1892 East Feliciana, Louisiana

PREFACE.

EAST FELICIANA.

RISE AND PROGRESS OF A COLONY OF THE CAROLINAS.

Clinton, La., October, 5, 1889.

Mr. Kilhourne:

My Dear Sir— I contemplate a work germain to the title "role" in the performance of which I shall need the "Patriot-Democrat" as my coadjutor.

Inasmuch as the census of 1890 will, as is customary, compile and publish all needed statistical information relating to our material progress, the occasion appears to favor a systematic, well-considered endeavor on our part to attract the gaze of the home-seekers to our large area of waste and uncultivated fields, which are laying idle for want of laborers, and which are dirt cheap and are easily renovated.

A pamphlet containing a synopsis of the census statistics for East Feliciana would be brimful of valuable and reliable information; but would the average home-seeker read it unless it is accompanied by some pleasant pictures of the social life to which he is invited ?

Those pictures, it is my design to draw in connection with a map of our parish by wards, giving to the history and genealogy, the social characteristics and progress of each geographical division, a separate sketch. As the sketches are drawn I venture to hope that the Patriot-Democrat and the other parish newspapers will aid in submitting them for inspection, amendment and revision, to the people of the ward sketched. If the papers will help me to that extent before the close of 1890, I expect to have compiled all the historical and genealogical material for a more than usual interesting immigration pamphlet.

It is universally conceded that we are badly in want of agricultural recruits, and it is almost as generally desired, while we will cordially welcome capital and labor from any quarter of the compass, that our agricultural recruits should be drawn from the ancient seats of the race which planted this colony early in this century.

In tracing back to the fountain head, it is as well to have it understood, that we make no pretension to a genealogical shield emblazoned with heraldic legends in panels of gules, argent or azure, resting not upon the fanciful creations of bards and historians — owing nothing to fabricated genealogies — nothing to the miraculous apparitions which usually usher in the birth of states.

Nevertheless we, have a line of ancestry for which we entertain affectionate reverence and cordial admiration, a line of ancestry, which unlike the shoddy and codfish aristocrats, we are anxious to trace out to its remotest antiquity.

Vast schemes of colonization were generated in the older settlements when Mr. Jefferson made proclamation, in October, 1803, that a boundless fertile unpopulated empire had been transferred the previous April by France to the United States. That famous state paper found eager readers among our immediate ancestors. A population clinging to the sides of the mountain ranges of the Carolinas and Southwestern Virginia, cultivating the narrow valleys of the Clinch and Holston, rugged as the crags; impetuous as the torrents of their native mountains, still full of the military spirit inspired by the camp fires and on the battlefields of the Revolutionary War — still rehearsing by the light of their pine torches, the shame of Camden and Guilford Courthouse and the glory of Saratoga, King's Mountain and Yorktown — still burning with patriotic fires which lighted Sumpter, Pickens, Laurens and all the heroic chiefs of cavalier and Huguenot strain the path to glory, and many a tory minion of King George the way to dusky death.

On such a population, restless and ill at ease, environed by the dull monotonies of peace paying unwilling homage to the authority of the law — relying more on their own valor and trusty rifles for that protection rarely extended by the laws in those early days to segregated and remote communities. On such a population the stirring announcement that a boundless and fertile empire, larger than the original thirteen states, for which they had risked their lives and freely shed their blood, lay to the south of them waiting to be peopled; — And the promise of homes in the genial south — land dazzled their imaginations, as did the spoils of England, the restless imaginations of the bold Feudal Chieftains who rallied to the standard of William Duke of Normandy.

Still hunting our genealogical source which is common to the population of each of the eight wards without groping in the dark, we can inquire a step farther back for the origin of the sturdy mountaineers, who colonized East Feliciana. We can go back to a settlement on the shores of Albemarle sound by the Cavaliers, fleeing from the cruelties and oppressions of Cromwell, — back to the settlement along the South Carolina sea coast by the persecuted Huguenots who after the siege of Rochelle, sought an asylum in the new world for the freedom of conscience denied them by Cardinal Richelieu and the Pope of Rome.

When the sea coast hives of the Cavaliers in North Carolina and the Huguenots in South Carolina became overpopulated, they spread out in search of homes, the two lines of home seekers crossed and commingled among the mountain ranges of the Carolinas. From the commingling of these two lines sprang Marion, Sumpter, Laurens and Pickens, and many of the great southern chiefs of the Revolutionary war; and from the commingling of these two historical lines, we claim lineal descent.

If here amid the cane-brakes and vine clad forests of these southern wilds, we have constructed a civilization characterised by all the virtues of both lines of our haughty aristocratic fore-fathers, we arrogate to ourselves with pardonable pride some little credit.

If under the enervating influence of southern heats, our progress and development has been slow, when contrasted with the more populous, faster moving northern societies still we claim to be the better, happier, purer civilization, because we have maintained uncontaminated and undefiled the moral and social characteristics of our patriotic high strung ancestors and because no new fangled "ism" foreign or native has ever taken root in our societies which we have always jealously guarded against the poisonous preachings of visionary enthusiasts who come from abroad to teach them to be freer who know and feel that they are already as free as they ought to be — as free as they want to be.

By these cautionary acts of vigilance we have maintained our civilization, socially and politically free from the turbulent teaching of Irish saloonists and free from the socialistic heresies of the beerguzzling Germans. Happy would it be for our country if the older and more trumpeted colonies of Jamestown, Plymouth Rock and Manhattan Island had preserved the civilization entrusted to them by their ancestors as jealously as we have guarded ours.

I send the Patriot Democrat this preparatory chapter of the more extended work I have in contemplation, hoping it will not prove too long for your space.

Yours truly,

H. Skipwith.

Clinton, La., October 10, 1889.

I am enabled, Mr. Editor, to send you this week, a few authentic incidents relating to the earliest movement of population in Ward No. One, first in antiquity, first in fertility, first in population, and therefore entitled to be first of my series of AVard Sketches. Tradition, corroborated by vestiges of a decayed Fort, Mission House, Cemetery and Store House, tell of a small centre of population settled between Murdock's Ford on Thompson's Creek, and the great river and along the public thoroughfare leading from Baton Rouge, the metropolis of the political and ecclesiastical Power of Spain, in West Florida to St. Francisville, and the Church of St. Francis. An old blotter or day book, of Cochran & Rhea, an adventurous firm doing business in September, 1802, in the old store house now decayed, informs us from day to day until the close of 1803 who were the clients of that earliest commercial venture within the borders of our parish, and likewise discloses the names of many of the old pioneers who first awakened the primeval forests of East Feliciana with the echoing thuds of the woodman's axe.

Inasmuch as the junior partner of the old store on Thompson's Creek, by his marriage with one of old Dr. Raoul's (a French "Emigre") lovely daughters, founded a family which has played a prominent part in the material and social development of Ward One, and has moreover fastened his name and deeds conspicuously on the pages of history, I will devote a short paragraph, to keep green the memory of old Judge John Rhea, who in 1802 was merchant, planter and alcalde for Feliciana (an officer about the equivalent of parish judge in our system). The King of Spain's jurisdiction, as it was administered by his mild and benevolent old Anglo-Saxon alcalde, was doubtless equitable and paternal, and the people of that day lived contentedly under it. When, however, a few years later, the country began to fill up with the fiery Huguenot and cavalier immigrants from the Carolinas, and loud protests against monarchial government, began to stir the hearts of the AngloAmerican communities, I am afraid the King of Spain's old Anglo-Saxon alcalde, blinded by the hot love of liberty characteristic of his race, forgot his royal master at Madrid, and in 1810 the alcalde figures prominently as member and president of the convention which founded and governed the free and sovereign State of West Florida.

From the old blotter of Cochran & Rhea's Thompson Creek store, I select the names which I conjecture became permanent factors in the advancing civilization of East Feliciana, many of them founding families which became identified with the development of the wards. While the old blotter rescues from oblivion the ancestors of many of the powerful and honored families of our parish, I notice, nevertheless, some notable omissions of pioneer names of Ward No. One who contributed largely and faithfully to the social elevation and agricultural development of that modern garden of Eden. Those notable omissions 1 shall endeavor to supply after preparing an alphabetical catalogue of the names of the clients of Cochran & Rhea, selected from the blotter of 1802 and 1803, to- wit:

Adville Aitkens, Giles Andrews, A. Brozina, James Brannon, Thomas Brannon, Asa Brashiers, Zadock Brashiers, Samuel Brashiers, Philip Brashiers, Henry Bradford, Sr., HenryBradford, Jr., Nathan Bradford, John Buck, Peter Busky, Baily Chaney, James J. Chaney, James Clarke, James Cooper, Madam Como, Thomas Carney, Sr., Thomas Carney, Jr., Daniel Carney, Guy Carney, John Carney, Sr., John Carney, Jr., Thomas Carpenter, John Dortch, Doctor Flowers, John Gale, Llewellyn Colville Griffith, Baltor Hanmer, Battle Hanmer, Thomas Irwin, James Jackson, Watkins James, Michael Jones, Thomas Jones, John Keats, Peter Keller, Sr., Peter Keller, Jr., Nathan Kemper, Ira C. Kneeland, James Loudon, David Miller, William Miller, John McDonald, Manuel Montegudo, William Marbui-y, John Murdock, John McArthur, George Neville, Sybil Nash, John Nolan, Phoebe Owens, James Owens, Robert Owens, John Patterson, Vincente Pintado, Policarpio Rogillio, Amos Richardson, Zachariah Richardson, Henry Richardson, Theophilus Richardson, William James Richardson, William Reames, William Stewart, John Stewart, David B. Stewart, Abraham Speers, John Simms, Hugh Smith, Laban Smith, Jeremiah Smith, Abraham Smith, William Taylor, Mary Taylor, Thomas Vaughan, Robert Vaughan, Thomas Williams. David White, Elizabeth Waltman, David Waltman, William Walker, Thomas Young.

Parsons Carter, whose name is not in the blotter, a scion of the Carters of Shirley Hall in old Virginia, migrated from Natchez, certainly before the country passed from under the Spanish jurisdiction, and founded a home on the Baton Rouge and St. Francisville road, just where it emerges from Buhler's Plains. And nearly at the same time, Benjamin Kendrick, the maternal ancestor of the Flukers, began a clearing at Asphodel, the present ancestral seat of the Flukers, Willliam D. Carter and Gen. Albert G. Carter lived near the oldest family seat, useful, public spirited citizens, warmly honored and loved by their neighbors. Many of the descendants of Gen. A. G. Carter still uphold the social prestige of the family, in close vicinity to their ancestral seat. The same honorable characteristics have developed in the line of old Mr. Ben Kendrick's descendants. At a later day, there came into the ward Gen, Felix Huston, of Texas "Crab Orchard" fame, and his next neighbor, Capt. James N. Chambers, an "eleve" of West Point, who having married a daughter of the rich and powerful Relfs, of New Orleans, opened a large plantation along the banks of Thompson's Creek, over the site of the old Fort, Mission House and store. These two comparatively new comers became able and zealous coadjutors of the Carters and Flukers and the pioneers who figured on the old blotter of 1802.

It is a merited tribute to the wonderful fertility and durability of the fine old ward, to emphasize the statement that notwithstanding its cultivation commenced with the present century there is scarcely an acre of land under fence that is not producing, in this year of grace, 1889, its bale of cotton.

I found in the old blotter of Cochran & Rhea the following entry: "To Robert Owens, $1.00 for taking care of goods at the landing," and I am admonished by it that Ward No. One has a history which has a commercial side as well as a social and agricultural side, and its commercial development will form the staple of the sketch which I intend to send you next week.

Clinton, La. October 9th, 1889.

Very suggestive is the following entry from Cochran & Rhea's blotter of 1802, to wit;

"To Robert Owens, $1.00 for taking care of goods at landing.''

Inasmuch as East Feliciana had before 1832 scarcely enough front on the Mississippi river to afford a wharf for an ordinary sized flat boat, and that small river front was her only port for imports and exports in the days of flat boats and keel boats, as carriers for the produce, transported by ponies, along bridle paths through the cane thickets, and raised by primitive "scooter" plow with wooden shovel boards and hoes, both of which were cherished because they had been "compagnons de voyage" all the way from the Carolinas and as further more the cotton production was limited to the consumption required by hand looms and spinning wheels, it stands to reason that the increase of the tides of commerce which flowed in and out of our only gate, signified when the area of production was increasing; that the laborers in the Eastern Wards had gathered into the harvest field in larger numbers, that the bridle paths had been widened, and that therefore the demand for flat and keel boats had increased.

Tradition has kept us of the present generation well posted regarding the primitive methods of agriculture and commerce which supplied the simple wants of our ancestors. There is not a doubt that the store of Cochran and Rhea on Thompsons creek did receive its stock of western produce from descending flat boats at the "Landing" at the foot of the Bluffs, on the top of which at a late date was built the "Town of Port Jackson," and it is equally apparent that the Thompsons creek store received its supplies of family groceries and general merchandise by ascending keel boats loaded by the New Orleans house of Cochran & Rhea and cordelled up stream.

As the area of production was enlarged in the Eastern portion of the parish, there arose in the interior two formidable commercial rivals of the Thompsons creek store, Mr. William Silhman, the founder of the renowned seat of education "The Female Collegiate Institute" of Clinton, and Mr. David Pipes, who migrated at an early date from Natchez. Both established a store in the Northeastern portion of the parish. Mr. David Pipes was the father of the present State Treasurer and of one of our members of the general assembly.

The cheap and primitive methods of those old merchants, in conducting the agricultural and commercial affairs of the parish are worthy of a detailed description. Either Mr. Silliman or Mr. Pipes would buy a flat bout and cargo moored at Port Jackson, flying at her peak the Wabash coat of arms an emblem which needed neither Hoosier nor Garter King at arms to interpret. Its realistic legend was symbolized by a flag staff with a mammoth Irish potato, a big ear of corn, a golden hued apple and a side of bacon pendant, and at the topmost peak, a bottle of whiskey, rampant. This purchase was notified to all their clients through all the Eastern wilds, and a day appointed to send in the years catalogue for Western produce, and for the delivery of a corresponding amount of cotton at the "Landing " As the long train of wagons dumped their cotton bales, the drivers were called into the flat boat, and the articles designated on the owner's list were loaded on his empty wagon; as the cotton passed down the Western produce passed up, and when the ark of the Wabash was discharged of its original cargo it was reloaded with cotton bales. The whole transaction would be completed in a few hours, and, than with Captain Silliman or Captain Pipes at her helm and with three or four stalwart Africans at the oars, the clumsy old Wabash "Broad Horn" would leave behind her the Bluffs of Port Jackson and soon be wafted out of sight by the ceaseless currents of the great river on their way to the Sea. Ordinarily the voyage was uneventful, but on one occasion, Captain Pipes tied his rich load of fleecy staple to the New Orleans shore, too late at night to make a sale of it, which added another night to the risk of his voyage. "That was the longest night and the most unpleasant I ever lived through" as the old gentleman used to tell. "I was awakened during the night by the whistling of the tempest, the deafening roar of the wild waters and the violent bumping of the boat against the bank. I jumped out of my berth, grabbed a lighted pine torch, and forgetting my pants, in the hurry and excitement, rushed ashore yelling like a wild Indian to wake up the sleepy headed negroes. I danced almost a hornpipe up and down, brandishing the flambeau and yelling to wake up the sleeping Africans. At last one wave bigger than its fellows, lifted the old flat boat on the levee, and there she lay next morning, like her ante type on mount Ararat.

"After the storm abated and the waters became calm" continued the narrative of Capt. Pipes," I became conscious that I was wet as a drownded rat by the sprays from the surging waves, and moreover that I was a "sans calotte's for the first time."

Pursuant to custom a sale of the flat boat and cargo was made to those merchant princes, Nathaniel and James Dick, the largest and almost the only cotton buyers in New Orleans, and a flat boat and cargo in those days passed to them without any labored figuring for freight, insurance, drayage, tare, sampling, scalage, storage or stealage. Under the influence of such cheap, honest and equitable methods, the country prospered, and as wealth poured in, production increased with magical celerity.

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Extracted 09 Aug 2019 by Norma Hass from East Feliciana, Louisiana by Henry Skipwith, published in 1892.

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