Sur le Teche: Exploring the Bayou by Canoe, Stage 4

Continued from Part III:

The fourth stage of my trip down the Teche occurred on January 29, 2012, and covered the stretch between Loreauville [30.056791, -91.740185] and Jeanerette. Keith Guidry, his son Ben, and Jacques Doucet accompanied me. The temperature that morning was a brisk 42 °F; in the afternoon it reached a comfortable 63 °F. We put in at 8:50 a.m. and within five minutes noticed one of the area's several boat fabrication facilities. These are large boats, perhaps eighty to a hundred feet in length. I reminded myself that the open waters of the Gulf of Mexico lay fairly close, where such boats would not seem so out of scale with their surroundings.

Large boat under construction along the Teche.
Note the two persons on bow.
(Photo by author)

Our starting point, Loreauville, sat halfway through a large oxbow meander. This meander bulged eastward toward the Atchafalaya swamp before shooting back toward New Iberia. Tackling the oxbow, we paddled past the mouth of Teche Lake Canal (also known as the Loreauville Canal) [30.023922, -91.731677], located in the east bank about 2.5 miles south of Loreauville. Despite its name, Teche Lake Canal doesn't lead to "Teche Lake" — there is no such lake — but to Lake Fausse Pointe. Perhaps the name is meant to imply "Teche-to-Lake" canal? (As I mentioned previously, Fausse Pointe is from my experience universally pronounced FAW-SEE POINT, in the Anglicized manner, even though it is a French name meaning "False Point.")

Aerial photograph of Stage 4, Loreauville to Jeanerette.
(Source: Google Maps)

Navigating the lower half of the oxbow, we passed through Belle Place [30.013368, -91.729617] and Morbihan [30.015858, -91.775107], two unincorporated communities that derive their names from old sugarcane plantations. Indeed, “Belle Place” lives on even in the name of a local middle school. Morbihan, on the other hand, sits halfway between Belle Place and the city limits of New Iberia. I tend to associate the name with a local volunteer fire battalion, known as the BOM battalion. A friend of mine once purchased a used truck from the battalion and drove all over with a huge decal in the back window reading "BOM Volunteer Fire Department." Neither of us could remember what "BOM" meant, though I knew that the "M" stood for Morbihan. Actually, it’s an acronym for Belaire-Olivier-Morbihan. (Olivier is also the name of a former sugar plantation — its plantation store still stands in the countryside near New Iberia — but I am unsure about the origin of Belaire.)

Ruins of modern sugar mill along the Teche.
(Photo by author)

Between Belle Place and Morbihan sits the Cajun Sugar Co-Op, another refinery that converts the region’s raw sugarcane into commercial-grade sugar. A bit closer to New Iberia, however, sits the rusting detritus of a less fortunate refinery, the Iberia Sugar Cooperative, which went defunct around 2005. Its remains include a battered, lopsided module that would look at home on the set of Mos Eisley space port. It's not a pretty site. I miss this refinery, a little: in winter the molasses-sweet scent of raw sugar wafted over my home in New Iberia, while the mill hissed and murmured quietly. Sometimes, however, the scent turned sour — but no one complained much: the stench lingered only a short while, dissipating after a day or two.

Jacques and Ben canoe by the Lutzenberger Foundry, New Iberia, La.
(Photo by author)

It was on this stretch of the Teche, just upstream from New Iberia, that U.S. Navy agent James Cathcart (see Part III) made the following observation in 1819:

[W]e embark'd [from New Iberia], and steer'd up the Teche, for St. Martinsville, & soon after met two canoes with a large family of Indians in them, viz. [that is]: 4 women, one of whom was half white, as many men & several children, besides a large dog couchant [lying down with head up] in the bow, & their baggage. One white man would have overturn'd either of those canoes if not extremely careful. . . .

We reached New Iberia at 11:50 a.m., more or less. Near downtown — a vibrant small-town Main Street, full of shops and restaurants — a venerable red-orange brick structure, the Lutzenberger Foundry [30.012075,-91.821515], came into view. Established in 1871, the foundry made "castings and repairs for steamboat and sugar mill parts," as a state preservation document records. The extant brick structure, however, dates from a bit later, around 1880.

The Lutzenberger Foundry from Jane Street, New Iberia, La.
(Photo by author)

Intriguingly, the Spanish colonial site of Nueva Iberia stood along the Teche in the vicinity of the foundry. In late 2012 I convinced my friend, archaeologist David Palmer of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, to undertake a small excavation of the foundry’s yard. Our goal: to search for signs of Nueva Iberia. One weekend he and I, with a few volunteers, set up screens and dug shovel test pits — and uncovered lots and lots of slag associated with the foundry, but no colonial-era artifacts. Not even a glass bead, much less a conquistador helmet, or a swivel gun, or a cache of silver reales. I was disappointed; but David was pleased because he, unlike me, found the nineteenth-century artifacts of interest.

Leaving Mr. Allain's public boat dock.
(Photo by author)

Passing through downtown New Iberia, which sits on the west bank of the Teche, we glided under the art-deco Duperior Street bridge. On the other side of the bridge we stopped at architect Paul J. Allain's boat dock [30.005253, -91.81603], which is open to the general boating public. Next to the dock, rising from the murky water, are a series of piles that protect the submerged ruins of a nineteenth-century steamboat. As the local Daily Iberian newspaper reported in 2007, "A sunken ship that wrecked nearly 140 years ago was unearthed last year during a site excavation by New Iberia architect Paul Allain. . . . The vessel was buried below 4 feet of mud under the bed of Bayou Teche." A formal survey by a team of archaeologists tentatively identified the vessel as a steamboat named (aptly) the Teche. Others, however, assert the wreck is that of the USS Tensas, a small Civil War gunboat. Regardless of its name, parts of the vessel have been excavated, including a section of the keel.

Smokestack of the defunct
Charles Boldt Paper Mill, New Iberia, La.
(Photo by author)

Waved on by my wife and children and some neighborhood kids, all of whom had walked to City Park to see us pass, Keith, Ben, Jacques and I continued to paddle southeast through New Iberia. Canoeing under the fractured smokestack [29.9974, -91.800309] of the long shuttered Charles Boldt Paper Mill, we soon reached the outskirts of town. There in the west bank we spotted the mouth of Nelson Canal [29.988465, -91.780083]; it was here in 1863 that Union and Confederate forces skirmished. As David C. Edmonds records in Yankee Autumn in Acadiana (1979):

During his observations along the Teche, Mexican war hero [Colonel William G.] Vincent, cunning as ever, found an opportunity too good to pass up. About two miles south of New Iberia, on the plantation of a wealthy New Orleans businessman and planter named S. O. Nelson, the roadway struck a deep hedge-lined drainage ditch (Nelson’s Canal) which emptied the excess waters of the adjacent prairies into Bayou Teche. The only passage over the ditch was on a narrow brick culvert. A few yards upstream from that point, near the banks of the bayou, stood a thicket of cypress trees. What better place to conceal bushwackers, reasoned Vincent. . . . Though some details are missing, it appears that Robinson’s “Louisiana” Yankees, together with Colonel Edmund Davis’ 1st Texas Cavalry (Union) rode right into the trap. “Colonel Vincent ambuscaded them at Nelson’s Bridge,” wrote General Mouton that night, “leaving the road full of dead and wounded.” Nonetheless it was but a short affair. Within moments the famed 2nd Massachusetts Battery of Light Artillery (Nims’ Battery) joined the skirmish, driving off the Rebels with a barrage of screeching Schenkel shells.

Below New Iberia a long, straight stretch of the Teche runs through the countryside. For this reason a published history of nearby Jeanerette, our terminus that day, bears the title Where the Bayou Runs Straight.

Around this time Jacques came down with a migraine; he needed a Coke, he said — the only sure quick remedy. Keith took out his cell phone (he kept it in a Ziploc bag in a watertight tackle box) and called a coworker who lived a couple miles downstream. At 2:47 p.m. we spotted Keith’s friend, along with son and dog, waiting in a boat to give Jacques a Coke. They sat in the shade just below the Louisiana State University’s Iberia Research Station bridge [29.955195, -91.715308].

What a great picture, I thought, imagining myself (as I am prone to do) a National Geographic photographer. “May I take your photo,” I asked, pulling out my Nikon D60. “No,” said the man, who mumbled something about “the police.”

Typical scene that day on the Teche.
(Photo by author)

We did not mention that Jacques, in his desperation for relief from the headache, had already put ashore at Olivier Bridge [29.979082, -91.7538] and purchased a Coke from a nearby convenience store — an act that for the rest of us shattered any illusion of roughing it.

Incidentally, the LSU Iberia Research Station, according to its website, contains 900 acres of pasturage and 150 acres of plowland. The station produces “energy cane," which can be turned into biofuel, and crossbreeds cattle to make new varieties that thrive in the semitropics. My reaction: “Isn’t this UL-Lafayette territory?” Being a UL alumnus, I am admittedly biased.

Jeanerette Sugar Company tank with "Danger Molasses" inset.
Why the sign? Molasses can kill.
(Photo by author)

Keith’s friend accompanied us down the bayou long enough to divulge that an abandoned smokestack [29.940404, -91.694351] up ahead on the west bank belonged not to a sugar refinery, as one might expect, but to a lumber mill. This struck me as plausible, because the Teche and its environs, including the not-too-distant Atchafalaya Basin, had supported a vibrant cypress logging industry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. (See my blog article about local cypress logging.)

The smokestack at Loisel, just upstream of Jeanerette.
(Photo by author)

Leaving Keith’s friend, we entered an uninhabited stretch of the Teche. “Without houses,” I recorded. “Woods both sides of bayou.” The smokestack, however, still loomed downstream and as we paddled closer I saw just below its apex a delta, Δ — perhaps a clue to the identity of its former owner. [Note: oral tradition holds that "the Loisel Lumber Mill" stood on this site; before that, however, the Loisel Sugar Company apparently occupied the same location.]

At 3:40 we reached the Bayside plantation home [29.930642, -91.680479], residence of nineteenth-century sugar planter F. D. Richardson. For posterity Richardson penned a short but historically important memoir, “The Teche Country Fifty Years Ago,” published in the March 1886 issue of the Confederate veterans magazine Southern Bivouac. Richardson’s daughter, Kate, married former Confederate officer Dudley Avery of Petite Anse Island (now Avery Island) — located some thirteen miles from Bayside — for whose descendants I myself now serve as historian and curator.

Live oak along the Teche between New Iberia and Jeanerette.
(Photo by author)

Bayside marked our arrival in Jeanerette [29.918563, -91.666317], and we came to a stop along the town’s park, which sits on the west bank, at 4:07 p.m. That day we covered approximately 20.5 miles in 5 hours, 55 minutes.