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Planning for Cane River Creole National Historical Park

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Planning for Cane River Creole National Historical Park View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by UNL | Libraries University of Nebraska - Lincoln DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln U.S. National Park Service Publications and Papers National Park Service 2004 A BRIEF ETHNOGRAPHY OF MAGNOLIA PLANTATION: PLANNING FOR CANE RIVER CREOLE NATIONAL HISTORICAL PARK Muriel (Miki) Crespi National Park Service Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/natlpark Crespi, Muriel (Miki), "A BRIEF ETHNOGRAPHY OF MAGNOLIA PLANTATION: PLANNING FOR CANE RIVER CREOLE NATIONAL HISTORICAL PARK" (2004). U.S. National Park Service Publications and Papers. 96. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/natlpark/96 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the National Park Service at DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. It has been accepted for inclusion in U.S. National Park Service Publications and Papers by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. A BRIEF ETHNOGRAPHY OF MAGNOLIA Muriel (Miki) Crespi PLANTATION: PLANNING FOR CANE RIVER Archeology and Ethnography Program CREOLE NATIONAL HISTORICAL PARK National Center for Cultural Resources National Park Service, Washington, DC Studies in Archeology and Ethnography #4 2004 http://www.cr.nps.gov/aad/pubs/studies/study04a.htm SUMMARY Interest in the people with traditional associations to Magnolia plantation, one of the two plantations incorporated into Cane River Creole National Historical Park (CARI), and in the development of the new park’s General Management Plan prompted this brief ethnographic study. We hoped to bring diverse voices to planning dialogues about resources, interpretation, and alternatives by walking the grounds that associated people consider culturally meaningful and by interviewing ethnically different peoples individually or in groups. Our interest focused particularly on the associated peoples who perceive park resources as essential to their development and continued identity as culturally distinct people. The same community members rarely participate in public planning hearings, but the research process would help inform them about the park taking shape in their midst. Additionally, the project would demonstrate the value of professional cultural anthropological or ethnographic work to “ground-truthing” community concerns by the researchers’ direct interaction with people and places. We interviewed people who were born or lived and worked at and near Magnolia. We identified the ethnographic resources, or places and landscapes they considered culturally meaningful, and the ways they perceived their past and wished it conveyed to the visiting public. To help contextualize people’s responses, we also lightly sketched the political, economic, social and geographic aspects of plantation life in the mid-20th century. For more than a month, Dr. Muriel (Miki) Crespi, National Park Service Chief of Ethnography interviewed people linked to Magnolia. For another month, Northwestern State University anthropologist Mrs. Dayna Bowker Lee and historian Ms. Susan Dollar interviewed people primarily from neighboring communities in the Heritage Area. Crespi also analyzed the data and prepared this report. The brief research period necessarily limited our work to people and planning issues directly associated with the park. Sharecropper life in the area beyond park boundaries, although important, received less attention. Generally, this study offers a stop-gap solution to the ethnographic data shortage on the full array of people whose combined labor, land, and goals built and maintained the plantation. Nevertheless, it provided valuable lessons about the benefits of conducting early ethnographic research with people whose intimate relationships to park resources and unique insights into local life make them candidates for the planners’ special consideration. We found an immensely complex situation, reflected in a landscape faceted by the diverse uses of diverse people. Until the rural exodus of the mid-20th century reconfigured local farms and settlements, Magnolia had formed part of an extended landscape peppered with places local residents considered important in their work, worship, recreation, and marketing. Probably the most frequented area reached from Cloutierville to Derry and urban Natchitoches. Many places fronted Cane River or left their mark on the neighboring plantations and settlements in the Cane River Heritage Area. Some were in the forested Kisatchie hills. For the plantation owners, the Hertzogs, the culturally meaningful landscape extended to more distant places, including New Orleans. Until the 1950s and 60s, when agricultural mechanization drove rural residents away, people’s class and ethnicity affected their distribution, activities, and the places that welcomed them across this landscape. Magnolia’s own resources form a named landscape, best known by its owners’ name, “the Hertzogs’.” The section now under National Park Service management includes the farm operational center with the quarters, first built to house enslaved workers and later serving the tenant laborers; the former slave hospital and later overseer’s house; the store; cotton gin and other farm structures. Beyond park boundaries is the standing Big House and cultivated fields. They, along with the former church and sharecropper area along Highway 119, mirror the earlier 1 plantation community. Many of these still-meaningful places have become mostly “shadows” or ephemeral memory places and nearly invisible reminders of formerly standing structures. Still, in the conceptual landscapes of traditional residents, the barely visible remains mark the places and call to mind the people, events and structures that gave meaning and shape to local life and geography. Local people tended to classify themselves and others as members of one of three principal ethnic categories. Combining views about ancestral birthplace with views about ethnicity and race led people to categorize themselves and others as: (1) Creoles of color or Creole who descended from the cultural and biological meeting of African, French, Spanish and perhaps American Indian peoples; (2) whites, including French Creole (different from Yankees, Anglos or Americans); or (3) blacks, a term people preferred for themselves over African American. Differences were attributed partly to ethnic heritage, including religion. For example, black people, along with Yankees, Americans and Anglo whites were mostly Protestant, but whites of French ancestry and the Creoles of color tended to be Catholic. Ethnicity and class tended to overlap so that “black” usually equated with agricultural laborers who, in the 19th and 20th centuries, occupied the quarters. Some might become sharecroppers but, generally, they struggled against enormous economic and political odds. Changes since desegregation have tempered past inequities so that many black people became successful businessmen and professionals. Still, change has not fully erased inequities and the accompanying pain. Creoles of color enjoyed slightly higher status as sharecroppers in Magnolia and successful landowners and businessmen elsewhere in the area. The social hierarchy peaked at the white Hertzog family. They are the French Creole descendants of French Europeans, the centuries-long stewards of Magnolia Plantation and the occupants of the architecturally important Creole-style Big House, the plantation command and control center. Until mechanization fully transformed “the Hertzogs’” into a modern agribusiness, organizationally, Magnolia reflected historic European manors in its power relationships and dependence on tenant laborers and tenant farmers, such as sharecroppers, whose compensation came partly in residence sites and only partly in cash. These arrangements, in addition to the practice of delayed cash compensation, mitigated management’s problem of scarce funds until harvest. Limited cash troubled everyone, but none felt it more acutely than tenant laborers and sharecroppers. Their survival rested on foods from gardens and barnyard animals, on fishing, hunting, neighborly cooperation, and on credit at the plantation store. Status in the community reflected people’s ethnic/class identity and relationships to land and coincided with their distribution across the landscape. People of French Creole descent, the Hertzog family of planters who enjoyed the highest status, occupied the Big House. Other whites, geographically and socially distant from the Hertzogs, lived in the overseer’s house. The tenant farmers were mostly Creoles of color whose temporary use of plantation fields increased their earning potential. Landless black people, rural proletarians, lived primarily in the quarters. Although the most economically vulnerable of Magnolia’s residents, stable kinship, friendship, and church ties knit blacks into a support system and community with a sense of their own worth. Black residents and Creoles of color lived among kin and friends whose activities, interests and special places created the “community” of place. Health care, work, recreation, and social gatherings brought people together, sometimes at ethnically mixed public events such as baseball games and horse races, and sometimes in ethnic- specific or private settings such as house parties and church suppers. Churches of all denominations were social linchpins that held people together through shared beliefs, ties to particular places, and joyful events
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