Jim Bradshaw: Keeping watch for the coffin in a tree

In December 1900 the Board of Control of the Louisiana State Penitentiary bought nearly 3,000 acres of land between New Iberia and Jeanerette to use as a prison farm.
They named it, somewhat facetiously, Hope Plantation.
According to the memories of some of the people who lived near the farm, the only hope for more than 200 inmates who were housed there was the hope of escape — something they tried to do regularly.
Gertrude Hebert lived near the farm when she was young. She said in a piece in the Attakapas Gazette historical magazine some years ago that the “most chilling and spine-tingling sound” heard in the area was the baying of the bloodhounds used to track down would-be escapees.
She said the baying hounds were also the signal for the plantation’s neighbors to rush out and take in any washing hung out to dry, because the prisoners would steal clothing from the lines. A
They needed to get rid of their black-and-white striped garb and they also wanted to change clothes to confuse the dogs.
Convicts at Hope Plantation tended a sugar cane crop and made bricks.
Photos taken in the early 1900s show a row of barracks-like buildings, a sugar mill, prison bakery, and an infirmary on the premises.
A kiln was added  when it was discovered that some of the land along Bayou Teche was composed of red clay that made good bricks that were used for buildings on the plantation or sold.
The plantation was also said to be the source of one of the most unusual landmarks on the old U.S. 90, now La. 182, and of a spate of stories that went with it.
Hebert thought the landmark, a large box in a tree, was deposited in its branches during the Flood of 1927, but some others who recall seeing it say it was too high up in the tree to have been put there by the flood.
However it got there, the tree became known locally as “the coffin tree,” and folks who used the route regularly remember watching for it.
Kids traveling with their parents sometimes had a contest to see who would spot it first. Stories circulated for years that the box was used for convicts who died on the farm.
Elaine Oubre of Broussard told me a decade or more ago that in the tales her father told, “it was definitely a coffin, not just a box.”
There was another story that the coffin contained a nearby plantation owner’s treasure and that you’d break a bone or go nuts if you tried to get to it.
Those are nice stories, but it almost certainly wasn’t a coffin, held no riches, and had nothing to do with Hope Plantation.
It was only an old sugar vat that was placed in the tree about 1927, when a Civilian Conservation Camp was opened nearby.
Several people told me that CCC workers used the rain-filled metal box as a shower to cool off during long, hot summer days.
Hope Plantation was closed as a penal farm in 1931 and sold to private owners. The tank and the tree it was in were removed when the Jeanerette high school was built in the late 1960s.
You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.