We’re off to see our northeastern parishes in this, the last “Traveler” adventure of the great Louisiana Purchase bicentennial year, so – what the heck – let’s grab for a little symbolism: The curtain rises to find us at Monroe’s beloved Louisiana Purchase Gardens and Zoo.
Not only has
the park’s name taken on double significance this year, and not only are
most of us longtime admirers of its “new zoo” concept of offering
boat rides for viewing the animals on natural- habitat islands, but the great
old Louisiana Purchase Zoo represents a new phenomenon in land use that has
suddenly appeared in this region. Like this 82- acre tract of prime Ouachita
Valley cotton land that was long ago set aside for public enjoyment, significant
tracts of erstwhile cotton and soybean fields are now being converted to well-managed
forests, ranges, lakes and ponds to be used as campgrounds, nature preserves,
hunting-fishing facilities and other tourism/recreation purposes. The reasons,
say the landowners, are dwindling agricultural profits and booming demand by
urban visitors for experiences in the rural outdoors.Of course, you can’t be a true Louisianian if you don’t have a high regard for cotton, but never fear: You’ll never see cotton or cane or soybeans on the endangered species list. The market will find its own proper balance between agriculture and recreational uses of the land, and the big winner will be the consumers. And maybe the landowners, too. As one old Southern governor explained gleefully, decades ago when the word “tourism” was first being bandied about, “We’ve found out that a tourist is worth a lot more’n a bale of cotton, and he’s a damn sight easier to pick!”
MONROE-WEST MONROE
One of the first planters in the region was the founder of Monroe, Jean Baptiste Filhiol, who arrived here from New Orleans in 1782 to find nothing but a remote meeting place for trappers and traders on the Ouachita. His orders from Spanish Gov. Bernardo de Galvez (and the governor’s successor, Estevan Miro) were to establish the military Poste du Ouachita, but things were peaceful and Filhiol didn’t get around to building his little Fort Miro until 1791, barely time for it to lose that new-fort smell before Spain lost Louisiana. Soon 1803 brought the Louisiana Purchase, but Filhiol stayed to develop his own land grant into a plantation, and his descendents can still be found hereabouts.
The Louisiana Purchase Gardens and nearby Kiroli Park and Gardens, like all of Monroe and West Monroe, are draped, at the moment, in the old seasonal lights of red, white, green, yellow and blue. The Ouachita Christmas Flotilla has delivered Christmas 2003 to the Twin Cities, department store sound systems have been playing the old familiar songs, and holiday scenes fill the quaint 19th-century shop windows of the west bank’s Antique Alley. It’s a cheerful time indeed to visit the scenic riverfronts and other points of interest around town – the Biedenharn Museum and Gardens, the big and lively Sci-Port Discovery Center, the Masur Art Museum and the campus of UL-Monroe (with its Wesley Art Gallery and natural history and zoological museums) – or to fan out and enjoy a nice big circle through the entire region.
GETTING AROUND
Most of the roads that link the Rockwellian communities in these parts can be found in Louisiana’s Scenic Byways brochures because – you guessed it – they’re so scenic. From Monroe you might start by heading west for a look at hilly downtown Ruston, perhaps visiting its worthwhile city museum and the Odell pottery shop (and maybe the nearby campuses of Grambling and Louisiana Tech) before taking old U.S. 167 north to Bernice, which also boasts a good town museum. Then follow undulating La. 2 east through the Watermelon Festival town of Farmerville and on to Bastrop, with its Snyder Museum of farming and household paraphernalia and nearby Kalorama Nature Preserve (call 318-874-7777 for guided tours), then to the old-house hunting and antiques-auction opportunities of Mer Rouge and Oak Grove, and finally to beautiful Lake Providence and its lakeside Louisiana Cotton Museum. Each town is quaintly nostalgic, and all are peopled by people who like people like you. It’s Southern hospitality, which, like the cotton, is not endangered.
Below Lake Providence, U.S. 65 forms one of Louisiana’s segments of the west bank Great River Road. It’s also part of the so-called Bienville Trace Scenic Byway, which heads south through the delta land towns of Tallulah, St. Joseph on the Mississippi and Newellton on Lake St. Joseph, where you can detour around the lake to visit Winter Quarters Plantation State Historic Site. Then it’s on to Jerry Lee Lewis’ Ferriday to see a museum dedicated to “the Killer” and his kin, and to the nearby Frogmore Plantation to ramble through an extensive collection of vintage cotton-ginning buildings and equipment.
For a brochure listing all of Louisiana’s Scenic Byways and upward of 300 roadside attractions, call the Louisiana Office of Tourism at (800) 261-9144.
Take a meal beside the Mississippi in Vidalia, at one of the restaurants that offer views of the very sandbar where Jim Bowie fought his famous “sandbar duel,” then zigzag your way northwest through great towns like Harrisonburg (to see the Catahoula Parish Courthouse’s collection of Indian artifacts and to enjoy a bluff-top picnic where the guns of Fort Beauregard once guarded the Ouachita), Sicily Island, Winnsboro (with its town museum, walking tour and boyhood farmhouse of Gen. Claire “Flying Tigers” Chennault) and the Ouachita River metropolis of Duty.
DUTY BOUND
Dare to be different: plan an overnight in Duty. Trust me. The place you’ll find your supper is Jim Bowie’s Relay Station, famous as the establishment where the Bowie brothers would have dined while doing business in the region – if it had been here then. They would have liked the Ouachita River catfish, the double-baked potatoes and the Ruston-peaches peach cobbler, and Jim couldn’t have resisted taking along several jars of the Jim Bowie’s White Lightning Syrup for the road.
Go before sundown to enjoy the assemblage of sawmill, schoolhouse, moonshine still, covered bridge and other outbuildings that owner Ed Bartmess has clustered around his restaurant. Once inside, at your table, you’ll be distracted from the menu by the collections of Louisiana campaign posters and Bowie knives, but the Bartmess granddaughters and daughters-in-law of the hostess corps are used to it.
The place to go for your evening’s entertainment is also Jim Bowie’s Relay Station, thanks to the restaurant’s “Louisiana Saturday Night Stage” and a Bartmess son- in-law singer named Nathan Roark, not to mention the Bartmess Grandkids Chorus.
The place to find your night’s lodging is – you guessed it – Jim Bowie’s Relay Station. For reservations call (318) 744-5206, and you’ll sign in at the restaurant for a key to a cozy cottage complete with riverview back porch. Come morning you’ll hear the tootin’ of the Duty Ferry, the famed two-car-or-one-school bus ferryboat that will take you across the Ouachita for the 10-mile drive upriver to Columbia.
GEM OF THE OUACHITA
Columbia is one of those grand old where-Main-Street- meets-the-river towns, complete with delicious old storefronts, riverview benches for loitering and the high- water mark of Western civilization: diagonal parking!< BR> Speaking of high- water marks, the infamous Flood of 1927 left one inside everyone’s favorite local establishment, the Watermark Saloon, also famed for its “floating” (nothing to do with the flood) dominoes game. One of the usuals in the domino corner, himself nearing landmark status, is Huey P. Long (generally wearing camo and thus easy to spot) who feigns crotchetiness and maintains staunchly that he’s named for no one in particular.
Next door is a handsome Italianate mercantile building, reminiscent of an Italian opera house, whose façade features images of Washington, Columbus, the American eagle and Italian coat of arms. Built in 1916 by an immigrant-architect and businessman named John Schepis to please his operatically gifted wife, the building’s lofty interior now provides spaces for the changing exhibits of the Schepis Museum and pleasant offices for Kay LaFrance and her Columbia “Main Street” Program.
Columbia is one of 25 or so Louisiana towns participating in the Main Street USA Program, which recycles historic business districts by offering promotional assistance and financial incentives to attract viable new businesses. The turn- around of Columbia’s Main Street, for instance, is quite evident now, with boards gone from shop windows, façades spruced up, and, on one recent day, the “Old Ferrand House” chugging up from the countryside to its new Main Street address, destined to become the Captain’s Quarters Bed and Breakfast.
You’ll enjoy a drive around Columbia, with its striking Scandinavian First United Methodist Church (1911), a private chapel (but guests are welcome) built as a replica of old Christ Episcopal Church in St. Joseph, and the hilly and picturesque lane through the Columbia Hill Cemetery. Just upriver on the east bank, a great old 1870s farmhouse, with contents preserved and dependencies intact, has been restored (just enough) by a civic organization and opened to the public as the Martin Homeplace Folklore Museum (home-cooked meals available for groups by reservation, (318) 649-6722).
HOG DOGS AND DUCK CALLS
The region around Columbia and the Ouachita has been at the center of today’s trend of converting farmlands to habitat for wildlife populations and converting the hunter-fisherman-birdwatcher- photographer population to paying customers.
Jerry Bailey of Columbia, for instance, now offers year- round boar hunting at his 100-acre hunting club called Wild Hog Ridge, overlaid with a year-round schedule of duck, squirrel, deer and ’coon hunting for variety. You can sit in your blind and wait for Bailey’s fine kennel of Catahoula hog dogs to run the razorbacks and curly- haired Russian boars into range, but hunters who follow the dogs on foot will get a far more dramatic look at the skills of this ancient breed of work dogs, now honored as the proud state dog of Louisiana. The lodge here is warm, roomy and waterproof, with a big fireplace and good around-the-clock cooking. Check it out at www.wildhogridge.com, or phone (318) 649-6252.
“People are coming here from all over the United States,” says Wes Newman of his Bend of the River hunting facility on the Ouachita near Columbia, “and they’re coming back again and again.” Bend of the River specializes in duck hunts, but boats, blinds, guides and all other necessities are available for any type of hunting and fishing in the hundreds of acres surrounding his comfortable lodge. Contact www.laduckhunting.com or call (318) 386-2882.
LURE OF THE LAND
No matter the use of the land, there’s something strangely appealing about these hills, bottoms and Mississippi deltalands, which probably has as much to do with the call of antiquity as with the dramatic topography itself. The region is virtually peppered with ancient manmade mounds and ridges whose builders and even whose purposes are now, for archaeologists, the subject of intense study here and intense interest around the world.
Before the moundbuilders, the earth itself was busy here, at the dead-center of the continent and at the base of the incredible drainage system of the Mississippi River Valley, preparing for us a hidden and not-so-hidden record of its doings. Consider the encroachments of the sea itself, at various levels during various epochs, or the effects of a miles-high mountain range in today’s Arkansas that eroded through millennia and spread itself over Louisiana. Consider a single property in the Copenhagen Hills of lower Caldwell Parish, blessedly preserved for decades by Gov. John McKeithen and family and now by the Nature Conservancy, where a hiker descending one 300-foot hillside will traverse unnumbered small-to-real-small fossils and fragments from 121 (identified to date) marine species ranging in size from worm to crab to whale and ranging in age 30- some-odd million years and three epochs: Cenozoic, Tertiary and Eocene.< BR> Consider that the ground under that hiker’s feet, along that 300-foot trek, consists of a variety of clays and soils left by that same huge span of geologic change, resulting in, for one thing, the greatest variety of woody plants of any site in North America.
You can arrange access to the Copenhagen Hills Preserve by contacting the Winnsboro Office of the Nature Conservancy (318-412- 0472) several days in advance. The colors of spring make a marked contrast in the variety of flora. No collecting of plants, please, but take a little trowel for fossil hunting.
State parks, wildlife management areas such as the Sicily Island Hills, the Tensas National Wildlife Refuge, nature preserves, hunting clubs and sometimes even our roadsides can also provide glimpses back through time. Start by finding Darwin Spearing’s Roadside Geology of Louisiana and contacting the Louisiana Division of Archaeology and Office of State Parks (888- 677-1400) to request their free brochures on the several major mound complexes.
BEST BETS
Poverty Point preview: Of course you wouldn’t visit the northeast parishes without dropping in on the oldest (3,500 years) of the continent’s large mound- and-ridge complexes, and the special events already planned for Poverty Point (on the West Carroll Parish side of Bayou Maçon). Two of the popular hands-on “Bucket Archaeology” programs for children are set for Jan. 31 and March 6; three basket-making workshops will take place January through March; and David Griffing plans a Feb. 20-22 flint-knapping workshop ($75 gets you a dorm room and all materials. Call (888) 926-5492 to enroll). Author-archaeologist Jon Gibson will lecture and sign yet another of his Poverty Point studies on the weekend of March 19-21, and you can start right now enjoying a novel based on Poverty Point facts and speculation: People of the Owl by Kathleen and Michael Gear.
Good News Dept.: Inspired no doubt by our call a few issues ago for more Louisiana statues, the great little New Orleans Music Legends Park in the 300 block of Royal Street has unveiled a bronze of legendary clarinetist Pete Fountain, alongside that of his old pal, the late trumpet man Al Hirt. And across the state, the Coushatta Tribe of Allen Parish now boasts a major museum of Coushatta and other American Indian artifacts (337-584-1433).
PHOTOGRAPHER: BRUCE MORGAN PHOTOGRAPHY
Louisiana Life Magazine
Winter 2003/2004- Vol. 23 Issue 4