Jim Bradshaw: Of ice, fish and high-octane booze
More than a half century ago, Atchafalaya Basin fish buyers who knew what they were doing stopped at “Uncle Tom” Bernard’s post office before running up or down the river.
The fish buyers who fanned through the basin’s network of waterways brought mail, groceries and household goods to isolated houseboats and cabins across the wetlands. They were probably nice guys, but their mail delivery was motivated more by economics than altruism. Basin fishermen sold their best fish to the guy who brought them their mail.
The postal guys in Washington never did quite understand the system. People were supposed to go to the post office to pick up their mail, and the fish buyers were not authorized mail carriers. But that, like many other things, didn’t make much difference in the isolated Basin.
By the early 1950s, the single building housing Uncle Tom’s home and post office was the last one left in the tiny Atchafalaya community five miles east of Henderson.
In its heyday, when trains hauling ice and fish ran across the Basin from Lafayette to Port Allen the town sported 20 or more buildings.
It had a small school, a dance hall, several stores and Uncle Tom’s Bernard Fish Company, the (Thomas) Martin Fish Company, and Fernand Dupuis’s Atchafalaya Fish Company, among others.
These companies sent boats that could hold as much as 10 tons of fish up and down the river to deliver mail and groceries (and sometimes orders delivered to them by Sears Roebuck or Montgomery Ward) and pick up the fishermen’s catch of catfish, carp, gaspargou and buffalo.
These weren’t the only boats that traveled the river. In 1931, federal agents captured a tug boat they said belonged to Al Capone.
An auxiliary fuel tank was filled with moonshine so strong that “it could probably have run the engines.”
But the community built on stilts was already in decline by then. It began to dwindle away after the railroad trestle washed out in the Flood of 1927, until finally there was nobody left but Tom — described by newspaper reporter David Lyle in May 1952, as “postmaster, notary public, deputy sheriff, railway express manager, and general all-around city government for the Atchafalaya community.”
When the trains stopped running, Jessie Serret’s mail boat made the run from Henderson to Atchafalaya; then Tom and his niece Clara Bell Haynes sorted it for delivery.
As Lyle explained, “The mail is picked up by passing fishermen and taken to the homes of the many swamp-dwellers for 30 miles up and down the river. …
The families along the river make their living mainly by fishing and the fish boat captain who wants to make a good living is the one who takes the trouble to stop at the post office and pick up mail for delivery. … The people living back in the swamps will always save their catch for the man who brings the mail to them.”
By the 1950s there wasn’t another house to be seen in any direction from the Atchafalaya post office, but there were still a good number of folks who depended on it, and it handled more mail than many in the state.
A good living could still be made from the swamp in those days. When fishing was slow, the swampers gathered moss, pulled up valuable sunken cypress logs, or hunted.
But then things began to change. Levees and floods changed the character of the Basin, roads brought outlanders into it, old swampers died and their children moved away from the isolated houseboats, the oil industry lured fishermen to more lucrative jobs on rigs inland and offshore, modern life caught up with even those who wanted no part of it.
Tom Bernard lived in Atchafalaya from 1914 to the day he had to close his post office and move to Henderson in 1959.
There was just no way to keep going in a place that had changed so much from the days when he was a young man.
You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.