “giving the kids a run for their lives” on a regular basis. The orange trees, seen in the 1894 photo at right, will not survive to see another season. A freak unprecedented snowstorm in just a few months, in February of 1895, will kill them down to the last tree.

I found it hard to imagine snow like that in South Louisiana until I ran across a shot of the Moss home, around the corner from the Reids, taken after the snow let up. In fact, the Moss home was on the site of the old Reid home. And the rear property line of David’s new house abutted perpendicularly to the old Reid home site where he’d grown up. Dr. Abraham Moss, who’d torn down the judge’s old west-facing wind tunnel of a house, built his home “right between the trees Grandfather Reid had planted around his own home”, but facing south.

Actually, I should call it the Moss/Bel home, because you already know this house, though you wouldn’t recognize it except for the cupola. Moss sold it to J A Bel, and over the course of 2 remodels, Bel created the magnificent Bel mansion that you know from the photo I found in the McNeese archives of my 8-yr-old grandmother in front of the house at a Bel garden party.

Now that’s snow!

There’s an earlier shot of the house that must be from the early 1880s, not long after Moss built it, because the Widow Hutchins’ cottage is plainly visible at left in the distance, which it won’t be after David Jr. builds his fine home right in that line of view.

Fourteen years after David Reid built it, around 1900 when he was 44, he sold his fine home and gardens and built another house 2 blocks farther down the recently-extended Pine St, passing Moss St for Ford St. I showed you this house, too, early in Part 1 of The Route Home, the house Maude Reid spent her entire adult life in. He sold the Hodges St house to Mrs. Julie Muller Marx, a forward-thinking, 13-yrs-younger-man-marrying (wink*) entrepreneur and founder of the hugely successful Muller’s department store.

~~~~~ Hodges & Pine intersection, 1907 ~~~~~

By the time the Champagnes arrived in Lake Charles in 1907, 20-something years had passed since W L Hutchins moved to Hodges St with his second wife, built his mother a house, and watched his brother-in-law David Reid build May a showpiece of a home and garden on the corner between them. In that time, the coming of the railroads had turned Lake Charles into a boom town. When the Champagnes’ carriage passed the old Hutchins house, though, the good Captain Hutchins’ boom was nearly done. Still there at 63, widowed for a second time, nearly alone in the house except for his last child from his second marriage, a 17-yr-old daughter, William L Hutchins would be gone the following year. In fact, many things about the intersection of Hodges and Pine, stable for 2 decades, would be gone or changed within 2 years of their arrival, things baby Stella would not remember like her older siblings would. It’s possible that little Stella never knew the man living in the old Hutchins place, but she would know several of his grown children and grandchildren. Because the Reid/Hutchins clan of cousins that had put their stamp on the Hodges/Pine intersection had reconstituted itself a block away on Moss, where it would play a dominant role in the neighborhood the Champagnes were settling into.

Passing old man Hutchins’ house, then the bicycle shop on the corner, the Champagnes’ carriage would have turned left onto Pine just before reaching the Widow Hutchins’ house, by then the MacIvers’ home, which was in its last year as well, at least in its original location. I read somewhere in Miss Maude’s biography (McNeese archives) that Capt. Hutchins hadn’t wanted any changes to be made to his mother’s house after she died in 1890, not while he was alive. He died in October of 1908, though, and the 1909 Sanborn map shows that the little house had already been pushed to the back of the property and rotated to face the side street, just as Miss Maude said. This was how Tisolay would have grown up knowing it. Sold and used as a rental property, she’d have seen the deterioration that Miss Maude referred to as well, and its eventual abandonment when the stock market crashed. It was torn down 3 years later, the year after she married Granddaddy and left for New Orleans.

On the 1909 map, nothing had yet been built in the little house’ original location, but the following year, the 1910 census reported that the 502 Hodges address was again in use, this time by the family of Alex Bluestein, a well-to-do dry goods merchant from Germany, age 35, with 3 sons the same ages as Tisolay’s brothers Presley and Roosevelt. Sanborn’s 1914 map provided the first look of the Bluestein’s house, an outline of a grand 2-storey home where the Widow Hutchins’ cottage had been, with multiple bays and a J-shaped, 2-storey verandah with a large, rounded extension at its corner. This is the house Tisolay would have grown up knowing. She would have seen its damage and repair from the 1918 hurricane when its upper verandah collapsed. It was replaced as before, but subsequently, as with so many other houses who wanted to turn verandahs they no longer used into rooms, the southern end of the verandah was closed in on both levels. Today, it has apparently been divided into several apartments, but it got a much-needed facelift after the 2020 hurricanes and is again quite a beautiful home.

One of my favorite photos in the whole archive immortalizes Bluestein’s on the night that Halley’s comet flew by overhead. An almanac told me that it passed over Louisiana on May 19th, 1910, 26 days after the fire. The comet was all over the papers for weeks. The whole country knew its arrival date, and all of Lake Charles probably took a brief respite from the woes of its upheaval that early Spring night to enjoy the unique phenomenon. The Champagne family most likely went outside for a few minutes that night as well, to watch its slow crawl across the sky.

I hope they brought you out with them and didn’t leave you asleep in bed. Remember Hurricane Betsy, when we rode out the storm at your house? Were you awake when Daddy brought me outside in the middle of the night? He must have had me up on one hip, half asleep, cuz I remember my face being right up next to his, looking up at the gaping hole in the thick spiraling blanket of clouds, and way up through to the clear black night sky above it all, a full moon. Everything was so still and calm and strange. Through the crisp air, the stars were like diamonds on a bed of black velvet. The moonlight showed the mess of fallen branches and leaves around the yard where a million puddled water droplets twinkled, but the rain had stopped After a while, it started getting windy again and Daddy brought me back in. I’ve always wondered if that night had anything to do with why I’ve never had a fear of storms.

The Bluesteins didn’t have to live through the 1918 hurricane that took their upper verandah down. Though their big brick dept store downtown survived the 1910 fire, 1911 was the last year it was listed as Bluestein’s, and by 1917, the Bluesteins had moved to Texas.

~~~~~ Reid Jr/Muller house ~~~~~

Rounding the corner and leaving the MacIver’s house behind them, David Reid’s old house would have come into view. It must have been a feast to their eyes. It was no longer the Reids’ home, and there’s no telling whether his magnificent garden was still as it was. But the house, which the new owner would make some major changes to some time after 1909, was still in its original form when the Champagnes first passed it.

A unique trend, however, was becoming popular in Lake Charles architecture about the time Mrs Marx bought the place, that was replacing the delicate Eastlake Victorian columns and gingerbread millwork with a more imposing, slightly tapered box column with recessed panels that would come to be known as the Lake Charles column. A few who could afford it remodeled the verandahs of their old homes with the new Lake Charles columns, and that’s what Mrs. Marx did with the Reid home. Sometime between the 1909 and 1914 Sanborn maps, she extended the double verandah out to be flush across the front and supported the whole with four columns of the new style, moving the whole house closer to the street while she was at it. Maude Reid commented in admiration of Mrs. Marx’s change, saying that it replaced “that ugly Victorian front”. To each their own, I guess, but I loved it. I’m glad she only changed the exterior verandah and columns, and not the actual façade of the house, the ornamental door casings in particular.

Ya’ know, your daddy would’ve seen the construction walking to and from work at the SPRR freight depot every day, watched them dismantle all the gorgeous woodwork from those verandahs. Those first few years, he’d have watched the new columns being built and lifted into place. He’d have seen the Widow Hutchins’ little cottage being moved and the fine Bluestein home going up in its place. Maybe he walked the family down that block every Sunday after Mass to see the progress on the various homes being worked on. It would have been something to watch, especially repositioning the Reid/Marx house. Y’all may even have known the family. Her 3 younger children, the Marx kids, were Carmen and Presley’s age. Maybe they walked home from Central School together.

~~~~~ Pine and Moss ~~~~~

When the Champagnes reached the intersection of Pine and Moss for the first time, they finally saw their new home, one door down from the corner on their far right. Were there any neighbors outside, sitting on their front porch? Young families? Any children? If there were, one would never guess how inter-related they all were.

Lorena Hutchins Walker, Captain William’s daughter, now 36, was in the corner house directly to the left of their carriage as they sat at the intersection (#5 on the map), and her baby brother Thomas Bristow Hutchins (he of infant soot mustache renown) and his wife were on the other side of her(#6). Lorena and Tom had settled on the west side of Moss, sorta back to back with their father’s house(#1), across from two of their Reid uncles, Jack and Fred (#7&8), and their great uncle John Martin Reid (#11) on the east side of Moss. Lorena was nearly Tiwazzo’s age, 40, and had been married nearly as long, but she and her husband John B Walker never had children, which was very unusual at the time and often the source of shame and criticism for women. Let’s hope they took comfort in their many nieces and nephews around them.

I’m sure she was close to her closest sister Maggie’s kids who lived next to David and May back on Hodges(#4), 2 doors down from where she grew up(#1), 3 doors if you counted the bicycle repair shop on the corner. Her 3 boys and 2 girls, ranging in age between 15 and 3, were within friendship and flirting range of the Champagne children, the youngest, Beatrice, being exactly a year older than little Stella. Her Uncle David Reid’s older kids(#10) were in their 20s, Maude off in New York at nursing school, but his youngest two were Beulah and Carmen’s age and may have taken the same streetcar to and from high school. Her brother Tom, next door to Lorena, had a daughter Vena also a year older than little Stella and another on the way. Across from Lorena and Tom, on the NE corner, was their Uncle Jack, Andrew Jackson Reid, and his wife Annie(#7) who, at 45 & 40, had supplied Lorena with 8 young cousins the same age as Lorena’s own children would have been. Ranging from 19 to 4, they were also in the same age range as the Champagnes, their youngest, twins Audrey and Earl, being just over… wait for it… a year older than Stella (what was in the water that year?). Married to Jack now for 20 years, Annie, who’d been a Hennington from Copiah County, Mississippi, came to Lake Charles and married Jack 5 years after her older sister Lizzie, deceased for several years now, had come to marry Jack’s widowed brother-in-law, Capt. William L. Hutchins(#1).

Catercorner from Jack and Annie, directly to the right of the Champagnes’ carriage, before it turned right onto Moss, were Ernest and Floy Bel (#12) who had a daughter a few months younger than little Stella. It was in a photo of her birthday party some 5 or 6 years later, out on her grandmother’s magnificent front lawn, where I first found Stella, my Tisolay, at the start of my Lake Charles research, sitting in the grass in the front row of a big group kids. Their home, a wedding present from Ernest’s father J.A. Bel, was situated behind the grand Bel mansion Ernest had grown up in, on the south side of the block(#13). Floy was the daughter of Dr. Abram Moss, the man who’d originally built the Bel house after tearing down the old Judge Reid home. Dr. Moss sold the house to Ernest’s father several years after he hired him to manage his lumber mill in 1885, which might be when Ernest Bell, then 5, first met little 3-yr-old Floy Moss.

Floy’s mother had also been one of the Copiah County Henningtons, the first to come to Lake Charles. Floy was born around the time her mother’s cousin Lizzie was getting ready to come to Lake Charles to marry Capt. Hutchins(#1). Five years later, in marrying Jack Reid, Lizzie’s younger sister Annie would complete the Hennington chain, one of several to link the Reid and Hutchins families.

Ernest’s heritage, like Floy’s, had its share of family-intertwinedness. His mother Della was a Goos, daughter of Captain Daniel Goos and Catherine Moeling Goos, whom we’ve met in a previous post, Leaving Cajun Country. His father John Albert Bel was a step-son of his widowed mother’s second husband Friedrich G Moeling, Captain Daniel’s brother-in-law. When the young man J. A. Bel made his mark on the lumber industry, he married his step-father’s niece, Della.

But even the Goos family couldn’t beat the Hutchins/Reid clan for family intertwinedness, exemplified by the family of Alfred Joshua Reid and Mary Ellen Lanagan Reid, who built the house on the remaining corner of the Champagnes’ new block, the “witch’s hat house” next door to the Champagnes’ new home. But that story will have to wait for another time. It’s a sad tale, actually.

Alfred Joshua Reid was the last of the siblings to build a home on the old Reid homestead(#8), which he did some time after 1895. They’d been there less than 8 years when a 6-week battle with typhoid fever finally took him, leaving Mary Ellen with 4 kids between 10 and 2. Some time afterwards, she moved her family next door into her Pine St rental property(#9, whose back yard connected perpendicularly with the Champagnes’), and rented out their fine corner house, most likely out of financial need. The renter was a Dr Carlysle Hamilton and his wife Camille, newcomers from Illinois who would only be in Lake Charles for a few years; no children. As the widow Mary Ellen’s back yard met with Tiwazzo’s, she’d have known each other, as would their children who, like so many of the other Hutchins and Reid children, were the same age. The kids would’ve walked or ‘streetcarred’ the same path to and from school. The oldest of the 4, Alfred Jr, would certainly have been worth Carmen’s attention, since a newspaper photo of him as a high school track star a few years later shows that he grew up to be gorgeous! But that first year, Alfred was entering high school and Carmen still had a year to go before she’d join him. Sadly, by the second year there, I’m not sure Tiwazzo would have encouraged her kids to associate with Mary Ellen or her family. As I said, a sad tale.

Aw, Ti. I love history, you know I do. And learning the history of your town and your neighborhood, and tidits about their private lives, does mean a lot to me. But are you in here? So much I wish I knew. So many children around you; were you friends with them? So many differences I imagine between your life at 511 Moss, and 5 or so years later, 617. Between the single family dynamic, where J Euclide and Tiwazzo lived as though their lives were their own to determine, and communal life with Tante Mathilde and Mildred, where financial and personality complications ensued. Or is my imagination making too much of Mildred’s bullying? If Uncle Michel hadn’t been hit by that train, and y’all had never moved in with them, how would things have been? That was the only unhappiness that you’ve ever admitted to, to me anyway.

It never occurred to me before, but what if it were Tante Mathilde’s money that brought a piano into the house and into your life? I think you’d say it was all worth it. Somehow that is hugely comforting to me, because I do think it was Mathilde who brought the piano into your home and your life.

~~~~~~~ cont’d on next post ~~~~~~~

The post The Route Home, 1907 – part 2 of 2 appeared first on My Old New Orleans Family.

It’s been months since I discovered the McNeese Collection of vintage photos of Lake Charles, but they still flood me with feelings of closeness to Tisolay, my grandmother, especially those taken of places and events in the same year she’d have seen them, letting me see what she saw through her eyes as a girl. It’s as though it were a gift from the universe, a moment when her eyes as a teenager then and my eyes now meet and we become conscious of each other and can visit, even take a walk together through the streets as they are today with the help of Google Earth’s street view to these places that could have been very meaningful to her in her young years. And she can tell me about the places in the old photos as they were in her time, when she knew and loved them. In those rare times when I can find an old photo of something that still exists, and Google Earth gives me the same view, the time merge knocks my socks off. When it’s of a place I already know was meaningful to her, and I know the role it played for her, it can bring me to tears.

When I put 2 and 2 together about my great aunt Beulah’s class ring, (see Leaving Cajun Country…) marked ‘1908, Lake Charles High School’, it disproved much of what Tisolay had always believed about when and why her family had left Cajun Country for Lake Charles. This pushed something of a reset button for me, but gave me a solid starting point in time from which to start over. For Beulah to have graduated in 1908, the family couldn’t have gotten to Lake Charles any later than January of ’08, and probably moved the summer before, in ’07, much earlier than Tisolay had thought, though being 2 or 3, she had no memory of it herself. I can imagine J Euclide and Tiwazzo, my grandmother’s parents, and the kids, spending their last Christmas on the farm on Bayou Teche, amidst the swishing sugar cane fields, their last Christmas with Yépope, as the kids called their grandpère Adeo, and his new wife Sidonie whom everyone called Tante Sin, and Nonc Adrien, Tiwazzo’s brother. By waiting til the middle of the school year, they’d still be there in November to help with the sugar cane harvest. I wonder, though, if Tiwazzo saw continuity in her children’s school year as a factor worthy of consideration, and rather than disrupt everyone’s school year, preferred to move in the summer before, in 1907. Considering Tiwazzo was from a rural farming community where school routinely took 2nd place to both the springtime planting and autumn harvest seasons, and financial constraints often required teenagers to quit school to work, it says something about her that all 5 of her children completed high school.

In any case, when the Champagne family stepped off the train in Lake Charles, be it in the summer of ’07 or the following winter, Beulah would have been 16 and entering Lake Charles High School’s senior class, knowing that she was on the cusp of going out into the world to find a job to help support the family, and meeting young men, one of whom would be her future husband. Carmen would have been 13, joining the freshman class, maybe just starting to be interested in boys, but probably not yet. Both girls were probably missing friends. Presley and Roosevelt, at 10 and 9, going into 6th and 5th grades, might not have formed bonds with friends as closely as the girls, but who knows. Were they resentful and reluctant to explore their new town, any of them? Were they eager and curious to know what town life was like? Little Stella (my grandmother Tisolay), being 2½ or 3, would have been a happy toddler, all eyes, unconcerned with changes. She wouldn’t be starting school for another couple years.

What would the first thing be that they saw of Lake Charles? Well, “comin’ right out the gate” as it were, almost the minute I found the McNeese Collection, I found a shot of exactly that, the first thing they would have seen, from the vantage point they would have seen it from, the same year they would have seen it . . . the Southern Pacific passenger depot, from inside the train, pulling in from the east, taken in 1907.

It floors me still.

~~~~~ the depot & Railroad Ave. ~~~~~

My God, Tisolay, look at this. For all we know, Uncle Michel is one of those men, waiting for your train to arrive, making arrangements with a drayman to manage y’all’s luggage and take everyone to your new home. “511 Moss St, please.” And it would’ve been a short trip, too, just 4 or 5 blocks south.

The depot’s gone, unfortunately, destroyed in a fire in the late 1980s, and its lovely turrets were taken by a hurricane long before then. Everything else around it, too, is gone, abandoned, the only remains of the businesses that catered to train travelers being the old concrete slabs, crumbling and shot through with weed-filled crevasses. A few of them still bear remnants of the walls they once supported, or did until the 2020 hurricanes.

A photographic moment in honor of the many people whose lives will never be the same, a city that isn’t getting enough help to recover, and a government that can’t possibly fund the barrage of disaster recoveries arising of global warming.

You would never know that even before the concrete, beneath the concrete, there’d once been a thriving little wooden community of boardinghouses, restaurants and storefronts catering to travelers up and down the road along the tracks… bakeries, barbers, drug stores and dry goods stores for those who’d left some necessity behind, groceries and meat markets for the restaurants and residents who worked in these stores and businesses. And of course, the saloons, billiards halls, and ‘red-light’ establishments, especially toward the far east end. In the 20s, my grandmother glided comfortably in and out of the station going to and from college in New Orleans. Whether she noticed that the little storefronts she passed as her train headed east out of the station, as well as the occasional scantily-clad woman, seemed to exist on a more licentious plane, I can’t say. Whether my great-grandparents J Euclide and Alicia (Tiwazzo) Champagne, 20 years earlier, knew why Railroad Ave was sometimes called by another, less official name, Battle Row, I can’t say either. But the drayman carrying the family and their luggage to their new home surely would have. Which street did he take? What were the first houses and people and little glimpses of life in Lake Charles did my little 2-yr-old grandmother see?

Two photos I’ve found through McNeese exemplify the two distinct personalities of Railroad Ave in those days when the Champagnes first saw it in 1907.

While it seems as though nothing remains of the depot, this is not exactly so.

A close-up of the above photos shows a 2-storey building with an upstairs balcony looking out over the far corner of Hodges and Railroad Ave. You can just make out the name of John Isaac’s restaurant, the Southern Pacific Lunch something, (the depot hides the rest of the name). The depot seems to sit at a level higher than the street, and you can just make out the faint lines of an iron railing, partly obscured by a luggage wagon, protecting those inside the depot grounds from the drop-off. Today, if you walk to the corner where the restaurant was, then turn back toward the depot site, you see a set of concrete stairs set into a crumbling retaining wall that tapers upward, once leading to a loading dock, the wall that held the iron railing at the southeast corner of the depot’s perimeter.

I can’t help but chuckle at the thought of the drayman deciding whether to avoid Railroad Ave entirely and take the newcomers down Hodges St straight from the depot, then switch over to Moss St a few blocks later, or to take Railroad Ave for a block to Moss St, then have a straight, 4-block shot to their house. He might have friends he could wave to, but there were 5 children in his carriage, after all. And maybe his friends were a good reason not to go down Railroad Ave.

If the driver decided to take Moss by way of Railroad Ave for a block, he’d have passed the Southern Pacific Lunch ‘something’ on his right, a bakery, and several groceries, before turning right (south) onto a block of shanties and small homes of laborers associated with the depot and the businesses around it.

~~~~~ Parsonage of the German Lutheran church ~~~~~

At the first intersection, Church St, when it started to feel like a neighborhood, one of the first things the Champagnes would have seen was a cemetery. From dancing bears and half-dressed women in the street to a cemetery; nothing Kafka-esque about that.

It was a quiet residential neighborhood, though, of wooden cottages with deep-shaded front porches. The older ones, typical of the earliest settlers, were simple, built without any particular architectural design in mind except protection from the heat… being raised off the ground for ventilation and having a deep porch for outdoor shade. The later ones were built after the railroad broke through the forbidding forest and swamp, bringing with it the popular Eastlake Victorian style of architecture.

One of the earlier ones, built around 1875, was the home of the Methodist pastor, across from the cemetery. The Champagnes would see the house a block or so further along their ride, but it had originally been next to the little wood frame church that the Champagnes saw on their left as their carriage took them into the 2nd block south of the depot. It was typical of the early homes built before the railroad, the Victorian style, and big money found Lake Charles.

The old German Parsonage photo is one of the lucky ones in the McNeese archives to have been collected and captioned by Maude Reid, an avid Lake Charles historian born in 1882. She put her collection together in a series of scrapbooks, a staggering body of work, and donated them to McNeese. In fact over the course of decades, she captioned several copies of this photo. She tells the story more succinctly than I can.

“The old parsonage of the German Methodist church [before it was called Lutheran] on Moss Street where, in the front room on the right, I was taught my A.B.C.s by Ella and Alice Usher in the late 80’s. It was built in 1875 for the first German pastor, Rev. S. Hoernicke and stood next to the church on Moss street, just across the way from the old cemetery. . . . Back in the 80’s and 90’s there was one section of Lake Charles known as German Town. Not only because the First German Church and parsonage were in this section, but many German families lived there. Here lived the Bendixens, the Hansens, Cordsens, Jessens, Jacobsens, Mathis and others. The area designated as German Town comprised that section from Church street to Ford [then named German St], to Division, to Hodges street north to Church street. . . . When the new church was built on Ford street [in 1889), the old church was made into a residence, later occupied by the Abrego family. . . . The house was later moved and now stands on Belden street, across from 2nd Ward School.” – Maude Reid

No, Miss Maude, not anymore.

Tisolay, you must have known Maude Reid. She was a nurse in the Calcasieu parish public school system all through your years; would’ve been in her thirties when you started school. Plus she lived right behind you; never married, never left the family home.

If nothing else, you’d have seen her visiting her whole cluster of Reid and Hutchins cousins who lived all around you, several with children your age. You’d have known who her dad was, too, Sheriff DJ Reid, Jr. You probably would have heard of his dad, too, though he’d been gone for 25 years, a powerful judge from Lake Charles’ pioneer days whose ‘colorful’ character and hot temper were often spoken of in tandem with his Scottish heritage. Reid Jr, the judge’s son, built this house around 1900, moving in by 1901. The verandahs got blown off by the 1918 hurricane and were replaced without the nice denticulates, but otherwise it looks the same today.

I know Mother drove you through the neighborhood sometime after Granddaddy died, I think it was on the way back from the Hurricane Andrew evacuation in 1992. So I know you’ve seen what these wonderful oaks have done for the neighborhood in the century since you first knew it as a bare, wide open space, little saplings planted everywhere, and maybe the occasional big tree.

Miss Maude’s coordinates for German town, 2 blocks wide, 6 blocks long, running south from the railroad, overlap a good bit with the homestead of Judge David J Reid, Miss Maude’s grandfather. Not yet a judge, Reid was still the sheriff of the largely unpopulated wilderness that was Calcasieu Parish, elected in 1850 after he first came to the little outpost that was then referred to only as Charley’s Lake. He’d been a builder too, was friends with the original settler, Charles Sallier, and built his son Joe Charles’ house. But he was accumulating land and building investment properties for himself as well, investing in the growth of the little prairie outpost, before Daniel Goos, the Danish schooner captain who’d been carrying other people’s lumber to markets along the Gulf Coast, realized what a lumber ‘goldmine’ Lake Charles’ pine forests represented. Anyway, Reid donated a piece of his land, a block south of Railroad Ave, for a cemetery in 1857 when the town was first incorporated as Charlestown, the Corporation Cemetery they called it then. Fifteen years later, Goos returned from a trip to his homeland, Foehr, in the North Frisian Islands (by then wrested from Denmark by the Germans and reeling from the effects of war) with 3 ocean schooners full of experienced engineers and carpenters to work in his lumber mill, as well as shipbuilders, sea captains and sailors to transport his lumber to markets up and down the Gulf Coast. That’s when Goos founded the German Methodist Church for his newly-arrived countrymen right across from the town cemetery, and that’s where those newcomers started buying lots from Reid, slowly pushing the forest’s edge east, farther from the little town center… 3 blocks from the shoreline, then 4., etc.

~~~~~ the Hansens and the Cordsens ~~~~~

The very first intersection the Champagnes’ carriage came to, across from the cemetery, told the story of the Hansens and the Jacobsens, Foehr Islanders both, and a sea captain named Friedrichs Cordsen from the port town of Kappeln on the Baltic Sea, about 45 miles east of the Foehr Islands. And something of a sad story it was, though early deaths and dire straights seemed to always be a single week’s wages away for so many. Jocina Jacobsen left her homeland in the North Sea for America when she was 20, arriving with her family in one of Goos’ ships in Dec 1871 after a month at sea. Her brother Simon, a schooner captain who married Daniel Goos’ niece Gardina, lived a block further down Moss St. Jocina married fellow Foehr Islander Jacob Hansen, another of Goos’ schooner captains, in Sept of 1872 in New Orleans, eventually coming to Lake Charles and settling on Church St around the corner from the church on Moss. They had 3 children in their 11 years together, Ferdinand, John and Minnie, before Hansen was killed aboard his schooner, the Lydia, on the Calcasieu River in Nov. 1883. He was 36, his widow 32, young Fred and John 10 and 7, and little Minnie was 5.

Unexplained circumstances surround how and when Jocina met and married her 2nd husband, Captain Friedrichs Cordsen, in Galveston only 11 months after the death of Captain Hansen. He’d arrived from Germany 5 years before, sailing for Goos out of Galveston, and was 5 years Jocina’s junior. The young widow could have gone there with an eye toward selling Hansen’s ship, the Lydia, as was mentioned in her husband’s succession papers. Goos’ captains and his ships operated between Lake Charles and Galveston, and the Lydia was kept in Galveston much of the time. But her daughter with Cordsen, Marie, was born 6 months after their marriage, so going to Galveston could have been partly to keep the pregnancy hidden until she could return home with an explanation for the child. Her father was a steward on the Hamburg-America shipline and away at sea a lot, so her mother lived with Jocina on Church St and could have taken care of the children while their mother was gone. Adding to the mystery is the mention in her 1st husband’s succession papers that she had not followed legal protocol as responsible party for the children, all of whom were still minors, by clearing the marriage with the children’s legal family representatives. She lost her rights as natural tutrix to her children until her new husband was cleared as co-tutor, which he was.

Things seem to have evened out, though, and the Cordsens settled into a house somewhere near the corner between the Hansen home on Church St , then occupied by Jocina’s parents, and the church on Moss St. Somewhere along the line, during the Hansen marriage, they had acquired an old store building catercorner to the old parsonage that now served as housing for blue collar laborers, mostly African American. And then after the church was decommissioned in 1889, the Cordsens bought several more rental properties, one of them being the old parsonage.

In 1892, 8 years into their marriage, the town newspaper wrote of the 50th wedding anniversary celebration of Jocina’s parents Jans Lorenz Jacobsen and his wife Marie, which the entire German community took part in. The paper noted that, though it started soberly enough with a benediction in the new St John’s church, named after the church in Wyk on Foehr Island, “all present enjoyed themselves as only the Germans can, and the company dispersed at midnight.” In early 1896, though, the family was hit with a double whammy that was surely felt at Jocina’s middle son John’s wedding celebration later that year. Jans Jacobsen, age 76, died on Jan.29, and his son Simon, 52, died the following month at sea. Simon had been named after Jans’ big brother who’d been killed at the age of 25, the year before he was born, shot while hunting seals near Greenland . . . (this seafaring business is not for the faint-hearted!) Then, 3 years later . . . “Mrs [Jocina Jacobsen] Cordsen had been ill for only two days. The direct cause of death was heart failure, but the remote cause is thought to be an overdose of medicine taken for headache. Her husband, who was on his schooner, was caught by a telegram at Sabine Pass and summoned to her bedside.” American Press, March 1899

But then, the 1900 census shows us that he was remarried by August, living with his new wife Annie, his daughter Marie Phelonise(15), his step-daughter Minnie(21), and his former mother-in-law Marie Jacobsen(81). And her succession shows us an expenditure against the estate by her husband for a $2 bottle of Mumm’s champagne at the Cagney Christman’s saloon, bought . . . wait for it . . . the night after she died. Makes you wonder if there could have been a reason for Jocina’s unhappiness, if indeed it was unhappiness. But then, who knows. Would Jocina’s mother and daughter both have stayed with the Captain years into his 2nd marriage if they’d thought he’d done something untoward? Would John have named his second son after his step-father 3 years after his mother’s death?

Not all the information in Jocina’s succession was unpleasant, either. Jocina had a piano valued at $100 and paid for piano lessons for her kids (the cost was torn off), as well as a yearly tuning by K. MacIver for $8 (we’ll be meeting him again in the next post). Her household and kitchen furnishings were valued at $200, the value of the lot with the Hansen house on it was $600, and the empty lot that eventually had the Cordsen house went for $300. Jocina was a businesswoman, though, keeping track of rental properties and repairs, tenants and rents, ordering lumber, hiring contractors, recording expenditures, etc., and many construction-related contracts were still open at the time of her death which means their final invoices and payment are recorded as part of the succession. The most interesting to me was the one hiring A J Ryan to move a house.

Was it the parsonage? I would assume so if it weren’t for the fact that the succession describes the lot where the Cordsen house is now (yes, it’s still there, a bit changed but recognizable) as being an empty lot, valued at half the price of the neighboring lot marked as having the “old house” on it. Was it the Cordsen house? Which one was the “old house”? Where was the Cordsen house moved from? What evidence there is is contradictory, which intrigued me. In this case though, unlike most, chasing down an online archival rabbit hole didn’t solve the mystery. Can’t win ’em all.

When the Champagne family arrived in 1907, it had been 35 years since Daniel Goos had sailed back from his homeland with shiploads full of hard-working Foehr Islanders. The community was in its 2nd and 3rd generations which had spread out as the boundaries of the growing town had spread. And by the time the Champagnes‘ carriage passed the wide corner lot that had held the 1870s parsonage, it had indeed been moved a block further down Moss and around the corner to become 619 Belden, across from the school as Miss Maude said. In its place were two houses, the second one, tight up against the old church, was still the home of Fred Cordsen, now 51, who still captained schooners, though no longer for the long-deceased Daniel Goos, and not so frequently since the railroad took over so much of the transport trade.

With Jocina Hansen Cordsen resting in peace for the past 8 years, he now lived with his 2nd wife Annie, 38, and their 3-yr-old baby girl Elsie, and likely spent much more time with his second daughter than he did his first. Whether built there new, onsite, or moved there from elsewhere, the Cordsen house was built in the old-fashioned, prairie style like the parsonage, but with a bay window to represent the Victorian influence that trickled in after the railroad was completed. Its front porch columns probably had 2 simple, somewhat-decorative brackets up at the roof. Coming from Galveston, which was connected to Houston by the railroad, Cordsen would have seen the Eastlake style there before he came to Lake Charles.

Today, though its deep shady front verandah has been closed in for interior space, you can still see the original eave at the roof where the overhang had been. I’ve been seeing that a lot in Lake Charles, where the bones of an old prairie-style home still exist, and wonder if this isn’t a by-product of mid-20th-century air conditioning, which eliminated the need to go outside to catch a breeze, as well as the frequency with which the windows and doors could be left open. Sadly, the time-honored culture of porch-socializing with the neighborhood went ‘out the window’, but, man, do I hate south Louisiana’s humid heat.

~~~~~ the Abregos ~~~~~

Passing the Cordsens, the Champagnes might have regarded the next house somewhat quizzically, wondering why the little house had its own bell tower. Eighteen years before, the little church had been outgrown by its Foehr Island community, and in 1889, it was replaced by St John’s Lutheran Church a few blocks down on German St, soon to be renamed Ford St, the next street over from Moss. As Maude Reid has told us, the church was decommissioned as a church and sold as a residence, as was the parsonage. The Abregos, 44 and 57, the wife being the older one (he’d been 22 and she 35 when they married!), had come from Matagorda, Texas, cattle country, and settled in Goosport where he was a machinist at a lumber mill, and they had indeed bought the old church building across from the cemetery. In the process of looking for a photo of the old church, which I have yet to find, I discovered that Steven Abrego was Sarah’s 3rd husband, after she had had to bury two, the first when he was only 25, allegedly hanged by cattle rustlers at Elliott’s Ferry on her father’s land (her maiden name was Elliott). I can well imagine him chasing the thieves, catching up to them at the river where the arduous job of ferrying a herd of cattle across a river could take all day, then the thieves, not willing to run away without the fruits of their theft, or lose them to a stampede started by a gunshot, deciding to simply throw a rope over a branch and killing him in relative silence. I have no idea if that’s what happened, but the picture comes easily to my mind, knowing how sturdy, but pains-takingly slow, managing those big old, hand-pulled ferries were back then. She’d also had to bury 5 of the 11 children she’d given birth to across her 3 marriages. In 1907, they had 3 of her surviving 6, Claude(37) a fireman for an oil company, Maud(16), and Vivien(15), both of high school age.

Here’s one for you, Tisolay, something I’m pretty certain I can guess correctly. I found an article in the Lake Charles paper dated May 15, 1930 about Mr. Abrego, “Cabinet, Begun 41 Years Ago, Is Now On Display”. . . 5’10… mahogany… inlaid and overlaid… exquisite beauty and workmanship… carvings as intricate as lacework… a machinist by trade, and evidently an artist in spirit… begun in 1889 [which was just a couple years after they got to Lake Charles from Texas] and finished only a few days ago… appraised for $1600 [that’s 1930 dollars, $28,000. today!]… in the Ryan St window of the Milford Furniture Co. so that the public may have the pleasure of seeing it.” It wasn’t for sale, just display. I started thinking, what makes a person pick something back up that he laid down decades ago? I guessed, but sorta knew already. I went back to his wife’s date of death… sure enough, 10 days before the article was written. I had a picture of her, I think from her early days in Lake Charles before they were on Moss St.

I found one of him, too, a faded headshot of him as an elderly man. Later, though, when I went back looking for the article, I happened upon the full shot that the headshot had been taken from. And look what I found!

The best part… I think you must have seen it. You were 25, graduated and back home, teaching, teaching Betty as a matter of fact, among others, and you weren’t due to get married and leave for another 11 months. You remember where Milford Furniture was?.. I can’t get over this! Where Mathilde’s shop was, 613 Ryan, the one she bought with the railroad money, Michel’s accidental death settlement. More to the point though, it was across the street from Smith music. You went there all the time, I’ll bet. And when you left, crossing Ryan again headed for home, you’d’ve seen Milford’s big glass window. I’ll bet you were at that window, looking at it, within a week of this shot being taken, the same shot I’m looking at right now, like you’re there watching the photographer take the shot . . . in the scene, just not in range of the camera. There go the hairs on the back of my neck again.

~~~~~ the Cemetery ~~~~~

Anyway, the Abregos and the Cordsens, both, woke up every morning to the sight of the Corporation Cemetery. Maude Reid seems to have had a special affection for the old place, where much of her family was, as well as some of Lake Charles’ earliest settlers. She spoke of it often in conjunction with the Reid family’s private cemetery on her grandfather Judge David Reid’s homestead.

” [Judge Reid’s mother, Mathilde Furth Reid, d.1869] was buried in the family plot on Grandfather’s homestead, just beyond his cotton gin… A fence was built around the plot to keep out wild animals, as is customary in the country… A few months later when the old Corporation burying ground – as the Moss street cemetery was called for many years, was fenced in and became the Protestant burying ground, Grandfather had the remains removed to this spot. But if any marker was ever placed on the grave, it was long ago lost, there is no trace of the grave today… In the same family burying ground… were buried several children born to Grandfather and Grandmother Reid who died in infancy. Grandmother told me that an Indian was buried there, too.” – Maude Reid

I don’t know about the Reid family cemetery, but it was a long-held belief that the Corporation Cemetery is situated on an old Attakapas ‘Indian’ mound.

Miss Maude talks about having to transfer the rest of the Reid graves in the family cemetery when Abraham Moss bought the part of the Reid homestead where the old house and cemetery were from Judge Reid’s estate after he died in 1881. By the way, Abraham Moss was the father of both A. H. Moss, the druggist from Railroad Ave, and Emma Moss who married Alton Foster, a wealthy rice mill owner… who, many years later after Emma’s death, together with his second wife, were guests at my grandparents’ wedding breakfast in April of 1931 in which their daughter Blair, one of Tisolay’s piano students, was a flowergirl. (Echos are ringing in my mind’s ear of a 1970s New Orleans gossip columnist, the mother of a girl I went to school with, who loved to sign off with, “… but you knew that‘“.)

“Like the other old cemeteries, many of the graves have disappeared, and where once it was not possible to walk two feet in any direction without touching a grave, there are now wide areas where no grave is visible.” – M.R.

About that: I’m sure there were records in the church… that no longer exists, and its replacement on German/Ford St… which no longer exists, and the old City Hall… which burnt to cinders in the Great Fire of 1910. Didn’t anyone just go in and write down the names of who was there? Yes. Can you guess who? The queen and beating heart of Lake Charles history bemoans the fact that she didn’t do it soon enough to get everyone. S’okay Miss Maude, you did more than anyone else. When you consider what she ended up doing with her life, being the first official school nurse for the public school system, even going out into the poverty stricken areas and tending to children who didn’t go to school, or quarantined areas where children were in bed with cholera, and compiling the history of the town she loved for tomorrow’s children, though she never married nor had children of her own, it makes sense that she devoted her life to the well-being of other people’s children.

In her listing of names, she also noted “quaint and interesting epitaphs” she found while walking through the graveyard like, “… a large brick tomb from the 1890s of a merchant’s wife who died in childbirth… with molded hearts on top and around the sides as though to show how much she was the heart of her family, and that they buried their hearts with her”. She wrote of her emotions, “… the large number of babies and little children buried in them. Such an appalling waste! ” And then there’s the story of the J A Bel lumber mill worker who stopped into the saloons of Battle Row (Railroad Ave) on the way home one night and got so blind drunk that he wandered off the path that ran alongside the cemetery, somehow got inside the cemetery fence but couldn’t find his way out in the dark, and finally crawled up on top of a large tomb and fell asleep. The next morning, woken by the chatting voices of men going to work, he stood up on the tomb and yelled, “Hey, there! How the hell do you get out of here?”, sending everyone running. Apocryphal?.. you be the judge .

As many cemeteries are, it was beset with maintenance problems and vandalism, going unmown for long periods, and it could well be that all the Champagnes saw as they passed the cemetery that first day were weeds five feet high. In 1894 (Miss Maude would have been 12), the mayor, and then the newspaper, emoted about the desecration of a dozen or so tombs one Saturday night, “all molested, monuments and headstones being broken by some heavy instrument and fences and railing surroundings of some of the lots torn down and broken up… some of our oldest citizens… and little children.” Such a shame. New Orleans has its share of the same problems, every city does. But New Orleans is lucky to have a lot of volunteer societies that try to take good care of their historic cemeteries. One of them, where my Tisolay is, I’ll be in, the one in the Garden District on Prytania next to Commander’s Palace, a restaurant God would eat at if He thought He could get away unrecognized. That’s the one she and I so famously hopped the iron spike fence of one All Saints Day when we went to see Granddaddy too late, after the gates had been locked. But that’s a story for another time.

“It is a pretty site, upon a gently rising hill crowned with magnolia and live oak trees. . . . “ – Maude Reid, ca. 1960, at age 78.

No, not anymore, Miss Maude.

Well, if you don’t look up beyond the fence, maybe. But just after Miss Maude wrote the affectionate comment above, the Interstate-10 highway was cut through Lake Charles, right up to the southern fence line of the cemetery. If the Champagnes’ carriage were driving south from the railroad depot today, Moss would abruptly end (this part anyway) after a block and a half, just past the Cordsen house, with a blockade, a nondescript stretch of grass, a steel rail barrier, then 8 lanes of interstate traffic.

But Tisolay wouldn’t need to be concerned with that. When they got to the corner after passing the cemetery, they would indeed have seen the old parsonage on the left at 619 Belden St, same block, 3 houses down, now the home of Fred and Jocina Cordsen’s daughter Marie, her tractor salesman husband of 2 years, John Pitre, and their new baby May… whose middle name was Jocina.

~~~~~ the School and the Kinders ~~~~~

Across from the old parsonage house on Belden St, they’d have seen the 2nd Ward Public School on a big corner lot.

Tisolay’s 2nd cousin Kinta Babin, a year younger than her, would go to school there when they moved to Lake Charles a couple years later. Her daddy and Tisolay were 2nd cousins, though there was a generation between them, both being great-grandchildren of the intrepid Marie-Thersile Thibodeaux Babin (she had 22 children over 29 years!) back in Breaux Bridge. It would seem like a remote relationship, but they and their parents plainly knew each other because Kinta was one of only a handful of children invited to little Stella’s 9th birthday party.

Miss Maude’s not quite right about the school being on the site of Jim Kinder’s home. James A Kinder was from a family of Irish Canadians who moved to the Illinois region in the 1850s. He and his brother Sam, Union soldiers during the Civil War who fought in Louisiana, returned after the war and settled in the Lake Charles area, getting married in the mid-1870s to 2 Scalley sisters from an Irish family in New Orleans, building homes next to each other on Moss St., and going into the saloon business on Ryan St. Sam bought a house nearby some time afterwards, closer to the lake, and I think it was his house that was sold to the school.

Some time between 1895 and 1900, James being in his 50s, he went into the life insurance business, and that’s what he was doing when the Champagnes first drove past his house in 1907. He was 64, living with his wife of 32 years, Kate (51), and his grown son James, who worked for the SP Railroad as fireman and engineer through the years, but would soon marry a Texas girl and move there to work at the docks.

~~~~~ the Jacobsens ~~~~~

Across from the school and the Kinders were two houses belonging to the Jacobsens, mother and son, the family of Simon Baker Jacobsen, Jocina’s brother. Gardina Goos Jacobsen, the mother, now 64, is on the corner in the older house of the two, built in 1876 by her husband Simon. He had bought the large lot on the edge of the fledgling settlement from Jacob Ryan for $750 that summer, a few years after arriving with his young wife to captain a schooner for Daniel Goos, his wife’s uncle.

Foehr Islanders both, Simon and Gardina had gotten married in St Johannes Evangelical Lutheran Kirche outside of Wyk on Foehr Island, a massive medieval, 13th-century church beloved enough to Lake Charles’ Foehr Islanders for them to name the new German/Ford St church after it. The Frisians apparently have a marked love for their homeland and a loyalty to their distinct culture, which they consider separate and apart from either German or Danish. For a while, Lake Charles was proud of it, too.

Lake Charles touted the old Jacobsen house as the oldest house in Lake Charles, but there were no pictures of it in their archives except those from 2 newspaper articles, from 1977 and 1982, about the legacy of the old Foehr Island schooner captains who made their mark on the character of the town. Found in several venues, both originate with Jacobsen granddaughter Mary Miltner.

Gardina took her children across the ocean more than once to get to know her family, friends and birthplace, and I found an eye-catching blurb in the Lake Charles newspaper about one trip concerning their anticipated return. It announced that their departure from Foehr was being postponed until their little son, Simon Jr, could recover enough from an accident where he got his foot mashed under a thresher which required the amputation of his big toe. (In the memoire of his future wife, she said they met at a dance, but that he didn’t dance, they just talked. )

. . . . . . . . .

Tisolay, were you aware of the Frisian identity of these people? There were still some 1st generation Foehr Islanders around when you were growing up, grandparents of your school friends, maybe. Gardina lived until 1931, the year you got married and left, and her house was described as being filled with exotic things that Simon brought home from all over the world. Of course, that doesn’t mean there were things representing their homeland, which wouldn’t have been exotic to them. But sentimental, yes. Did you hear people talking about ‘the old country’? Recipes? Notice their accents? Hopefully they weren’t like you . . . . . . saying not one peep. God, how I had to drag what little of your story I got out of you. Nevermind… It’s some solace that I’m hot on the trail of your hometown and the people and events around you, if not you, and that these nice people are reading about you.

Which, by the way, thanks, all . She’ll live forever because of you.

Anyway, when Simon was 17, a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico sank his father’s ship and made him the man of the house to his mother and 2 sisters, and he stayed near his mother for the rest of his life.

The year that the Champagnes’ carriage took them for their first ride down a Lake Charles street was the year Simon got married and built his bride a charming little house next door to where he grew up. He was a 30-yr-old engineer with Southern Pacific Railroad when he married Mary Runte, who was the oldest of 6 children who’d been orphaned 7 years before when they were between the ages of 14 and 3. They’d initially gone to live with their grandfather and his 37-yr-younger wife, but he died 5 years later, in June of 1905 (through some form of paralysis from 2 shocks sustained over 3 weeks). The children asked their uncle to take over their tutorship and let them live by themselves in the care of 19-yr-old Mary, the oldest, under his supervision, which he did, renting them a house a couple blocks away from him. The Jacobsens were a block further.

Simon and Mary wasted no time presenting his mother with a new generation of children to devote herself to. He, or someone, took pictures of her with one of his daughters (Lauretta, who was 3 years younger than Tisolay, almost to the day) and one of his sister’s children, Blanche. They included glimpses of the back utilitarian part of the house, with a back shed and a cistern, showing me a tiny part of Tisolay’s neighborhood at the time she would have seen it, as though she were there, just 2 blocks away. She was there, 2 blocks away, 6 yrs old in one, 14 in the other.

For all the attention that Lake Charles’ preservationists tried to bring to the old Jacobsen house, especially after Gardina’s daughter Annie, the last of the family to live in the house, died in 1967, the house fell to demolition in 1985. The newer house, Simon Jr’s, fared better. His widow Mary died in 1985 and the house was sold and restored, but after 40 years, the termites had found its foundation, and the 2020 hurricanes did what hurricanes do. I didn’t know this when I saw Google Earth’s 2014 street shot of the charming little cottage, and happily added it to the list of houses I would make sure to visit and say hello to when Covid let up and I could take my long-awaited trip to Lake Charles. When Google Earth updated their 2022 street views not long ago, I was stunned. It was gone, now only a big green lawn.

~~~~~ The Mitchells ~~~~~

Back to their left, the last house the Champagnes passed on the block was the Mitchells on the corner of Lawrence St, recently renamed Pryce, deeply set behind a large front yard. Maude Reid has pleasant memories of the Mitchells and their house. “Col. Mitchell, one of the early lawyers, and a veteran of the Mexican and Civil wars, designed this house following the style of old Texas frontier houses. Every room had a door opening onto the gallery which ran all around the house. This old home has pleasant memories for me, because of the kindly Mrs. Mitchell who never failed to give me a generous handful of Japan plums from her fine trees when they were bearing, whenever I passed her house – and I always did – in plum season.” – Caption by Maude Reid, from the 1930s.

Col. Absalom Mitchell, born in 1821, was from Tennessee but moved with his family to east Texas near the Louisiana border where he became a lawyer. He remained a single man for 43 years, going to war in his 20s for Texas against Mexico in 1846, then again in his 40s in the Civil War. He finally got married right in the middle of his stint in the Confederate army to a young widow with 4 children. He and the “kindly Mrs. Mitchell” had 2 children, his youngest, Absie Jr., following his father in both name and the profession. He moved his family to Lake Charles when he was in his 60s and probably did live to see his wife give little Miss Maude some Japanese plums off of their trees when she walked by, but he died in 1894 when Maude was 12. He may or may not have seen, however, Absie Jr. marry since I find conflicting dates for the marriage on either side of his death. The kindly Mrs. Mitchell of Miss Maude’s memory died the year the Champagnes arrived, and it would have been Absie Jr (36), by then a District Attorney and legislator, and his wife Blanche, 32, together with their 5 kids (and another on the way) living in the house when the Champagnes rode by. One boy was Roosevelt’s age, the next 2 girls were within flirting age for both the Champagne boys, and Iona Mitchell was the same age as little Stella. They moved, though, after 1911, when Tisolay was 6, and the family of Rosa Hart bought the Mitchell house. Rosa was 12 then, and destined for considerable local fame as the intrepid and strong-willed creator and director of the Lake Charles theater. But they, too, were short-lived in that house, which sheltered several rental tenants after that.

The house behind the Mitchells, 619 Lawrence, which I can’t show you either an old or a new picture of, would be the home of the Babins two years later, Kinta’s family, Tisolay’s cousins from Breaux Bridge. Willie Babin was a laborer who eventually became a carpenter and builder, and though he was renting, he made significant design changes and expansions, which seems odd to me unless the owner hired him to do them. Ten years later, after they moved to the Margaret Place neighborhood, the new owners, the Murrey family, were told that the home was believed to be haunted, and that some time previous to their ownership, “there had once been a murder committed in the house and the body buried beneath the front rooms. A square cut into the floor where the living room and dining room are joined seemed to substantiate this belief – Mrs. Lloyd Barras”. Hmmm. Did Tiwazzo know what kind of man her cousin was? Were the occupants before the Babins burying the body at the very moment the Champagnes’ carriage first drove by? Actually, the grate for a floor furnace was typically placed between the main front rooms where guests would be.

~~~~~ the John Martin Reid house ~~~~~

Across from the Babins, the corner lot was much the same as the Mitchells’. Side by side facing Moss St, with Lawrence St between them, it too was a large corner lot whose house was set at the back of a deep front lawn. Until 1899, it had belonged to John Martin Reid, the brother of the pioneer carpenter> Sheriff> Judge David Reid, and a peaceable man very different from the hot-headed lawman. He’d had very bad luck with wives, burying two and divorcing a third who was nearly 30 years younger, unfaithful, childish and ‘Frenchy’, to use Maude Reid’s word, which I assume is ‘code’ for emotional and flirtatious. And he’d also been bullied, Miss Maude suspects, into taking the position of Sheriff for one terms when his brother first vacated it to become Judge. But he settled in well with his 4th. Good things are written about John Martin, who was helpful to his nephews during their irascible father’s many temper tantrums.

“This house has had a dormer added to the front roof, and the big, double-hall, or dog-trot, that we liked so much has been walled in as a modern hall with a very modern porch. Otherwise, the house is unchanged. No longer, however, does it sit back in a field looking to the west on Moss Street. It is now very neat and tidy on a bit of a lawn fronting on Lawrence. The side entrance was always on Lawrence, it was merely turned around, when the home was sold after Uncle John’s death (c.1899)”– Maude Reid

I don’t think it was sold right after his death, though. It must still have been in the family 12 years later when his nephew Andrew Jackson Reid died, because his widow pushed the house to the back of the property, turning it to face the side street, across from the Babins, and then built a large 2-storey house in its place for their eight children, facing the side street as well.

~~~~~ the Richards-Jessen house ~~~~~

On the corner opposite Moss St from the Reid enclave is one of those oak trees that makes whatever house it belongs to look wonderful, its long, low, outstretched arms blanketed with resurrection ferns. Still. It survived the storm. A wonderful house in its own right, retaining its original pioneer style, it hints at the story of the Jessens, another Foehr Island family of ship captains that married into the Goos family.

In 1907, this was the home of the widow Emma Goos Richards(53) who was living with her youngest child, daughter Relief(23). After Relief’s marriage that September to a shoe merchant named Maurice Rosenthal, he lived there, too. She built or bought the Lawrence St house one block down from her cousin Gardina Goos Jacobsen upon returning to Lake Charles with her 5 children some time after being widowed in New Mexico in 1885. Daughter Georgiana soon married Emil Jessen, a tugboat captain from Foehr Island, and her 3 sons did well in the lumber business, buying mills north of Lake Charles. Emma and the Rosenthals moved, though, around 1912 to a fashionable new neighborhood that was developed in response to the 1910 fire, and rented out the Lawrence St house.

Emma’s husband, Edward Wilson Richards, was born in Maine, orphaned early, and went to sea to become a sailor, which led him eventually to the port town of Corpus Christi, Texas. There he met Daniel Goos who brought him into the lumber business in 1867, then two years later, gave him his 5th daughter Emma in marriage. Around 1883, however, having become interested in mining, he took his family to live in New Mexico where, two years later, he caught a chill from weather exposure that eventually killed him. It gave him enough time, though, to go to Lake Charles where his death at the age of 47 was reported as having occurred at the home of Catherine Jessen, 65, the recently-widowed wife of Albert Jessen, one of Goos’ Foehr Islanders. A decade later, Emma Goos Richards returned to Lake Charles with her children. Emma’s closest sister had married Albert Jessen’s nephew Emil, a tug boat captain who lived in the watery wilds of the river near the shores of the Gulf of Mexico. And after his wife’s death a decade later, within a year of Emma Richards moving her family into the Lawrence St house in 1896, Emil would take the Richards’ daughter Georgiana as his 2nd wife and bring her to live on his forested homestead at the mouth of the Calcasieu River. Perhaps Emil stayed with his aunt Catherine and uncle Albert, who never had children, when he had business to do in town, and met Georgiana around the neighborhood. The Richards house was rented out in 1912, though, and I don’t see Tisolay getting to know the Richardses or the Jessens in the few years their time periods in the neighborhood overlapped with the Champagnes’. Besides, so cliquish were these Foehr Islanders with the Goos family that Emma’s son Charles married his first cousin, the daughter of another of his mother’s many sisters.

~~~~~ the most recent of several Hutchins homes ~~~~~

Past the Richards home, the predominance of Foehr Island influence wanes in favor of the inter-relatedness of 2 other families much more rooted in the American pioneer experience out of New England, the Reids, whom we’ve already met, and the Hutchins family. The cluster of homes around the intersection of Moss and Pine belong to several Reid and Hutchins cousins, whose children no doubt grew up with the Champagne children. These 3rd generation Lake Charlesians are best met by taking the alternate route the Champagnes could have taken from the train depot, and seeing what the Champagnes would have seen had their driver taken Hodges St instead of Moss.

Finding the children in the neighborhood who became friends with the Champagne children, whose homes and families the Champagnes got to know in those first 3 years, played with, had sleep-overs and meals with, whose colds they caught … knowing that some of them were in the same room as the child my Tisolay was, the girl I love so much but know so little about, playing with the older Champagne children amidst gleeful toddler shrieks and pre-school chatter from elsewhere in the house, and occasional intrusions, sometimes holding her, talking to her, bouncing her, fending off her sometimes-unwanted intrusions, makes the hair on my arms tingle. So without further adieu . . . (cont’d on pg. 2)

~~~~~~~

The post The Route Home, 1907 – part 1 of 2 appeared first on My Old New Orleans Family.

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One morning in the Fall of 1963, Tisolay, my grandmother, kissed my grandfather goodbye at the door as he left for work, then as per her routine, went straight to the piano for a couple hours of practicing.

She rarely practiced while Granddaddy was at home to hear all the stop-starts and endless repetitions of problematic passages that practicing entails. All Granddaddy heard was the finished product, usually after dinner when he’d go sit in his chair in the living room with a pipe and listen to Tisolay play for him.

I don’t know whether she first noticed that the mockingbird in the chinaberry tree out front was singing along with her, then thought of Granddaddy’s upcoming birthday, or whether she had already been pondering what to do for his birthday when she noticed the bird outside. But the idea came to her to make a record of her playing along with the bird for his birthday.

She hurriedly set up the reel-to-reel tape recorder, unwinding miles of wire that went to two separate stand-up microphones, one of which she dragged all the way out to the foot of the tree. She put the other one next to the piano, then sat down to play everything she could think of; a Debussy, a Moszkowski, a Schumann, 2 Chopins… I don’t remember what-all. She would later tell us that she was worried the whole time that if she paused for anything, the bird would get bored and fly away. It never did, though.

Tisolay always did have a way with birds, particularly mockingbirds and cardinals. With every new season, there was usually a mockingbird in the crepe myrtle tree outside the kitchen door whom she’d talk to and put seed out on the back bannister for. They’d come regularly, and once, she put a handful of birdseed on the floor inside the door, then went to the far end of the room and sat quietly. In time, for a few moments, it came in and ate.

She taught me the songs and calls of mockingbirds, with their ever-changing assortment of song bits, whistles, clicks, buzzes, whatever… and cardinals who were always calling “Marguerite? Marguerite?” and “What cheer, what cheer?”. She taught me how to tell the ages of the season’s new babies by how disorganized their song still was.

Over the years, we found several baby birds who’d fallen out of their nests and raised them, all mockingbirds except for one nighthawk. The last one we raised was found under a tree by a group of teenagers in a long-term residential adolescent unit in the yard of a psychiatric hospital where I worked. Its head was bald except for a ring of fluff around its head, like my grandfather. And it was very weak, barely conscious, what little energy it had going into periodic spurts of gaping-mouthed begging for food. Who knows how long it had been out there.

The kids knew that just bringing it inside, let alone trying to raise it, was a health code violation 6 ways to Sunday, but I said I knew someone who had raised lots of baby birds. So we snuck it in past the head nurse, found a box for it and lined it with socks, got several drops of water into it, and at the end of my shift, I took it to Tisolay’s. It was a bit more alert and sharp-eyed by then, and its expression reminded me of one of my favorite shots of my grandfather. My next shift on that unit, I brought the photo for the kids to see, and they agreed to let me name it Percy Henry.

A few times over the next few weeks, I’d get the kids around the nurses’ station, then call Tisolay and put her on speaker-phone so she could tell them about the bird; how he’d grown, which feathers were coming in, what a ‘piggy’ he was at meal time. Always comfortable performing in public, she put on a show of charm and mischief for the kids. When it was old enough to be shown the outdoors again, she described what my face looked like when tiny bird claws were skittering back and forth along my bare leg, outstretched on the garden recliner. When we were teaching it to fly, she described its reluctance to let go of her finger, and when it did, how it hated landing on the sharp blades of grass with nothing solid to curl its feet around.

And when it was a strong enough flier, she described how it would avoid landing, fly back up and land on her head instead, and how it started doing that inside even though grass was no longer an issue. They thought she was pulling their leg, so she had me take a polaroid.

Predictably, a few of the girls asked if the bird ever pooped in her hair. I think they wanted to throw her off balance, making her dance around indelicate language, but the cheerful answer from this gentle, delicate woman dissolved even the diehard “too cool for school”ers.

“Oh, you just wait for it to get hard, then you can pull it right out.” When a chorus of “Eeew”s arose, I know I saw the mildly-disapproving head nurse grin just before turning her face away.”

I was still in graduate school, rotating across all units, and I never got the chance to tell them that Percy, after he finally took the flight that he never returned from, often dive-bombed Tisolay’s head out in the garden that first year, touching her hair but never again landing.

~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~

A-n-y-w-a-y. After 45 minutes or so at the piano, she came to the end of a piece and saw BadBoy, their Siamese cat, come strolling in from the dining room. Badboy always had a lot to say, and he did so in a deep baritone voice that always rattled with his purring. When he started talking to her, the microphone was a bit startled. When she picked him up and brought him to the mike, it nearly knocked you over. She gave Granddaddy a sweet birthday message in her gentle voice, then she cooed, “and minnie cat loves you too” and started squeezing purrs out of him, which sounded a bit like an idling diesel truck being revved over and over.

She took the tape someplace to have a record made, then went rooting through a McCall’s magazine where she’d seen a picture of a little 5-yr-old girl with brown hair down her back, like mine, sitting in the doorway of a kitchen with a green-and-white-tile floor, like hers, with a redbird on her finger. She pasted it to the record jacket with a long velvet ribbon around the edges and gave it to him when we were all over for dinner. Granddaddy played it for us, everyone was charmed, and that was supposed to be the end of that.

~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~

BadBoy was always part of Granddaddy’s birthday because they had the same birthday. The fact that he had to share his birthday with a cat was an indignation he often played to the hilt. The yearly bottle of Chivas, held like a club, played a role in the ritual more than once.

It was weird; Granddaddy wasn’t crazy about cats, but they loved him. BadBoy’s successor, Ping Pong, would climb up his shoulder when he was in his wing chair reading, stretch out across the back of his neck, and go to sleep. Rarely evenly balanced, he usually came slowly sliding down, head first, until Granddaddy had to cup Ping Pong’s head with one hand to keep him from falling into his lap and waking up. A hand that had previously been occupied holding whatever Granddaddy was reading, which meant adjusting to a single-handed grip. When that was a newspaper, there was always a long rustling of ungainly unfolding and refolding, and an audible, irritable grumble with the occasional intelligible bit… “never in my life”, or some such, under his breath.

Anyway, not long after Granddaddy’s birthday, a good family friend was over for dinner one night, a Jesuit priest, the dean of the music school at Loyola who’d hired Mother a few years before to teach piano, and he heard the record and asked for a copy. Tisolay was horrified . . . oh, no, it wasn’t her best playing, she was rushing, scared the bird would fly away at every pause, there were mechanical buzzes, amplified fumblings, and thuds followed by mid-piece pauses to adjust a fallen microphone, etc. Granddaddy must have been the one to have a copy made for C.J., with Ti’s personal message edited out, but the cat and the “and minnie-cat loves you too” still in.

C.J McNaspy. Though he was dean, he still taught a class called Music as Value which was a prerequisite for all music majors, something about finding the voice of God in music. He had a freak gift with languages, though… spoke several dialects of Russian as well as French, Spanish, Latin and I-don’t-know-what-all, so after a few years, the Jesuits decided to send C.J. to Paraguay, the first of several places around the world, to start a radio show along the order of his class, about music of every culture being the voice of God. It wasn’t until several years later that Tisolay found out that he had a copy of her mockingbird record and played it as one of the first things whenever he was moved to a new location. Over international airwaves. She was absolutely mortified. It became a family thing to tease her about it, because it was imperfect and human and magical, and it SO didn’t matter that her playing had not been concert-quality that day.

Okay. Fast forward to my freshman year as a music major at Loyola. C.J. is teaching again at Loyola, back in Louisiana because he’d requested to be nearer his elderly mother in her last years. So, I’m sitting in the auditorium waiting for C.J.’s first class of the semester to start, looking at the tape recorder, slide projector, and screen set up down in the front and sensing that this wasn’t going to be a regular Music as Value class like it used to be. I was right; it was a rollicking ride across the globe to places where he’d found God’s voice in strange musical performances and tribal ceremonies, in animal sounds and weather phenomena, from atop a squishy-humped camel and God-knows-what-all… you name it. When C.J. finally walks in, he goes to the tape recorder, and without introducing himself or even saying hello, he starts the tape machine, filling the room up with the loud chirping of a mockingbird soon joined by a Chopin étude. It didn’t bring me to tears the way it does now; Tisolay was still alive and well, and would be for many more years. But it was then that it occurred to me how others saw this thing, this family story that was just a regular thing to me, an episode in our family life. When he ended it, he said to everyone that he had the privilege of having in his class the granddaughter of the woman who made the record with the bird, and he asked me to stand up. It was a very dear, quietly proud moment for me.

I’ll leave you with this postscript. In later years, when Loyola beefed up their acoustics department with equipment to study the science of sound, my mother gave the tape to them to analyze, and see if the bird’s singing were actually following along with her. Of course it was. And now, writing this almost 60 years later, I think “duh, that’s why it’s called a mockingbird”.

As usual, thanks so much for visiting my little world and taking my grandmother into your hearts..

The post The Mockingbird Record appeared first on My Old New Orleans Family.

I always wondered what made Tisolay’s father, J. Euclide Champagne, pull up stakes from his wife’s long-held family land, his wife Alicia being Adeo’s daughter. [Her family called her Tiwazzo, Tiwazzo being a phonetic spelling of petite oiseaux, ‘little bird’ in French, just as Tisolay is for petite soleil, ‘little sunbeam’. Like Cirque du Soleil] Anyway, when I first started researching Tisolay’s family farm in Breaux Bridge, back in the 1980s, she told me she didn’t know anything about the move to Parks, except that they had lived in what used to be the Catholic church’s rectory. She found out decades later that it had been sold to a man for $1 under the condition that he remove it from the church’s property . . . which he did, floating it a mile or so down the bayou and hauling it up the opposite bank.

She didn’t know much about the move to Lake Charles either, a few years later, except that it had to do with her mother’s younger sister Mathilde (ma-TEEL) being newly-widowed and left with a young daughter to raise after her husband was hit by a train and killed near Lake Charles.

Fast-forward 40-odd years from my time researching the family’s time in Breaux Bridge in the 1980s, to 2020, well into the Covid-19 shut-down, when I have dived into researching Tisolay’s young years in Lake Charles as an escape from the political insanity surrounding the Trump/Biden campaign. Besides my usual starting points on Ancestry.com… censuses, town directories, etc., something popped up on a regular google search of Michel Bourdier’s name, Tisolay’s uncle who was killed by the train. It was a Supreme Court case, an appeal, from Mathilde’s lawsuit against Louisiana Western Railroad for the wrongful death of her husband. When I read the specifics of the accident, I marveled that the railroad company, after initially losing the case, had had the nerve to appeal.

In March of 1911, Michel, a railroad supervisor in Southwest Louisiana, was managing repairs on the tracks of a bridge when he got hit in a freak accident by a train that failed to heed the caution signs to slow down. When Michel saw from a distance that the train was not slowing down, but continuing at a speed he thought the damaged bridge would not support, he ran down the bridge toward the train waving a red flag. When it didn’t slow down for that either, he turned and ran back toward land, but failed to reach it before he was hit. I read to my horror that he had lain awake, broken but coherent, for 4 hours, thrown by the train back up onto the land he’d nearly reached, and at one point had asked one of his crew if the train had wrecked, worrying that he might lose his job if it had. In 3 days, it would have been his 31st birthday. The railroad company’s appeal claimed that it was Michel’s gross negligence for not jumping off the 8-ft bridge, but the Supreme Court was having none of that, and Mathilde was awarded $12,000, part for her and part for their daughter Sophie. Twelve thousand dollars in 1911 was the equivalent of almost 250k in 2020 dollars. A copy of the courtcase and the whole mess surrounding it was attached to Michel’s will, which told me that my great-grandfather, J. Euclide (eu-CLEED) had been the executor of Michel’s will, which would have brought him to Lake Charles.

Around the same time, through a question I’d asked another researcher on Ancestry.com, I’d found the granddaughter of Tisolay’s adored older sister Marie-Carmen, a newfound 2nd cousin in Pennsylvania 8 years older than me whose mother had never been willing to tell her anything about her mother’s French Louisiana roots. I was ‘nuthin but’ French Louisiana roots, which seemed to mean a great deal to her, and she and I became good friends over months of in-depth, personal correspondence that, among many other things, touched on a potential girls’ road trip together to Lake Charles. This will no doubt hit the presses of this blog with some force, but going back to the beginning, one of the first things we did was share photos that we had of each other’s grandmothers together as young girls in Lake Charles. In the course of our photo exchange, there were several unidentified ones that we hoped the other could identify. One of hers was of a man whose face was so like Tisolay’s cousin Sophie that it could only be her father Michel, the man killed by the train. Crouching behind his dog with a pipe inside a tiny little grin, it took a second for me to realize that his dog was smoking a pipe as well. Chèr Michel, you look like you had a playful heart. I am so sorry you suffered for so long. I’ve come to know a little bit about you in these past few months of research, 110 years after your death, enough to know how different things would have been for my grandmother, for everyone, had you been able to live out your life and raise your family as you and your young wife had no doubt expected to.

Sometimes life comes wafting up in living color from a simple black and white printed page. When I found Michel and his little family in the 1910 census, living near the lumber mills that lined the river north of town, he and Mathilde were the only white family in a pocket of farming families listed as Black and Mulatto, many of whose grown sons were listed with wage-paying jobs repairing tracks for the railroad. I wonder if this suggests a comfort level with his fellow man across racial and socio-economic lines. That would fit with where he was raised, St Martin Parish, which is unique in that sense. Were these men on the census page with Michel the workers on his team, the ones who pulled his broken body from where he was thrown and stood by him as he lay dying, keeping him company? Was the man he asked whether the train had wrecked, worrying about losing his job, one of these men in the census?.. not just one of his workers but a neighbor who knew his wife and little girl, had seen them playing outside in the yard? Was there someone with him who knew that Michel was a playful man who might put a pipe in his dog’s mouth for a photograph? Were the women in the neighborhood who heard Mathilde weep comfortable enough with the social divide to bring meals for her and little Sophie the first few days, or take Sophie home with them so Mathilde could lose herself in her grief? I do hope so.

☙ ❦ ❧

Tisolay didn’t talk much about Lake Charles, not in the way that would tell me what the town or its people were like, but I remember the first thing she ever said about it . . that she was punished for speaking French when she first started school. The town obviously redeemed itself for her, though, because most of the times she’d talk about Lake Charles, it was about how the city brought music into her life; the piano lessons, the recitals, her teacher, her mother’s slightly scandalized disapproval of some of the popular tunes she and Carmen would play in the front room, but mostly how Lake Charles had loved this talented, charming young girl who showered the town with her music so much that they came together as a community to pay the tuition and board for her to go to college “in the big city” at the New Orleans Conservatory of Music. But that’s about all she ever said about Lake Charles.

She spoke affectionately of the Moss St house she grew up in, though she never described the inside of it or talked about anything the family did in it. And she remembered her best friends Bernard Levy and Karl Krause from the neighborhood, and Etta Cruikshank from school, though she never said anything about them. She rarely spoke of her daddy, though when she did, it was with great love. He was a gentle man who sometimes worked as a clerk in a store and loved gardening in his vegetable patch. She remembered him waking her up with a cup of coffee in bed, then putting her on his shoulders and bringing her downstairs to start the day. She had a photo of her father in a horse and buggy, and said it was his prize-winning trotting horse. From the look of him in the photo, he was younger and still in Breaux Bridge on his wife’s farm. That’s all she ever told me about him.

She adored her big sister Carmen, my newfound cousin’s grandmother who was 11 years older. Gentle and sweet, she did things with her baby sister that may have made up for the two brothers in between them who would have spent more time with each other than their much younger sister.

And she loved Tiwazzo who was very much a lady, quiet and refined in her ways, and I somehow got the impression, sad. Nothing dramatic, and certainly nothing Tisolay said directly about her. But Tisolay never described her mother being cheerful, or enthusiastic about something, or engaged, taking part in things, but rather intimated that she was patient and uncomplaining, which begs the question, “about what?”

I knew that Tiwazzo was a French-speaking woman in an English-speaking town, but not until these past months’ research did I know anything about that town or what factors could have caused Tiwazzo’s unhappiness. Lake Charles was a pioneer outpost of lumbermen, loggers, mills and saloons, on a lake whose river system ambled through dense pine forest to the Gulf of Mexico, and whose shores had merchant schooners captained by German/Danish North Sea seafarers pulling in and out, taking Louisiana lumber to the bustling coastal trade route that connected Mexico, Texas, Louisiana and Florida. It was settled by northerners in the lumber industry, “Montana Men” they call them, sorta like our carpetbaggers but without the negative political and cultural connotation that applied in New Orleans, who’d turned their attentions to the pine forests and cypress wetlands of South Louisiana. Several of Lake Charles’ most influential founding fathers were German sea captains who settled down and built their own mills, seeing the potential of joining their northern friends in the lumber business while also having their own fleet of ships to take the lumber to the booming new towns out west. In the 1880s, when the railroad finally penetrated the forbidding Atchafalaya swamp, connecting the major ports of Houston and New Orleans, French Louisiana farmers joined east Texans to form a limitless supply of labor, and Lake Charles became a melting pot of American cultures that would have seemed another world from the secluded, homogeneous French Catholic farming community that Tiwazzo knew.

The railroad brought much-needed prosperity to those financially-stagnant parishes of post-Civil War Cajun Country that had the foresight to bid for a railway stop in their parish. But St Martin Parish, preoccupied at that critical time by the recovery from both fires and hurricanes, missed the opportunity. The old land grants, now on their 4th generation of divisions (and we’re talking Catholic-sized generations here), could no longer support their founders’ descendants, so many St Martin Parish residents used the railroad to find prosperity elsewhere, leaving Bayou Teche for the thriving new job markets to the west. Lake Charles, with its mix of cultural influences, had a reputation as more tolerant of social, religious and racial differences than the rest of French Louisiana which was more embroiled in post-Civil War racial strife.

Ah, Tisolay, I may have an idea why your Papa left the family farm for Parks, and then for Lake Charles.  I tell you what, though.  There’s still something curious about why your daddy moved y’all to Lake Charles.  Something’s off.   I finally found the ‘missing’ 1910 census.  The census taker’s ink pen made an utter hash of your names and street number, and the computer entry person did a worse job deciphering the old handwriting, but it’s you.  Anyway, it puts y’all in Lake Charles in the summer of 1910, which is odd. If your Nonc Michel wasn’t killed until 9 months later, in March of 1911, then that’s not what brought y’all to Lake Charles.

 In fact, I found your Nonc Michel and Tante Mathilde too, with little Sophie Mildred, a few miles upriver from Tisolay and the Champagne family in Lake Charles.  And right there, I think I see what brought your daddy to Lake Charles, hoping to give y’all a new life. Look at the occupations. Nonc Michel worked as a section foreman for the railroad. Your papa worked at the Southern Pacific freight depot.  At the start of 1905, both families were still living on the Teche, there for both your birth that January and Tante Mathilde’s marriage to Michel 2 months later in March.  Michel and Mathilde were in Lake Charles 13 months later when Sophie was born. I don’t know when the Champagnes left Parks for Lake Charles or whether Michel got the job at the railroad freight depot for J Euclide, but by 1910 census time, they had both in or near Lake Charles and had gotten jobs working for Southern Pacific Railroad.

I wonder if Tiwazzo knew what this move would mean to her. Because she wasn’t just isolated by her language, was she. She was isolated by her lack of money, now that y’all were no longer under the financial umbrella of your grandfather’s farm. You always said there was never any money, that things other people had or could do, your family couldn’t. You spoke so lovingly about your Papa, the few times you spoke of him, but more than once you said you didn’t remember much about him working, leaving in the morning, coming home, just that he worked in a store at one time, and that his favorite thing to do was to putter in his vegetable garden.  You would never have told me this, I know, but my guess is Tiwazzo had to raise a family on very little money with a husband who wasn’t financially ambitious, and possibly had to rely on the help of her bilingual daughters in the first year or so to get marketing done, bills paid, schools lined up for the kids. 

☙ ❦ ❧

But beyond language and money limitations, there was something else, something my grandmother hinted at about her own young years, the one source of unhappiness that ran through her otherwise-happy childhood, that I started to think could easily have had a parallel effect on Tiwazzo’s life. It had to do with the fact that they shared a 2-storey house with Tiwazzo’s widowed sister and her daughter Sophie, Tisolay’s cousin the same age as her whom she never got along with.

It was always a mystery to me. My grandmother had an innate joy, a kindness and manner of diplomacy that could make peace between God and the devil, and she actively avoided criticizing anyone even when they plainly deserved it, with one exception . . . Sophie. By the time I started asking Tisolay to tell me about the treasure trove of photos in her bureau drawer, Tisolay & Sophie, now in their 70s, had lived in different cities for over 50 years. Sophie only came up in conversation every few years, after a call from Sophie, wanting to come visit her cousin in New Orleans and stay for a few days, something Tisolay was always ‘far too busy for’. It amused me how her natural cheerfulness and easy-going patience gave way at the mention of her name, and I mean in an instant, to the scowl and irritable tone of the girl she’d been then. Though it only lasted for 10 or 15 seconds, she made it clear that Sophie’s brash and bossy nature had had a profound effect on her childhood and her home life. They were only a year apart, and would ordinarily have been treated similarly, given similar things, experiences, etc. But Sophie apparently always came first, getting things Tisolay didn’t, the best things, getting to do things, getting her way, etc., and Tisolay never understood why. She’d ask her mother, but all Tiwazzo ever said was, “Ma chère, vous devez vous rappeler qu’elle n’a pas de père”… “You must remember she doesn’t have a father”, which sounds to me pretty lame of an excuse for favoritism severe enough to cause prolonged unhappiness. Apparently Sophie, far from being broken-hearted, milked it for all it was worth, and with Tisolay’s siblings all so much older, Tisolay was the only one on the receiving end of it.

When I went to graduate school near Breaux Bridge and first got to know the relatives on the family farm, I looked Mildred up and we went to lunch. I was surprised to find her quite cheerful in a boisterous way, laughing all the time. But she was also exactly as Ti had painted her, brash and bossy, and seemingly clueless about it. There was something indominable about her; turns out she lived to be 107. Frankly, I thought she was a riot! But Tisolay never could get over it.

Ti, I’m sorry I didn’t grasp the importance of it then.

Still, though, Tisolay had a wonderful, outgoing nature that allowed her to make friends at school and elsewhere, away from home. But Tiwazzo? I’d always sensed that resignation was somehow the subtext to Tisolay’s restrained descriptions of her mother, and now I can’t help but wonder if it had anything to do with the discord between the two girls? Did it go deeper than that? Was there a parallel discord between Tiwazzo and her sister that made having to share her home with her widowed baby sister such a disappointment?

I’ve often wished that Tisolay had told me more about her mother and her aunt, the two sisters who were the women of the house, and the dynamic in the home that caused my Tisolay to feel so slighted, as if being made to feel ashamed of being Cajun French at school weren’t enough. Did the age difference between Tiwazzo, who was only 18 months younger than her older brother Adrien, and Mathilde who came along 11 years later, affect Mathilde’s personality? Was she raised like an only child, with both her mother and Tiwazzo looking after her? Their mother being the youngest of 22, whose neighbors were cousins, all older, did Mathilde somehow not learn what cooperation with others was all about? While Sophie clearly played the ‘dead father’ card knowingly, was part of her nature simply learned from her mother?

Perhaps it was less about personalities and more about the Bourdier money from the railroad settlement. Because I do know that Mathilde had money to spend on her daughter and Tiwazzo did not. It doesn’t seem like Mathilde shared much or was concerned about Tisolay’s feelings being hurt, but I don’t know. I do know that both mothers watched it happen, watched Tisolay’s unhappiness at the hands of Sophie. Did Tiwazzo talk to Mathilde about it? Was Mathilde receptive? Did gentle J Euclide get caught in the middle, perhaps too passive at times when his family needed him to stand up for them?

Perhaps it was Mathilde’s house, making her feel she had the right to dictate the goings-on within the house, and Sophie the right to behave how she pleased. At a typical 1912 price of $2500, she could have afforded it, but the records and Tisolay’s memories suggest conflicting stories. Tisolay always admitted to the genteel poverty of her family, but nevertheless, said that it was her father who owned the house, and that after he died and her mother moved to a smaller place, Tiwazzo had then sold the old 2-storey place to Mathilde. But the records show 617 Moss St as being rented alternately by either J Euclide or Mathilde the entire time both families lived there.

This was not the last life-long assumption of mine that the records would throw into question. Tisolay had never spoken of any other house but 617 Moss, until she graduated from college, which is when her father died and Tiwazzo decided to move to a smaller house. She’d also never spoken of a time when the Champagnes and Bourdiers didn’t live together, which put Tisolay and Sophie together from the start. The 1910 census proved that they had not lived with the Bourdiers before Michel’s death, and Lake Charles’ first directory, published in 1911, proved that they had lived in a different house than the 617 Moss house thatTisolay remembered before Michel’s death, just around the corner at 614 Mill St., facing the Flanders’ beautiful front garden.

The directory showed me who was in the 617 Moss house, which led me to find that family in the census, which told me that the Champagne’s smudged address was not a misrecorded version of 617, but 511 Moss St, a few doors up the next block, it’s side abutting the rear of the Flanders property. They’d lived in 2 different places before joining the Bourdiers at 617. Three houses in 3 years? What’s up with that?

But it wasn’t anything I found in the records that told me that the Champagnes had lived in Lake Charles for a good period of time before moving in with the Bourdiers, getting to know the town by themselves and on their own terms. It was something I’d read in the family papers years ago, in the will of Tisolay’s brother, Presley, from 1963, but hadn’t recognized the significance of.

   Ti, do you remember when Presley died, the family papers of his that you got afterwards, the plat of the farm, all that?   I know that Granddaddy would have taken care of the business end of things, might have even been the executor, but did you read the inventory of Presley’s things, where one of them was a Lake Charles High School ring from 1908?  He would have only been 11, but Beulah was 17. It was Beulah’s ring; she left it behind when she got married, and Pres had kept it. Anyway, that ring means that your family’s move to Lake Charles predated Michel’s death by 3 years or more. You would have only been 2 or 3, so I’m not surprised you don’t remember the move, or living anywhere other than 617 Moss. But I’m surprised you don’t remember Michel. He and Mathilde, with little Sophie, only lived 2 miles upriver from town in a community called Goosport, where the river was lined with lumber mills, the oldest one belonging to the family of Daniel Goos, one of those German cargo schooner captains I told you about who became a founding father of Lake Charles.  I can’t imagine y’all didn’t visit regularly.  You would have known your Nonc Michel from the time you were 3 til you were 6, when he was killed.  You don’t remember him at all?    

☙ ❦ ❧

Interesting guy, Daniel Goos.  He came from the Foehr Islands in the North Sea, close enough to both Germany and Denmark to be caught in border disputes, and for the early censuses of Lake Charles to refer to his nationality both ways.   Capt. Goos brought his seafaring culture to the New World where he shipped other people’s lumber back and forth along the Gulf Coast, until 1855 when he decided to build a lumber mill of his own in… they called it Charlie’s Lake then, just a backwoods outpost of saloons and loggers in the middle of a rich forest of prime lumber.  At the time, Jacob Ryan, the man whom Lake Charles’ main drag Ryan St. was named after, had the only mill there, a grueling, hand-powered operation that heaved forth the lumber that built the town, board at a time.  So Goos went back to the Foehr Islands and brought back shipbuilders and sea captains, sawyers and loggers, and engineers, one of whom was carrying the first steam-powered sawmill Calcasieu Parish had ever seen.  Then, because the dense forest that lined the river blocked the wind his schooners needed to sail down to the Gulf, he built a fleet of steamships to tow them out to more open water.  

Ti, this guy… he never lived in your neighborhood; died 10 years before y’all even got there, but his thumbprint is all over it, and you, sorta.   You remember Della Bel from across the street?   Yeah, I know about her.   I was looking up something about the architecture of the Bel house, which apparently has quite a history, in this incredible photo archive McNeese has… it’s a college, started in Lake Charles not long after you left, 1939, down past your high school. I found a newspaper photo of a garden party at her grandparents’ house on the corner, with a whole gang of kids, easily 50, in the grass in front of the verandah.   

And there you were.

You’re about 8, Sophie’s behind you, over your left shoulder.  Della and Bernard are there.  I wish I knew what Karl Krause looked like, cuz he’s gotta be in there.   You knew Della ended up marrying Karl’s big brother Rudolph, right… while you were at the Conservatory?  Anyway, the photo, that was when the Krauses were still ‘just plain folks’ next door, or so it would’ve seemed to you, before Mr Krause built the Shell Beach place that really reflected his wealth.  Having these two rich families on either side of you, in and out of their homes, I marvel at how egalitarian childhood is. Still though, you could never fall in love outside the Catholic faith; Tiwazzo would never have stood for that. And all the families around you were German, either Jewish or Lutheran; they probably felt the same as Tiwazzo, about the Catholics. 

Anyway, Della’s grandmother who threw the party, Mrs. Bel, she was one of old man Goos’ daughters, 51 by then.  And Mrs. Flanders, on the corner across from them?.. She was another of Goos’s daughters.  Mr. Flanders’ sister Florence married Daniel Goos Jr.; they were 2 blocks away.  And Walter Goos behind you, that stately old place with the Juliette balcony?.. his back yard backed up onto the Krauses’ yard next door.  They’re everywhere.   Goos’ kids read like a who’s who list of Lake Charles’ up-and-coming captains of industry, the earliest builders of the magnificent mansions of Broad St.      

Apparently the Charpentier District has a section . . . Did you know that your historic-district neighborhood has a name, the Charpentier District, with a very interesting origin? Goos brought a lot of very talented shipbuilders and carpenter-builders to Lake Charles who, owing to a fluke absence of decent architects in the city, were free to compete with one another, adding design features to patterns and building the grandest homes they could think of.  (I’m really glad Mother drove you around there those last few times you evacuated with her.  And I’m glad you went with her and not with me; I think it made her feel good, something she could do for you.)  Anyway, the Charpentier district has a section known as Germantown, several blocks up and down Moss St and Ford St, and you were smack in the middle of it.  Goos brought so many settlers from his homeland during the years of that neighborhood’s expansion that he founded a church for them… in their neighborhood , not his.  Remember the little church on the street behind you, around the corner, St John’s Lutheran?   It’s been chopped up a little bit, no longer in use since the new church was built, but it’s still there.   

Mr Fitzenreiter across from the church was the son of Captain Charles Fitzenreiter, one of Goos’ German immigrants, who moved across from the church.  And who was his mother whom the good captain married?  Goos’ eldest daughter Barbara, of course. 

You know who else came across with Goos from Germany?  I don’t know how many of these names you recognize as neighbors, but your Papa would know the name of Peter Platz.  Half the neighborhood did, considering he lived next door to the Goos children when they were growing up. 

Peter Platz was a young man of 21 when Goos first brought him from Germany in 1855, the engineer with the steam-powered equipment which Platz installed the following year when he built Lake Charles’ first industrial sawmill for Goos.  He lived for several years in Goosport, north of town, as a single man in a boarding house next door to Goos and his large family, watching the schooners pulling in and out from the wharf, loading up amidst the hubbub of the mill.   His sister had come across as well, settling into the Goos compound near her brother and raising a family with her sailor husband.  Also in the Goos compound, from Foehr Island and somehow related to the Gooses, were several members of the Brudersen family, one of whom, Agatha, Peter Platz married.

Platz built his bride a house at the corner of Moss and Mill in an area of undeveloped land where many of his German countrymen were settling.  It was situated some 3 blocks east of Ryan St., named for Jacob Ryan, the original founding lumber miller of Lake Charles I told you about, .   When Platz’ wife presented him with a baby daughter, they called her Babette after his sister Barbara who, freshly widowed, would soon marry the 60-yr-old widower Jacob Ryan and, despite him already having 15 children, would give his 2 more. 

It appeared to be a rather peaceable merging of the two families in a photo of Barbara’s 3 daughters, now grown with daughters of their own, and the old man, step-Papa Ryan, in front of the lakefront house where he raised them from their early teens.  One of his step-daughters poignantly named her child Inez, after the 4-yr-old daughter he and their mother had just lost the year before. 

Some time in the 1890s, Platz built two rental properties on either side of his corner house, one to the east on Mill, the other to the south on Moss.   When the Champagnes moved to town some 15 years later, they moved into a 2-story house at 511 Moss near Pine, half way up the next block from the Platzes, on the other side of the big Flanders house on the corner.

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On April 23rd of 1910, late on a hot, unusually windy Saturday afternoon, the elderly Platz, long widowed and living with his daughter Babette, now 36, may not have been up for the walk he saw everyone making from his window, following the smoke. But if he was, he saw, several blocks south down Ryan St, a sky-high black and red curtain, behind which the heart of the town he’d played a pioneering role in creating was burning to ash on the ground. 

The Champagne family from the next block up very likely would have made the walk. They’d have had to walk a block down Ryan, to the bend at Division St, to get a straight-shot view of the fire, but when they did, their view would have been on one block further back than the photo of the fire I just showed you, with the boy whose hands have gone up to his forehead in anguished disbelief. I can imagine J Euclide, even if he were working at the freight depot on Saturday, being allowed to work around the schedule of incoming trains enough to leave the depot to see what everyone was talking about, looking down Ryan and seeing for himself the smoke just 3 blocks down, a gathering crowd watching helplessly. What must have been his instantaneous mental calculation about the angle of the wind and whether his home and family were in the fire’s path. I can see him going home to check that all his kids were accounted for, then taking his wife, little Stella, and whichever of the kids weren’t off on their own with neighborhood friends (God, what panic must have strangled his heart over whoever was missing), to get as close to the fire as they dared to assess how much danger their own house might be in. 

Aw, Tisolay, did you see it?  The older kids were 11 through 19… Beulah’d just had her 19th birthday a couple weeks before… but you were only 5. Did you understand what was happening? How could you not, given how everyone around you was acting, crying, or staring mute, many yelling directions, jumping into action, men with horses and wagons full of hoses and equipment galloping by. And closer to the fire, women screaming for help to load wagons with valuables from homes in the fire’s path, or just dragging them out onto the streets. I don’t suppose your Papa still had his horse, huh? The Sanborn maps didn’t show any stables or barns on the small properties your Papa rented, and it’s not like you needed one like you did on the farm, being miles from church and school, etc. In Lake Charles, you could walk or take one of the new electrical streetcars everywhere you needed to. Unless the sreetcar tracks were on fire.

Months later, with a terrible housing shortage in the city and many well-to-do families evicting tenants to move into their own rental properties while their homes got rebuilt, old Peter Platz did one of his last pieces of business before his death when he rented his little Mill St. cottage to J Euclide, whose family had to leave their spacious, 2-storey house further up the block for a place that was much too small for a family of 7. 

Top . . . 511 Moss St, May 1910 census – The address in the 1910 census that I thought was a smudged version of 617 Moss, Tisolay’s home address for as long as she could remember, wasn’t an error. The Champagnes lived at 511 Moss St, a 2 story house behind the Flanders house on Mill, at the time the Bourdiers were in Goosport.

The census taker found a devastated city in chaos from a fire only a month before which gutted the city and threw many of its residents into homelessness. City Hall, the Courthouse and jail, and the Catholic church, convent and school were destroyed, as well as the majority of the business district and many of the oldest homes. But civic leaders and lumber magnates quickly pulled together and threw their resources into an ambitious recovery plan, emergency measures kicked into high gear, and a full throttle effort to rebuild and update went underway. Hotels, boarding houses and families whose homes had been spared were taking in families who’d lost everything. Every source I’ve read on that time period describes it as remarkable.

Middle . . . 614 Mill St, 1911 directory – The reason for leaving their two-storey home is likely related to the fire, possibly because rents increased, or the owners needed to move in, or the owners asked J Euclide to vacate to the smaller place in favor of a larger number of homeless people. Whatever the reason, in early 1911, he rented Platz’ Mill St property, a small 1-storey house around the corner from their old house that must have barely fit his family of 7. He may well have been there for only a short time, because it was around this time, in March, that Michel Bourdier was killed and his wife left a widow. Since they were not in Lake Charles proper, the directory did not include them, but it’s likely they’d all moved into 617 Moss together by the end of that year.

Bottom . . . 617 Moss St, 1913 directory – Possibly less than a year after old Peter Platz rented his tiny Mill St cottage to the Champagnes, J Euclide moved the Champagne and Bourdier families into 617 Moss, the Platz’ other property on the south side of the Platz home, where they would be for the next 15 years. Only it was Babette, now living alone, whom he’d have rented it from. 

I’d imagine Tisolay knew Miss Babette, who would have been in her late 30s when the Champagnes moved into first one, then the other of the Platz rental properties. Babette never left her father nor married, and lived next door to the Champagnes until Tisolay was 16, when she died.  The Platz successions, Babette’s and her father’s, cleared up the mystery of who owned 617 Moss.  Peter Platz passed the properties to his daughter who, when she died ten years later, passed them to her cousin, Amanda Janssen, who lived a block down, behind the Division St grocery.  In 1938, long after the Champagnes were gone and Mathilde did finally buy the house, it would have been Amanda that she bought it from.

I don’t know if you knew Amanda, who was about the same age as her cousin Babette, but Carmen did.  They were clerks together at Calcasieu National Bank.  And, of course, Amanda and Babette’s mothers, both Brudersons, were Goos’ cousins from back on the Foehr Islands. I doubt they were in the picture of their Aunt Katherine’s garden party, being a kid’s party, but that party would have been around the time Miss Babette rented 617 to J Euclide, or shortly afterwards since Sophie’s in the picture and apparently no longer in Goosport… late 1912 , 1913. You look to be about 8, though, so y’all were only just adjusting to a two-family household.

 The 1910 photo of the whole family, when y’all were in Breaux Bridge visiting Yépope (Tisolay’s grandfather Adeo, ‘Yépope’ being a weird sorta short for Vieux Papa, old Papa), would have been during the time y’all were still living in the first house, behind the Flanders property, across from Della. I don’t know, though. There’s something about it. You’re definitely 5, but look behind you; that’s an iron spike fence, with a bit of it going up into an arch as if it were a gate. There aren’t any iron fences in rural cane country; that’s a city thing. And it’s a pretty well-to-do city thing, too.

Wait. You know what? I’ve seen that fence. I’ve seen it 100 times on Google Earth since the hurricanes, looking for updates on the repairs to your house. That’s the fence around the Flanders house; their back fence would have abutted the side of 511 Moss. Y’all aren’t in Breaux Bridge in that shot; you’re standing in the back yard at 511 Moss St, with the Flanders’ back fence behind you. I know exactly where that is!

Seeing the outline of 511 Moss St on the 1909 map, and knowing that Tisolay lived there the day the Sanborn people’s mapmaker was measuring the house, walking around it, drawing it out in a notebook… seeing her as a 3-yr-old, possibly standing on a chair watching him from the front window, created mixed feelings in me. I thought of the freedom she was soon to lose, as well as her confidence in her own importance under Mathilde and Sophie’s dominion. I thought how ‘small-town’ unique it was that, despite the 3 moves it took before settling into 617 Moss, she never needed to stray farther than a block’s radius from her original neighborhood, neighbors or friends. I thought of the first exploration the family would have made of their neighborhood from that house, in the first days after stepping off the train, during breaks from unpacking or after J Euclide came strolling home from the train depot. You would have only been a toddler holding someone’s hand, maybe Carmen’s, occasionally riding on Tiwazzo’s hip or J Euclide’s shoulders.

Aw, Ti. I know you had plenty of happy times, and I don’t know why the whole issue with Sophie makes me so sad. But come to find out, there was a whole period of time when you and your family’s lives had not yet been tied to the fate of the Bourdiers, when Tiwazzo was the mistress of her own household, when your family was free to commune with your new city on your own terms… and you were too young to remember it. It was only 3 or 4 years, but it was the life y’all would have had, your own, had its course not been hijacked. That’s probably putting it too strongly. Perhaps life was meant to take its structure from the string of little highjackings that the world presents us. I know that my need to get your story written before I die, like any artistic drive, requires a self-absorption and shift in social priorities that comes at the expense of anyone we live with, and it does worry me. Or maybe I just yearn so badly for you to remember the days you had before Sophie because I’m only just now getting my first glimpses of where you grew up, and every little discovery is so poignant for me… digging for pennies and finding diamonds.

☙ ❦ ❧

When Tisolay died, I thought that surely, if ever there were two people so connected that one would ‘visit’ the other when they died, to say goodbye, it was Ti and me. But nope. She was gone, I mean gone gone, dancing in Granddaddy’s arms again. And I understood. That was 17 years ago, the day before Mardi Gras in 2004 (yeah, yeah…because she knew that if she waited a day and died on Mardi Gras Day, Bultman’s Funeral Home, right smack on the St Charles Ave parade route, would never have been able to get out of their own driveway, let alone through the parade and its crowds to get to her). But last year, when I finally started researching the long-awaited Lake Charles chapter of her life, the mystery years I didn’t know anything about, I felt her very near me, albeit a feeling I knew perfectly well was created in my own head and heart. But when I found Carmen’s granddaughter and we got to know each other’s version of our family. . . wow! I could almost feel Tisolay’s breath purring in my ear. And then I knew, without any doubt, what she wanted me to do.

The more I uncovered about Tisolay’s life in Lake Charles, the more I realized how grateful Ti was to her big sister Carmen who’d been so devoted to her. I think Carmen understood how Sophie made Tisolay feel, and how inescapable it was, the forced pairing that existed at home and probably also out in the social world, when one girl couldn’t be invited and the other left out. Carmen probably also understood something of the dynamic within the household that kept the problem between Tisolay and Sophie alive and unresolved. And since Carmen did not marry and leave home until she was 26, she was there for her during Ti’s difficult early teens until Tisolay was halfway through high school.

Even after Carmen married, her new husband only took her a few doors away, just around the corner, and the girls stayed close. A few years later, photographs show that Carmen had her own piano. Marrying into a relatively well-to-do family, she may have had it since her marriage in 1920, and if so, may have allowed Tisolay to bring her music there during those few high school years after Carmen left, out from under the pall of Sophie and Mathilde. (Good lord. It never occurred to me, but all the recital programs Tisolay kept had Sophie among those playing, and at a somewhat more advanced level. I knew Tisolay had started taking piano lessons at a later age than most. Had the Moss St piano been Mathilde’s, and piano lessons been one of the things that Sophie got and Tisolay didn’t? And once Tisolay did start lessons, did Sophie’s dominance extend to the piano as well?)

In any case, Tisolay went away to college at the Conservatory in New Orleans the same month that Carmen gave birth to her daughter Betty, and I can well see Ti joyfully making regular trips home by train, which only took 5 hours, repaying Carmen’s kindness and spending time with little Betty, taking her under her wing, perhaps exercising on tiny Betty the budding teaching skills she was learning.

After she graduated, moved back home, and helped her newly-widowed mother move to the little corner house across from Carmen, she announced herself as a piano teacher in the Lake Charles newspaper and began teaching. Betty, now 4, officially became one of her students, and the piano forged the bond that would link them together for life.

But Granddaddy lived in New Orleans, and he was champing at the bit to get Ti to marry him, so long had she been dangling the unspoken word “yes” over his head, just out of reach. So after only 3 years doing what she loved, teaching in Lake Charles, Tisolay married Granddaddy, with Betty as flowergirl, and then left Lake Charles for good. No one had any way of knowing that Carmen would die 3 years later, at the young age of 40, and change little Betty’s life forever.

Less than 2 years after Carmen died, Betty’s father remarried, leaving Betty in a lonely sadness apparent enough for Granddaddy to suggest to Tisolay that they adopt her. I don’t know how far that went, but Betty’s father and new wife kept her with them, and she had grandmère Tiwazzo across the street. But 6 years later Betty went off to college at the Eastman School of Music in Pennsylvania and never looked back. She met her husband there, Tisolay and Granddaddy went up for the wedding, and they kept up with Tisolay over the years. Betty sent her programs of recitals and school photos of her son and daughter as they grew up, modern school portraits only a few years older than mine that Tisolay never told me anything about. I was only familiar with them because they were in with the unsorted mish-mash of older photos, thousands of them, in Tisolay’s overflowing bureau drawers that I loved rooting through.

I was several weeks into my correspondence with the cousin I met on Ancestry.com when it hit me like a thunderbolt that that was her and her brother in those little school shots. Tisolay and I had labeled and sorted all her thousands of photos after Granddaddy died, and though I hadn’t seen them in the 30 years since, I knew right where to go to find them. I spread them out across the bed and sent her a single shot of them all together so she’d have a sense of my having known of her my whole life. I wonder if Ti knew that she was one of the only people Betty kept up with from Lake Charles, and that such was the sadness of her childhood that she never would tell her kids anything about it or her family back in Lake Charles… would refuse if asked. In any case, Tisolay felt she never got the chance to repay all that Carmen had done for her, and she’s telling me now, loud and clear, that I ‘m to ‘pay it forward’ to Carmen’s granddaughter and give her back her heritage.

The post Leaving Cajun Country for Lake Charles: 1907-08 appeared first on My Old New Orleans Family.

What I’m working on right now is the Lake Charles chapter of my grandmother’s life. She told me nothing of her childhood, and the only childhood picture there was of her showed her face in the deep shadow of the noonday sun, her features unrecognizable.  I had no idea what she looked like as a child. But I knew where her house was, and I found her world, gradually, pouring through the McNeese photo archives of Lake Charles in the 1900s and 1910s, one eye-opener after another. Likewise with the Sanborn fire insurance map from 1909, 2 years after her family moved to Lake Charles from the family’s sugar cane farm on Bayou Teche in St Martin Parish. I’ll celebrate this whole blog resurrection and christen the Lake Charles chapters in particular, with possibly the best thing I will ever find in my Lake Charles research. I don’t see how I could top it. I’ll back up a bit, though.

The Sanborn map showed me my Tisolay’s house in perfect outline, 617 Moss, between Mill and Division, the middle house on the right side.  I’d grown up with Tisolay’s photo of her house, and was delighted to see on the map an added tidbit that couldn’t be seen in the photo, the outline of a 1-storey back porch off the kitchen door.

It also showed me the outline of a big house on the opposite corner, across the street, whose broad, L-shaped verandah had enormous rounded extensions at the front corners. I’d seen a magnificent house like it in the archives and went in search of it.  Plugging the address into the McNeese archives didn’t show me anything. The present-day Google Earth view only showed me a well-kept lawn where the house had been, which I’d already seen from the many times I’d checked on Tisolay’s house after the one-two punch of hurricanes that hit Lake Charles in 2019.

The town’s 1911 directory, though, listed that address as belonging to a J A Bel, a name I recognized as one of the town’s big lumber magnates.  And McNeese had plenty on the much-documented Bel house, including a full shot of the house dated the same year as Sanborn, 1909, exactly as Ti would have seen it. She could have been sitting in her front window at home, not yet in school at age 4, when the photographer took this shot, maybe have seen the horse and carriage in this shot pull up in front of the house. 

There was something about the architecture of the house that was unlike what I’d seen from the same period in New Orleans, but I couldn’t put my finger on what it was until I saw a close-up of the verandah in a second photo from the McNeese collection captioned ‘Bel house garden party’. 

In the garden party shot, 50 or 60 children were lined up loosely in rows that extending out from the corner of the verandah, and plainly visible was a second set of columns, smaller and only 1 storey high, set inside the ring of larger ones. They held up the 2nd floor verandah without any connection to the large main columns in front or the roof above them, which fascinated me.   

The caption dated it to 1920.  The caption was wrong. 

I don’t know why my eyes went so unerringly to the face of a small 8-yr-old girl sitting cross-legged in the front row, but the differences that spanned 70+ years between the face of that girl and the face I loved more than any other on earth fell away, irrelevant. The little face soon blurred away behind two lakes of tears, and the thought blipped into my mind that I should tag McNeese’s photo somehow, saying that it couldn’t have been from 1920, because my grandmother was 8 years old in 1913. 

The post We’re back! – Digging for pennies and finding diamonds appeared first on My Old New Orleans Family.