Jim Bradshaw: Reviving the history of Bayou Chene

Today you would have to dig through more than ten feet of silt to find any remnant of the Bayou Chene community that once flourished in the middle of the Atchafalaya Basin. That makes it only a little harder to find than when it was a reasonably prosperous settlement.

It was always an isolated place. It was surrounded by swamp and the only way in or out was by boat. But that didn’t bother its hardy residents, who found small plots to raise crops and cattle and to build a little town. About 500 people lived there in the early 1920s, most of them descendants of the first settlers who got there in the 1830s. A post office was established in 1858. A church, school, and store were there at least in the early 1920s, probably earlier.

Bayou Chene families made a living as farmers, fishermen, trappers, lumberjacks, moss pickers, and by doing whatever else they could to use the resources of the Basin. (It has been alleged, with pretty good foundation, that Prohibition was a particular boon to the community, both as a place where moonshine could be made and where booze from outside could be distributed.)

We know from census data that at least sixteen planters had homesteads in the area by 1841. The first land claims were registered with the U.S. government in June 1848, and nearly all the useable land in the vicinity was claimed by the end of that year. The 1850 census counted 184 people in 41 households. By the 1860 census, the total Bayou Chene population had increased to about 675.

Swampers and lumberjacks moved into the community after 1876, when the federal Timber Act allowed sale of huge swaths of cypress swamp to raise money to build a levee system. That attracted the eye of northern investors who could afford the manpower and technology to cut even the biggest trees and haul them to sawmills at the edge of the Basin.

Lafayette industrialist Dailey Berard, the son of a swamper, reminisced about growing up in the Basin in his autobiography, “This Cajun Ain’t Bashful,” (Lafayette: 1986).

“Cutting the great cypress trees for crude saw mills provided the meager wages to purchase the necessities of life. The loggers leveled axes and saws that seemed ludicrously inadequate to the task. … The huge bases of the cypress trees made it necessary to use elevated perches of planks driven into slits cut in the cypress trunks. Some of the large red cypress measured more than ten feet across the base. Some were so large they took many days to fell, trim, and cut into manageable lengths. The felled trees were pulled to centralized locations by wire cables hooked to steam-powered engines.”

J. M. Ramel, priest in Loreauville, was in charge of the Bayou Chene mission in 1925, when he wrote about it in a letter to a friend in France. He said it was 20 miles from the mother church, six miles by car, the rest by boat.

 “At Bayou Chene there is neither road, cars or horses. There is no chapel to celebrate Mass or preach. I do everything in the middle of the prairies — Mass, preaching, confessions, marriages, baptisms, etc. If it rains, we have no Mass. For this reason, we are about to build a chapel at Bayou,” he wrote.

A Catholic chapel was built before 1838, and, like every building there, was affected by more-or-less regular flooding, according to a memoir (“High Water, Low Water,” Lake Charles, c. 1960) by Father R.J. Gobeil, who came after Father Ramel.

“The chapel had been well silted by 1938,” he wrote. “About a foot of the fence rose above the silted ground. The steps leading to the entrance had completely disappeared under the sand, nor were they needed to enter the building, for the floor was below ground level. In the interior, the oak floor, because of repeated flooding, resembled the rippling waves of a lake stirred by a light breeze.”

Those rippled floors, and the floods that caused them, were harbingers of the community’s demise. The Flood of 1927 submerged the community and convinced the Army Corps of Engineers that a spillway had to be built to divert Mississippi River floodwater away from New Orleans. Bayou Chene was in the middle of that spillway, and, even though it took years to get it completed, the community’s days were numbered.

The school was moved to higher ground in 1945 and closed a decade later, about the same time as the post office.

A few residents moved onto houseboats and stayed as long as they could, but most of them dismantled their houses, loaded the lumber and their belongings onto barges and moved to Plaquemine or St. Martinville or New Iberia, or some other town where floods, silt, and wavy floors were not a perennial problem.

You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.