Jim Bradshaw: Vermilion was once 'fairly alive' with steamboats

Steamboats did not begin regular routes on the Vermilion River as early as on some other south Louisiana streams that were more easily navigated, but they were coming at least to Abbeville by the Civil War.
Alexandre Mouton, grandson of the governor of the same name, was reared at Walnut Plantation which bordered the river just below the Pinhook Bridge (now a part of Lafayette’s Bendel Gardens subdivision). He said in his memoirs that there was a large warehouse between his home and the bridge in pre-Civil War days and that “here the steamboats had their landing, where they received and discharged goods.”
The Lafayette Advertiser reported in March 1873 that the steamboat Flora, “commanded by Capt. [John] Pharr, the … popular steamboat captain, will make regular trips from Brashear City [Morgan City] to the Berard Landing .... about five miles from Vermilionville.” Pharr later announced plans to make regular trips “as high up the Bayou Vermilion as Wilkinson’s Landing near Pin Hook.”
In the following spring, an Advertiser advertisement for the sale of a farm three miles upriver from Abbeville noted: “The Bayou is navigable at all seasons of the year to Abbeville and several miles above the town. Steamboats run between Brashear City and the Farm in 16 hours, communications with the flourishing towns of New Iberia and Vermilionville are almost daily.”
By 1878, trade appeared to be good enough to spur talk about running steamboats from the Vermilion directly to New Orleans. The Abbeville Meridional reported that the “present high rates of freight [are] a serious disadvantage to this section of [the] country and anything tending to reduce them and to increase shipping facilities will be encouraged and hailed with real pleasure.”
A year later, according to the Meridional, the Vermilion was “fairly alive with water craft,” with the steamers Mattie, D. Stein, H. W. Fuller, and Exchange all working the river.
“It has been many years since [the Vermilion] has witnessed such activity along her banks,” the Meridional reported. “[with] short and easy communication with New Orleans, Vermilion Parish would … be able to land her produce upon the wharves of that city at a small expense and not being oppressed by monopolies would rapidly develop her wonderful productive powers.”
Capt. Pharr wasn’t so optimistic. In November 1879, as the railroad began to build toward Vermilionville, he sold “all of his interests in the Steamboat Mattie and the Bayou Vermilion Trade, including the Pinhook warehouse,” but kept it all in the family.
The buyer was Capt. A. E. Pharr, and the Mattie was scheduled to resume regular trips on the Vermilion “with Captain Burt Pharr in command.”
The railroad did take a big bite out of the steamboat trade, but did not kill it until Mother Nature lent a hand.
A study by the Army Corps of Engineers in 1880, the same year as the first trains arrived, reported on havoc done to the river by a storm in 1879.
The first four miles heading toward Abbeville from Pinhook Bridge were “so filled by snags, logs, and trees blown in during the … gale as to be impassable."
William B. Bailey, editor of the Advertiser and first mayor of Lafayette (after it was renamed from Vermilionville), urged in a letter to the Corps that cleaning the bayou was “a great necessity” because “the country is ... settled by small farmers who are self-sustaining …[but with] the bayou being closed up at several places, these people have to haul their produce and freight from 2 to 15 miles to the Morgan Railroad, who, having no competition, extort exorbitant rates.”
Besides that, he said, “There is another reason that should induce the Federal Government to do this work. Our bayou connects with the Teche and Fuselier and a very safe and regular inland navigation can be inaugurated for our people in that direction, instead of the dangerous mode by the Gulf, and as a military precaution in case of war with a foreign nation.”
The argument did not convince O.T. Crosby, who was sent by the Army Engineers to look over the situation. He found that about 400 obstructions and another 300 overhanging trees would have to be removed to clear the bayou for navigation, and that the trade did not justify spending the money.
When his boss, W. H. Heuer, made his appropriations request to Congress for Louisiana waterways, he reported, “This bayou, in my opinion, is not worthy of improvement.”
The official view has not changed very much since then.
A collection of Jim Bradshaw’s columns, "Cajuns and Other Characters," is now available from Pelican Publishing. You can contact him at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 7058