Jim Bradshaw: The Abbotts built their canal while others dug theirs

Elwood Mead identified himself as the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s “Expert in Charge of Irrigation Investigations” in 1902, the year he supervised a big study on rice irrigation that said the Louisiana prairies were the place to visit to see the way things should be done.
“Rice growing in southwestern Louisiana and southeastern Texas during the past five or six years has developed from an experiment into a stable industry of greatest importance to the United States,” according to “Irrigation of Rice in the United States.”
The report said our canals were one of the most inventive of the reasons for that growth; while other people dug canals into the ground we most often built ours on top of it.
“The only point of similarity between the rice canal of the South and [irrigation canals] of the Northwest is that both are filled with water,” according to the report.
“The canal of the Northwest is dug below the surface of the land through which it passes; the rice canal is built on top of the … highest ground that can be found.”
The Northwest canals didn’t hold water very well, but rice canals ran between levees, which, “when properly constructed, are practically impervious to water,” according to the study.
Furthermore, a canal in the Northwest, “owing to its necessary gradient, will empty itself at one end only” but a rice canal, “having a level foundation, [will] empty freely and… discharge the same volume of water at each end.”
The conclusions were drawn in part from a visit by the report writers to the pioneering Abbott Brothers farm near Crowley. David Abbott and his sons Miron and Martin came to Acadia Parish from Michigan in 1888 and settled on Prairie Hayes to grow rice.
Mary Alice Fontenot, who wrote a definitive history of the parish, said that “by this time the German farmers of the parish had learned to grow rice successfully on high land by throwing up levees to retain rain water .,,, [but] the Abbotts went a step farther.”
First, they devised a clumsy but workable system of buckets to pull irrigation water from Bayou Plaquemine Brûlée to irrigate about 15 acres.
Then, in 1894, they built a canal 15 miles long and 40 feet wide to water a wide swath of the prairie.
David died in 1910 and Miron, the older son, took the lead in managing the farm.
When he died in 1932, the Crowley Signal said that the Abbotts were “the first to inaugurate artificial irrigation of rice in this territory. … [and] the entire network of irrigation in Southwest Louisiana has grown from this humble beginning.”
In 1894, the Abbott farm was described as “one of the largest and most valuable in the parish” and at least one account described it as the biggest in the country.
The Abbott rice warehouse in Crowley was also said to be “the largest of its kind in the country.”
The federal report in 1902 said that “it was to this farm and these men – the Abbott brothers and their associates – who had the courage to carry on original experiments … that credit belongs for organizing an agricultural industry of great concern to the people of the United States.”
The success of the Abbott Canal led to the creation of others, including a 12-mile canal built by the Crowley Canal Company, which was owned by another set of brothers, William and C. C. Dison.
According to the irrigation study, “it was erected in 1896, the year which witnessed the first unqualified success in rice irrigation on the Abbott plantation.”
Another company, the Roller Canal Co., began pumping water in 1897, which the federal report described as a dry year that caused the managers of the three canals to think bigger pumps were needed to keep their canals from running short of water.
They combined their resources to build a pumping plant called the Union Relift on Bayou Plaquemine Brûlée with “a capacity equal to or greater than that of all three combined.”
That set off a boom.
By 1900, there were more than 400 miles of irrigation canals cutting through the south Louisiana prairies, and plans to build more of them and bigger ones.
You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.