Jim Bradshaw
Birdsong, flowers made memorable boat ride
traveler and writer Charles Dudley Warner rowed early one spring morning, “while the dew was still heavy” down Bayou Petit Anse. “in Petite Anse means “little cove.” The bayou runs along the west side of Avery Island, then flows generally south into Vermilion Bay. Warner described his delightful boat ride in a long article about “The Acadian Land” in Harper’s Magazine in February 1887.
“Mullet were jumping in the glassy stream, perhaps disturbed by the gar-fish, and alligators lazily slid from the reedy banks into the water at our approach,” he wrote. “All the marsh was gay with flowers, vast patches of the blue fleur de lis intermingled with the exquisite white spider-lily, nodding in clusters on long stalks; an amaryllis (pancratieum), its pure half-disk fringed with delicate while filaments. The air was vocal with the notes of birds, the nonpareil and the meadow-lark, and most conspicuous of all the handsome boat-tail grackle, a blackbird, which alighted on the slender dead reeds that swayed with his weight as he poured forth his song. Sometimes the bayou narrowed so that it was impossible to row with the oars, and poling was resorted to, and the current was swift and strong. At such passes we saw only the banks with nodding flowers, and the reeds, with the blackbirds singing, against the sky. Again we emerged into placid reaches overhung by gigantic live-oaks and fringed with cypress. It was enchanting.”
Warner’s interest in the Acadian country in south Louisiana may have been partly inspired by a visit he made in 1874 to Nova Scotia and recounted in a travel journal called Baddeck, And That Sort of Thing (Houghton, Mifflin & Co., Boston, 1891). Excerpts from his accounts of both visits can be found in a little book. In Acadia, The Acadians in Story and Song, compiled by Margaret (Minnie) Avery Johnston (F. F. Hansell & Bro., New Orleans, 1893).
Margaret was not an Acadian. She was the daughter of Daniel Dudley Avery (1810-1879), the first Avery on Avery island, and Sarah Craig Marsh (1818-1878). Her interest in the Acadians was stirred by an interest in spinning and weaving, and by the financial panic that began in the United States in 1873, spread to Europe, and brought on a depression that lasted for nearly a decade.
She wrote in the introduction to her book, “I have been led to undertake the compilation of this little volume by a desire to enlist the interest of the public in the Acadian people of Louisiana. Brought up in the neighborhood and personally acquainted with many of them, my family learned to respect … and to admire the many excellent qualities that distinguish them.
“In the period of great depression through which Louisiana has passed … [the Acadians] felt the touch of want in homes where formerly reigned a rude plenty. It was then that it occurred to us that if their handwoven fabrics of cotton, grown by themselves, could be brought to the attention of the art-loving public, a remunerative field would be open for their industry.”
She and her sister, Sarah Avery Leeds, worked to find markets for the cloth with such success that in March 1893 the Abbeville Meridional, boasted that Acadian cottonade had gained so much prestige that “in some of the most fashionable of New York and New Orleans’ mansions, you will find all the draperies, portieres, lambrequins and table scarfs made of the products of the looms of the Attakapas Acadians.”
The reason for the Meridional report was that in the spring of 1893 Louisiana and the rest of the nation were making plans for the upcoming Chicago World’s Fair, and that the Avery sisters were working to create an exhibit featuring Acadian weavers. They were successful. Margaret reported in her introduction that “their simple handicrafts of spinning and weaving” were showcased at the fair.
Margaret may have been aware of Warner’s Acadian pieces because he apparently visited Avery Island. He doesn’t say so specifically in his essay, but says in his Petite Anse narrative that after visiting a community on Bayou Tigre, “We went home gayly and more swiftly, current and tide with us … with … much pleasure [while viewing] the wide marshes through which we voyaged.
“When we landed and climbed the hill, and from the rose-embowered veranda looked over the strange land we had sailed through … we felt that we had been in a country not of this world.”
You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.
