A History of Mossville

By Bill Shearman A History of Mossville

By Bill Shearman

ii A History of Mossville

By Bill Shearman

Copyright © 2017

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems without permission in writing from the author, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

Printed in the United States of America

Wise Publications Printing 809 East Napoleon Street Sulphur, Louisiana 337.527.8308 [email protected] www.wisepublications.biz

iii

This book is dedicated to the residents of Mossville and Willow Springs, La., past and present.

It is also dedicated to Peggy Frankland who first told their stories and her friends, Ruth Shepherd, Shirley Goldsmith and Debby Ramirez, who helped generate environmental awareness.

The author is indebted to Ada Brand Vincent who shared the joy of reading with her son.

“But then it is what you learn by writing that gives the work its pull.” – David McCullough, Mornings on Horseback

iv About the Authors

Bill Shearman has been in the newspaper industry or some vestige of journalism throughout his career. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree (Social Studies, 70’) and a MBA (96’) from McNeese State University. He also earned a graduate degree (M.S., 82’) from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. He is retired from the Manship School of Mass Communications at Louisiana State University (LSU). He is married to the former Suzanne Cagle and they have three children and seven grandchildren. This is his first book. Sally McPherson is a 2014 graduate of the Manship School of Mass Communications at LSU where she was a member of the LSU Honors College. Following graduation, she interned at the American Embassy in London. She returned to New Orleans and spent 2015 at a boutique marketing firm there. She is currently the marketing and development manager of Big Brothers/ Big Sisters of Southwest Louisiana. She has been an editorial assistant on this book. Florence Shearman is a 2015 graduate of St. Louis Catholic High School. She is a 2016 graduate of Stage One, The Hair School and is a licensed cosmetologist. She is a self-taught photographer. This book is her first professional assignment. Shearman, McPherson and Shearman are all Calcasieu Parish natives.

v Foreword

The creation of what would become Mossville, La., was a fervent prayer for isolation, the overwhelming, overriding longing of a newly-freed people to be left alone. Mossville became a small, rural community, never-incorporated. It was insulated by design, predicated on agriculture, livestock, fish, game - and each other. Only religious determinism was as centrist and important. Mossville was settled by freed slaves and has remained African-American. The diminished village, located between Westlake and Sulphur, has almost disappeared. When the industrial behemoth Sasol completes its $26 billion expansion, three of Mossville’s newest subdivisions will have disappeared. The young, proud people who built those homes in Lincoln Heights I and II and E.F. Gayle subdivisions after World War II are gone, their homes are gone, their children and grandchildren are gone, never to return. Dr. Stephen Finley, director of the African & African American Studies at LSU, said black communities established after the Civil War lived in a “Sense of racial terror. “They had a freedom, but their desire to be left alone was always tenuous. They could never appear to be too prosperous. “The way that they did maintain their communities was by remaining isolated. They were constantly terrified,” said Finley. “Today,” continued Finley, “Mossville can only be located by the trained eye. Only Mount Zion Baptist Church stands defiant. “The economic and social structures (in Mossville) existed for nearly 150 years. That is pretty remarkable for a socially marginal people,” said Finley. Mossville’s failure to incorporate meant it would exist without city limits. That lack of border would prove to be the Sword of Damocles when the Conoco Refinery was begun. Industry had begun moving towards Mossville and the people of Mossville had no place to go. The 690-acre Conoco facility became the new eastern neighbor of Mossville, a Mecca of jobs for black people during World War II as the new plant integrated – only on some levels - because of the sheer lack of manpower.

vi The environmental chemist Wilma Subra, who has befriended Mossville and Willow Springs (La.) ever since the awareness of environmental degradation in those communities, explained the anathema of petrochemical refining. “Forty to 70 percent of the waste is hazardous, from oil production itself through refining,” said Subra. Until very recently, hazardous waste was generated generously through emissions, water, particularly by groundwater in ditches, and eventually, in underground contamination through leaky pipelines. Peggy Frankland, the author of Women Pioneers of the Louisiana Environmental Movement, a Sulphur, La. resident, notes the cruel incongruity of people with no connection to power. “The placement of most industries is in poor African-American communities where resistance to the plant sites was expected to be low. “Many of the citizens living near those facilities were poorly educated and so were not considered for work in the plants,” wrote Frankland. Arlie Russell Hochschild, in her book Strangers in Their Own Land, said that one reason petrochemical industries could locate here and operate with corporate bravado and environmental irresponsibility was because Louisiana was semi-literate in the 1940’s and 50’s. “Louisiana (then) had 40 percent of adults with less than an eighth grade education,” wrote Hochschild. Dr. Finley adds, “It was rarely a coincidence when dumping and dump sites were located near black communities. It is still more likely.” The environmentalist Michael Tritico (LaGrange Senior High, ’61; McNeese State University, B.S., Biology, ’67) has been a fountainhead of knowledge and perspective throughout this history project. He has devoted most of his adult life to the environment of Southwest Louisiana, a voice in the wilderness from the days way prior to the 1984 founding of the Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) until very recently. He discovered a love of ecology one summer as a young Park Ranger Naturalist in Glacier Park, Mt. He said the experience “Became the basis for everything that came afterwards.” He has spent the last 44 years as the soft-spoken Don Quixote of industrial insolence, a gadfly challenging the skeletal regulatory and permitting processes of a state all too ready to be a concubine to the anarchy of petrochemical refining. He is retired now, in a log cabin on five acres of pristine woods outside Longville, La. in Beauregard Parish. In the fall, 2016, he suffered, almost on recurrent days, a heart attack and long-delayed back surgery.

vii A condition of his return to Longville was that his small cabin be made neat and navigable throughout, the dissolution of his own recalcitrance to discard, seemingly anything. A retired Beauregard Parish school bus sits parked next to Tritico’s cabin. On every seat of the school bus are two large black bags with the cornucopia of his life’s work. He will spend the rest of his life going through those black bags. He lives his Catholicism discreetly. “The Creator wrote the Bible to tell us the rules of engagement. He likes balance; there are practical things people can do and there are things they cannot do. “He is the bravest, least-pretentious man of great intellect I have ever known. He does not suffer fools lightly; it is an honor to be his friend. “And one of these days, He’s going to come back,” Tritico said in a pensive moment. In the summer of 2014, I celebrated the 50th reunion of my high school graduation. During the festivities, I had a conversation with my best high school friend on the significance of 1964, the year the Civil Rights Act passed. We wondered what had actually transpired in race relations since the Civil War in those 150 years and in the 50 years since that epic legislation tried to balance the tables for all Americans. My friend, a West Point graduate and an attorney, and I commiserated racial progress through Reconstruction, the Jim Crow laws, the race riots and systematic abuse of black people and the (we thought) reluctant admonition of a democratic society to be truly democratic. He said, “Bill, it may take another 150 years for this country to get over slavery.” (Author’s note: In ancient times, Damocles was a fawning sycophant to the King Dionysius. To illustrate the frailty of power, Dionysius changed places with Damocles but hung a sword over his head by a single horse’s hair with the warning: “There can be nothing happy for the person over whom some fear always looms.” Don Quixote was the errant knight in Cervantes’s novel of the same name who went through life jousting at tall windmills).

viii Michael Tritico with Eddy

ix “Mercy, Mercy Me (The Ecology)” Woo ah, mercy mercy me All things ain’t what they used to be, oh no Where did all the blue skies go? Poison is the wind that blows from the north and south and east Woo mercy, mercy me, mercy father Ah things ain’t what they used to be, oh no Oil wasted on the ocean and upon our seas, fish full of mercury Ah oh mercy, mercy me Ah things ain’t what they used to be, no no Radiation underground and in the sky Animals and birds who live nearby are dying Oh mercy, mercy me Ah things ain’t what they used to be What about this overcrowded land How much more abuse from man can she stand Oh na, na; My Sweet Lord …… No My Lord ….. My Sweet Lord

Marvin Gaye

x TABLE OF CONTENTS

Mossville Timeline...... 1 The Black Church; Lenoria...... 4 Booker T. Washington...... 12 The Beginning...... 18 The Neutral Strip...... 22 Thomas Rigmaiden...... 27 “A Happy Cemetery”...... 33 Ralph Clifton Reynaud...... 40 Ward Four...... 48 Life: The Struggle...... 53 Coach...... 58 Sam...... 67 BFI...... 70 Mickey from Mossville...... 76 Heaven...... 83 CONDEA...... 85 Buyout...... 90 Summary...... 95 Acknowledgments...... 97 Works Cited...... 99 Interviews...... 101 Index...... 102

xi MOSSVILLE TIMELINE

1619 First Africans arrive in the New World.

1712 Twenty African slaves arrive in Louisiana from the West Indies.

1719 Four hundred and fifty-one African slaves arrive on theAurore and Duc de Maine to Louisiana. They were specifically captured because they knew how to grow rice.

1803 Louisiana Purchase doubles the size of America.

1806 The Wilkinson – Herrera Agreement between Spain and America is signed, designating the Neutral Strip of Southwest Louisiana as neutral territory. The area would later form ten parishes.

1808 Slave importing prohibited; slavery and slave smuggling continues. Principal smugglers were the pirate Jean Lafitte and Opelousas farmer Jim Bowie who both utilized Southwest Louisiana waterways.

1812 Louisiana admitted as state.

1820 First school in Southwest Louisiana for white children begun in Henry Moss’ home at Bayou D’Inde.

1821 Adams – Onis Treaty establishes the Sabine River as the western boundary of Louisiana.

1831 Nat Turner’s (slave) Rebellion in Virginia; 65 white people are killed, men, women and children. Over 200 slaves are killed in retaliation, many of whom had nothing to do with the rebellion.

1840 Imperial Calcasieu Parish (later divided into five parishes that compose the present day Southwest Louisiana) is separated from St. Landry Parish.

1857 Dred Scott Decision rules that anyone descended from Africans cannot be a United States citizen. Supreme Court ruling is 7-2.

1 1861 The Civil War begins; Louisiana is the sixth state to secede and one of the most prosperous states in the Union; New Orleans is the second - largest slave-market in the world.

1863 President Abraham Lincoln issues the Emancipation Proclamation, ending slavery only in the Confederacy. 1865 Civil War ends; Henry Moss has freed 57 slaves and gives them lands in what would become Mossville. 1866 Mount Zion Baptist Church established in Mossville, still the oldest, continually-operated church in Calcasieu Parish. 1891 W.O. Boston, a legendary black educator, begins teaching in what would become Mossville. 1896 Plessy vs. Ferguson ruling that blacks are second-class citizens. Supreme Court defines 7-1 vote as “separate but equal.” Segregation continues. 1897 First subdivision in Mossville, Braxton Subdivision, begun by the Rev. Griffin Braxton. 1900 First black school built in Mossville through a Rosenwald Grant, a three- room building on Old Spanish Trace, now Trail. 1907 Mossville recognized as a community; is awarded a post office; office is closed in 1916 and moved to Westlake. 1908 First real funding for black schools received by Calcasieu Parish Superintendent Dr. John McNeese from the Jeanes Fund. 1909 The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is begun. 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education. Supreme Court decision reverses Plessy; paves the way for school integration in America. 1955 Mossville School constructed on Old Spanish Trail. 1964 The Civil Rights Act is passed, outlawing discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin. 1968 Mabel Rigmaiden, a Willow Springs resident, appears before the Calcasieu Parish Police Jury, armed with a petition signed by Willow Springs residents protesting the Browning Ferris waste site. She is ignored. 2 1975 The Southwest Louisiana chapter of the NAACP sues Conoco Refinery for limiting black employment to the labor, motor pool and maintenance departments. Suit is settled; refinery integrates. 1977 Ruth Shepherd, a Sulphur housewife, discovers the Browning Ferris Industrial (BFI) hazardous waste site at Willow Springs by accident; begins counting tanker trucks entering the facility. Shepherd and Michael Tritico begin the High Hope Road Committee to try and stop toxic waste dumping at BFI. 1982 Calcasieu League for Environmental Action Now (CLEAN) begun, one of the first environmental groups in Louisiana. At one point, CLEAN had over 500 members. 1991 Mossville School closed due to declining attendance. Building is later sold to Sasol and demolished. 1997 Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) confirms toxins have spread into the Chicot Aquifer at a depth of 200 feet from Willow Springs. Chicot provides drinking water for 15 Louisiana parishes. 1997 Mossville residents reach a $16 million settlement against Conoco and parent company DuPont, the prior owner of CONDEA Vista, for groundwater contamination. 1998 Suit by Mossville residents settled against CONDEA Vista; award is $32 million. Property buyouts begin for three Mossville subdivisions with $13.9 million of the settlement. 2001 Sasol buys CONDEA Vista. 2003 Coach Williams Drive named for LaSalle Williams by the Calcasieu Parish Police Jury, a rarity for a living person. 2004 Sasol North America’s Research & Development Resources moves from Austin, TX to the Lake Charles Chemical Complex. Calcasieu Parish Police Jury Administrator Mark McMurry calls Mossville “A forgotten community.”

3 The Black Church; Lenoria

The year 2019 will mark the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in what would become America. They landed at Point Comfort, Va . The Rev. Sam Tolbert, Jr., pastor of the Greater St. Mary Missionary Baptist Church, 1801 2nd Ave., spoke about the power of spirituality that black people lived. “It all began in church. Slaves were sometimes allowed to go to the church of their slave masters, particularly the slaves who worked in the house. “They would be in the balconies and they couldn’t read but they could memorize. Lenoria Braxton Ambrose They had to have good Miss Mossville 1964 memories. Then when they learned to read, they began to teach other slaves how to read, particularly the Bible. They had an incredible motivation to read. “In Romans 10:17, the Word speaks of ‘Faith coming by hearing,’ and that’s what it was. People who can’t read only believe what they hear. The slave

4 masters controlled what they heard but they (slaves) were sure there was a better life and that had to be in Heaven,” said Tolbert. Slaves began composing spirituals as they better understood the Bible and those spirituals furthered their faith, said Tolbert. “You can sing the Bible, particularly the Book of Psalms, the Lord’s Prayer and the 23rd Psalm. That’s what those people did while they were picking cotton or harvesting sugar, they sang. “The spirituals were songs of hope, of another life much better than the one they had. Listen to the words of “Another Life,” ‘My Lord calls me from the thunder; I ain’t got long to stay here.’” “Slavery taught our people how to survive but it was the churches that educated them. All the early black education was in churches because they were no black schools, even way after the Civil War. “Blacks wanted more; like Reverend Ike said, ‘I want some pie down here.’ Many of our young people don’t know our history and the black church is not as strong as it used to be. “The church taught our people how to survive from Sunday to Sunday. The black church has historically been the only thing we control; it was the hope, a rallying place.

The Reverend Sam Tolbert

5 “Many of our young people are getting their wisdom from ignorance. Faith has to be the centerpiece because in church, everyone supports each other, there has to be a God somewhere,” said Tolbert. Tolbert said that the early black churches were the most important things freed slaves built after the Civil War. “They learned that from the Old Testament. When the Israelites were lost in Egypt, in their pilgrimage, the first thing they did was put up the tabernacle. “They did that first until God told them to move. And that’s what I hope the churches of today could do, to be the center of activity for everyone,” said Tolbert. Lenoria Braxton Ambrose’s roots are in Mossville and they are over 150 years old. She is directly related to the first pastor of Mount Zion Baptist Church in Mossville, where she grew up and where she still worships. She knows a great deal about everyone else’s roots in Mossville. She wishes she knew more. Although she lives in Lake Charles, Ambrose still owns almost five acres in Mossville, on Thomas Porter Street. “One of my plans is to sell my house in Lake Charles and move a house trailer on my property. That way when my family comes in, I can say, ‘Come visit me in Mossville,’” said Ambrose. “I will never sell (that property),” adds Ambrose. Her great-great-grandmother was Minerva Moss Perkins; her great-great- grandfather was Griffin Braxton, the first pastor at Mount Zion Baptist Church. Both of her great-great-grandparents were homesteaders, who settled on 162 acres each after the Civil War. Her great-great-grandfather on her mother’s side was Isam Perkins, who fought in the Civil War. At 22, he was enlisted in the Union Army’s Colored Infantry, Company F. That infantry unit fought in the battles of Fair Oaks and Darby Town Road, Va., 1862; Chaffin’s Farm/New Market Heights, Va., 1864, and the Battle of Wilmington, N.C., 1865. Lenoria’s parents were Gloria Jean Towner Harris who married Gradis Braxton during World War II. Ambrose was born on October 24, 1946, in St. Patrick Hospital in Lake Charles, the oldest of five children. “My father was the first black man to run for the Calcasieu Parish Police Jury. He owned a (dry) cleaner’s, a grocery store and a furniture store in Mossville,” said Ambrose. She had an idyllic childhood and was raised in a small, three-bedroom home. She graduated from Mossville High School in 1964 where she was Miss Mossville High that year.

6 She married Alvin Ambrose that same year and enrolled in McNeese State College. “I flunked out of McNeese. I was smart enough; I just didn’t go to class, played cards a lot. So there I was; a newly-wed with not much education. “I went to the employment bureau and met a woman named Rupert Clemons, whose son is Todd Clemons, a local attorney. She was an officer in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). “She asked me if I could type and I said, ‘Yes, I can.’ She told me about a Manpower Development Plan which turned out to be a nine-month program which taught me secretarial skills. “When I was almost finished, I had to do a practice interview which turned out to be very helpful. There was a (secretarial) job opening at Olin Matheson and when I went for the interview, I saw a man I knew named Frank Johnson, who worked at Olin. “I never knew if Frank helped me get the job but I was hired. I was the first black woman hired at Olin in 1966, and I worked there for the next 40 years,” said Ambrose with considerable pride. “My husband told me I couldn’t take the job - that his wife wouldn’t work. Finally, I said, ‘If you let me take this job, I will quit as soon as I get pregnant.’ “Well, I never got pregnant so I stayed at Olin,” said Ambrose. Originally a secretary, Ambrose was promoted to warehouse clerk in the Maintenance Department. She transferred to a new Olin plant addition in 1973 as a production analyst, overseeing inventory and production. Olin was the first plant built in the Lake Charles Industrial Complex in 1936. When Ambrose worked at Olin, the plant produced urea, a component of fertilizer; phosgene, “a bad, bad chemical,” said Ambrose and hydrazine, “which is rocket fuel,” she said. “While I was at Olin, they would truck in loads of clay and make these huge mounds at the plant. It was mind-boggling. I learned that they (Olin) were storing waste in those mounds hoping that the clay liners would contain the stuff when it rained. “By (mid-70’s) I knew how dangerous just our stuff (waste from chemical refining) was. PPG had already been caught dumping (into Bayou D’Inde),” continued Ambrose. “In the 1990’s, a group of us would walk around the plant at noon to get some exercise. When we would get on the east side of the plant, my nose would start running and my eyes would tear up, always on the same side of the plant. “We didn’t know then about the spill (of ethylene dichloride at CONDEA Vista) but the smell was coming from the Conoco docks. I told my friends

7 that I had to quit walking with them because it took me too long to get my composure back. “Then we found out about the leaks and we knew what was making me sick,” said Ambrose. “At our own plant, the (emission) discharges were worse at night. We all knew we were working at a chemical plant but the pay was good. “I thought then, ‘There are just some things you have to live with.’” I was naïve; I had a long learning curve,” said Ambrose. “It was a new world for me. We sometimes worked seven days a week and there was lots of overtime,” said Ambrose. Ambrose was a union board member of Organization of Professional Employees (OPE) Local 87. “The whole plant was unionized. That didn’t change until the 70’s when Right to Work passed,” she said. Promotions and responsibilities increased. “In 1992, I went to the TRI Plant as a yield analyst over all our tank car inventory. I stayed there until 2006 when the plant shut down,” said Ambrose. The plant has since been sold to BioLab. Not happy in retirement, Ambrose went to McNeese State University where she worked in admissions. She had just lost her husband Alvin to a courageous battle against cancer. At present, she works at the Calcasieu Parish Health Unit. She doesn’t need the money: “I have to have something to do, the social aspect of getting out. “I am recovering from rotator cuff (shoulder) surgery and part of my therapy is going to work every day,” said Ambrose. She revels in Mossville history, proud that the little community stayed African-American with its own heritage and singularity. She laments the fact that she doesn’t know more about the history of Mossville, even during slavery. “My ancestors wouldn’t talk except to say ‘the shame of it all.’ I wish they would have talked with us and occasionally one did, my Perkins relatives,” she said. Ambrose told a story about kindness in the Civil War prior to Emancipation. “A great-great-grandfather, John Israel Towner (on her mother’s side), was given (as a slave) to Parthenia Cagle, a white woman who lived in DeRidder, as a wedding gift. “He really became part of the family and when the war ended, Parthenia freed Towner. Then she took in two of Towner’s daughters, one whom he named Parthenia and Cora.

8 “She educated both of those girls and we are indebted to the Cagle family,” said Ambrose. She can reel off all the original families who settled Mossville: Rigmaiden, Moss, LeDoux, Vincent, Braxton, Towner, Lyons, Perkins and the Williams. She hates what has happened to Mossville since the late 90’s. “People used to have pride in their homes; their lawns were always neat and their houses were clean. “A generation or two later, people moved in who didn’t have that pride. Their homes weren’t always kept up and a sense of pride was lost,” she added. She can date the CONDEA Vista and Conoco lawsuits which resulted in the first buyouts of Mossville residents (1997). “That was all so unfair. Those refineries were just dangling a carrot to our people, particularly those first buyouts by Conoco in Bel Air (a more recent Mossville subdivision on the east side),” said Ambrose. “They (refineries) were buying people; they were trying to avoid any more lawsuits; they wanted people out of Mossville,” she added. Sasol, the principal refinery on the east and north of Mossville, initiated a second round of voluntary buyouts of Mossville residents in 2013.

9 The Genealogy of Lenoria Braxton Ambrose

A Mossville native, born 1946 - Present

PERKINS (Maternal) BRAXTON (Paternal)

Isam Perkins (b. 1842) Griffin Braxton (b. unknown)

Married Married

Minerva Moss (b. 1848) Harriet Jackson Braxton (b. 1856)

Ellison (Len) Perkins (b. 1875) Jackson Braxton

Married Married

Emma Perkins (first wife) Edith Robertson (Daughter of Amy Robertson Married Lyons) Lonia Braxton Perkins (b. 1881)

Birdie Mae Perkins Towner (b. 1907) Ellison Perkins

Married Married

William Arthur Towner (b. 1902) Loni Braxton Perkins

Gloria Jean Towner Harris (b. 1928)

Married

Gradis Braxton

Lenoria M. Braxton (b. 1946)

Married

Alvin Ambrose (b. 1940) in 1965

10 Minerva Moss Loni Braxton Perkins

Ellison Perkins

11 Booker T. Washington

“Great men celebrate love; little men cherish a spirit of hatred.”

Booker T. Washington

“As the great day grew nearer, there was more singing in the slave quarters than usual. It was bolder, had more ring, and lasted later into the night. “Most of the verses of the plantation songs had some reference to freedom … Some man who seemed to be a stranger (a United States officer, I presume) made a little speech and then read a rather long paper – the Emancipation Declaration I think. “After the reading we were told that we were all free, and could go when and where we pleased. My mother, who was standing by my side, leaned over and kissed her children, while tears of joy ran down her cheeks.

12 “She explained to us what it all meant, that this was the day for which she had been so long praying, but fearing that she would never live to see.”

Booker T. Washington, a nine-year-old illiterate slave boy, living on a plantation near Hale’s Ford, Franklin County, Va., May, 1865

The holocaust that was the American Civil War ended on April 19, 1865, almost four years to the day after it began. The war cost over 625,000 lives in a country only 82 years old. The Civil War began April 12, 1861, shortly after Republican Abraham Lincoln won the presidency. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, (January 1, 1863) which, in only prosaic terms then, would eventually free the slaves, probably would have started the Civil War had it not already begun earlier. In legend, Lincoln, as a young man, floated into New Orleans by flatboat. There he saw the nation’s largest slave market, an abomination of humanity, and promised himself, was it ever possible, that he would help end slavery. The war was fought mainly in the South which was left devastated and penniless. Over three million southern slaves were freed following the war’s end with about another million freed slaves living throughout the country. At the beginning of the Civil War, Louisiana had the highest percentage of freed slaves in the South, 13.6 percent. Over 24,000 Louisiana blacks served in the Union Army. Confederate soldiers refused to serve with blacks. The Confederate states, in a coincidence of slaveholding, ceded from the Union in order of the amount of slaves each state held. Louisiana was the sixth state to secede, on January 26, 1861. The United States had brought over 12 million Africans to America, still the largest forced migration in history. A vast southern culture, based on agriculture, subservience and free labor, came to an abrupt end as southern blacks and whites groped for new beginnings. Many of those same U.S. troops who read to Washington and his family marched through the old Confederacy, explaining to reluctant slaveholders the new paradigm of freedom. Booker T. Washington was among the earliest of Civil Rights leaders and one of the last who was born into slavery. Washington gave a speech towards the end of his life at the Arcade Theater in downtown Lake Charles on April 14, 1915, a remarkable event given the segregation mentality of the time. Washington died on November 14, 1915.

13 Washington’s early take on the end of slavery was that, in terms of subsistence, southern blacks were better able to cope with the new reality than whites, although they remained largely landless and almost totally illiterate, by design. Washington thought that as a result of slavery, at least three generations of slaveholders, certainly on the large plantations, had forgotten how to work, to survive, because everything had all been done for them for decades. Conversely, the newly-freed slaves usually had no place to go unless they were lucky enough to have relatives who lived in the North. Many returned to the plantation homes where they and their children were born. On the plantations, big and small, throughout the South, one slave was designated to go to the post office once a week to gather the mail. Post offices then were the fountainhead of gossip and the gossip was about the Civil War. When it began turning badly for the South, the word spread and in many cases, when all the white men left for service in the Confederacy, slaves were charged with running the plantations – and guarding the largely defenseless white women and children. Louisiana – and Southwest Louisiana in particular – had emerged largely unscathed from the Civil War. The Union Army captured New Orleans, then the largest Confederate city, in a campaign ending May 1, 1862. That gave the Union armies and navy’s control of the Mississippi River, the key tributary in the nation. Union soldiers, bolstered by gunboats, moved upriver and captured Baton Rouge, which had been abandoned. On October 3, 1862, a four-masted Union schooner, captained by Frederick Crocker, sailed into Lake Charles via Calcasieu Pass. The schooner sailed to a point just off Jacob Ryan, Jr.’s sawmill and fired five cannon shots which landed around – but not on – the sawmill. Captain Crocker then sailed up to Ryan’s dock and demanded beef and potatoes which were readily provided. The schooner was also able to capture the steamboat Dan, which was scuttled. The closest Union intrusion of significance to Southwest Louisiana came in the spring of 1863, when Union General Nathaniel Banks came up Bayou Teche and destroyed a salt mining operation on Avery Island. The Avery and McIlhenny families, who were making a fortune selling salt to the Confederate armies, fled the island and returned only after the war’s end. In Lake Charles, then an unincorporated community, the war – and the numbing realization that slavery might be over – motivated Ryan, Jr., the Father of Lake Charles, to write a letter. On April 26, 1863, Ryan wrote to Captain Daniel Goos, a German immigrant and an esteemed Lake Charles lumberman and shipbuilder, that he was thinking about moving.

14 “I may move to Texas with my Negroes. From what I can learn from far below where they have taken the country, a man stands a poor chance to have his Negroes,” wrote Ryan. Calcasieu Parish was spun off from St. Landry Parish in 1840 as the state’s largest parish and included what would be the parishes of Allen, Beauregard, Cameron, and Jeff Davis. On August 24, 1840, in the home of Arsene LeBleu, the first members of the Calcasieu Parish Police Jury were elected. They were: David Simmons, Ward One; Alexandre Hebert, Ward Two; Michel Pithon, Ward Three; Henry Moss, Ward Four; Reese Perkins, Ward Five and Thomas Williams, Ward Six. In all of the 11 slaveholding states, the psychotic fear of a slave rebellion was always topical. On August 21, 1831, a slave named Nat Turner led a rebellion in Southampton, Va., which resulted in the deaths of between 55 and 65 white people, men, women and children. About 70 slaves participated in the rebellion and they initially used only knives, axes and blunt instruments as weapons so as not to alert the citizenry. Turner was eventually captured, convicted in short order and flayed, hung, beheaded and quartered as an example. Fifty-six other blacks were executed by the state but at least 200 more slaves were killed by roaming militia, many of whom had nothing to do with the rebellion. The memory of Turner’s Rebellion was not lost on members of the Calcasieu Parish Police Jury. On June 7, 1841, the jury passed four ordinances dealing with the punishment of errant slaves. The language of the 12th Ordinance almost speaks to Turner’s Rebellion: “All slaves who shall be found at any unlawful assembly of slaves, all slaves who shall be found out of the plantation or place to which they belong, or who shall be found strolling without the permission in writing required by law, a number of stripes (lashes) – moderately inflicted – which shall not be otherwise inflicted than upon the bare back, nor shall be given with any other whip than that called cowhide or Cow-skin.” In the 1860 Calcasieu Parish slave census (slaves were termed “inhabitants”), there were 1,097 slaves owned by 172 men and women. Women were allowed to own slaves – Mrs. Arsene LeBleu had 14 slaves of her own – but it took an act of the state legislature for women to sell or transfer their slaves. In the 1860 slave census, Ryan had 16 slaves and his friend Goos had 17. The esteemed McNeese State University Louisiana historian, Dr. Janet Allured, said that five slaves per household was the norm. The math bears her out.

15 By far, the largest Southwest Louisiana slaveholder before and immediately after the Civil War, was Henry K. Moss. Moss was born December 2, 1795 in Virginia and served in the War of 1812. By virtue of large Spanish Land Grants, Moss moved to Rose Bluff in 1817, at the floodwaters of Bayou D’Inde (Turkey Bayou), the site of the present day CITGO refinery. Nearly all transportation and settlements in Calcasieu Parish were close to or on a body of water. Another early settler to Bayou D’Inde was Jacob Ryan, Sr. Moss married Ryan’s sister, Anne, and they had ten children; Johnson, Emily, Anne, Joseph, Melissa, Alfred, Erastus, Ezra, Oliver and Ellen. In the 45 years preceding the Civil War, Moss prospered. He raised cattle, had a tanning operation, grew and milled sugar and had a mercantile operation, perhaps the general store of his time. In those early days, Southwest Louisiana contained a vast plain of edible grasses and huge herds of Longhorn cattle roamed virtually unmolested between the rivers of Mermentau, Calcasieu, Sabine and the Gulf of Mexico. The grasses hindered land transportation. Moss built a schooner, the President, and he sent hides to New Orleans via Bayou D’Inde, the Calcasieu River, across the Gulf of Mexico and over and up the Mississippi River to New Orleans. To accommodate all this industry, Moss had 45 slaves according to the Calcasieu Parish Slave Census of 1860. Twenty-five were males, 20 were females and of that number, four were mulattos; three women, one aged 33, two were 25 and one male, 23. Slaves were only defined in the 1860 census as to master, sex, age, and color, which was black or mulatto. The seventh column in the Slave Census was “Number manumitted (freed).” There are no entries in those columns. In that same 1860 parish census, under the heading” Free inhabitants,” were 4,816 total people. Two thousand three hundred and eighty two were males; 2,151 were females and 253 were mulattos. Of the mulattos, 128 were men and 125 were women. In this census, mulattos were sometimes considered white family members and are listed along with the other members of a white family – with the racial designation. In an American Press column on February 23, 1917, under the caption, 100 Years Ago, Moss was quoted about his slaves: “All happy, the banjo Negro is seen oftener on the stage with a white man under the black skin, but the real Negro was at his best with a fiddle under his chin.”

16 Later, in that same article, Moss realizes that slavery is over and tries to reconcile the new stratum of emancipation: “They (slaves) were a happy, irresponsible set of children, well fed and well cared for. “But Abraham (Lincoln) has set them free and the old days are gone forever.” “Y’all are all free now,” Moss said. “I’m going to divide up my land and give you each (head of households) 40 acres. You can work for yourselves.” Moss reportedly had 57 slaves at the end of the Civil War. He gave them all squatter’s rights – the term is “free simple title acquired by squatters rights,” to lands he owned north of Bayou D’Inde near the intersection of Prater Road and Old Spanish Trail today. Mossville, although that area was known then as Choates Prairie, later Saprack, was born. (A choate is a small pig which were plentiful in Southwest Louisiana.) Moss Bluff, as well as Moss Lake (originally Little Lake Trahan), is named for the Moss family. Other early names for what would become Mossville were Prairie, Indian Marias and Vincent Settlement. In addition to Moss, Ryan, Sr. and Pierre Vincent were early settlers on Bayou D’Inde. Thomas Rigmaiden settled on land east of DeQuincy. The first black landowner and freedman in this area was James Webster Moss who was noted in a diary kept by Thomas Rigmaiden on May 21, 1860. Rigmaiden wrote, “James Moss (is) in the land that he declared.” In 1878, Moss formally acquired about 147 acres of land in Township 9 South, Range 9 West, Section 30. That area encompasses streets that include Junius on the west; Wallace to the north; Benjamin to the east and Pattie Moss and Goodley to the south. In 1894, James Moss acquired another 81 or so acres in the same area. This is where Mossville was born. James Moss’ ownership of these lands was confirmed by President Grover Cleveland on August 13, 1894, through the Homestead Act.

17 The Beginning

“From the day of its birth, the anomaly of slavery plagued a nation which asserted the equality of all men, and sought to derive powers of government from the consent of the governed. Within sound of the voices of those who said this lived more than half a million black slaves, forming nearly one-fifth of the population of a new nation.”

W. E. B. Du Bois

The first Africans landed in North America in 1619 at Jamestown, Va., the first of the 13 colonies to organize in 1607. They – 19 in number – had been seized from Spanish slave traders by a ship commanded by Dutch traders. When they arrived at Jamestown, they were indentured servants. As such, they pledged themselves to farmers for a set number of years and were provided with lodging and food. That servitude agreement also compensated the ship captains for the voyage across the Atlantic Ocean. This indentured contract was not limited to Africans but to all races who were seeking freedom, free land and opportunity in the New World. The indentured period lasted for a minimum of seven years. At that point, the servants were free men, were able to own land and were often enabled by their former masters with materials and sustenance. The horror of slavery, in its harshest form, came slowly, almost inexorably, to the colonies. The conflicting language was the indentured servant contract. What farmers found was that after training servants, they left the servitude agreement at the highest point of their labor potential. Another problem for land owners was that European indentured servants had a low birth rate as compared to Africans. The Africans were used to hard work, semi-tropical climates, and had often practiced agriculture in West Africa, the source of many slaves. The signal word in the legal transformation from indentured servants status to slavery was the definition of indentured. For the indentured period, the servants were slightly more than slaves but with a brighter future. The laws gradually increased the definition of ownership to ultimate and lifetime and the heinous culture of slavery began to proliferate throughout the colonies as law.

18 Africans – and only Africans – were reduced to chattel. Slavery traces its roots back to Biblical days and the conquering Romans practiced it freely. In North America prior to the Pilgrim’s landing, Native American Indians embraced the capture of warring tribes as slaves and often traded them for captives of their own tribes. The first, great agricultural opiate in the colonies was tobacco. Tobacco grew in popularity in Europe in the 17th century where it was hard to grow and on land better suited to foodstuff vegetation. The soil in Virginia and soon after North and South Carolina (organized as colonies in 1710 and 1712 respectively) was ideal for tobacco. But tobacco denudes the soil and the early farmers did not know about crop rotation or the use of manure as fertilizer. For some lucky planters, their soil remained fertile and the way they combated the relatively cheap prices for tobacco, often pennies to the pound, was to increase production. The slavery blueprint for this was the Plantation Model, exercised in the Caribbean Islands where the French had established huge sugar plantations with elaborate irrigation systems. They also grew coffee. Sugar, like tobacco, is very labor-intensive. As slaves died due to mistreatment and malnutrition, the French overseers bought more slaves. As such, the Plantation Model owners had no “employees,” per se, but a large work force with high birth rates. The slaves were treated cruelly, often underfed and the death rates were often higher than the birth rates. In North America, as the last of the 13 colonies was organized (Georgia, 1732), slavery was in every colony. The eastern colonies had poor soil so the national agricultural backbone became the southern states. A slave and his family were the owner’s property for life. Slave families could be – and were – sold separately, an innate form of cruelty. The punishment for runaway slaves was onerous. After the first escape and capture, a slave’s ears were cropped and he or she was branded on one shoulder. After the second capture, a slave was branded on the other shoulder and hamstrung. The third capture was almost always death by hanging. The northern colonies turned to industry and trade where the trend of training slaves to manufacturing began. Slaves were able to buy their own and their family’s freedom and in many instances, were made free men by their former masters. Slave women and their owners began to procreate and blacks of lighter color, who were treated with more equality than their darker counterparts, were the result.

19 Tobacco continued to be the early cash crop and its popularity exploded with the proliferation of pipes and snuff to cigars and chewing tobacco. War is bad for commerce and the American War of Independence (1775-83) curtailed tobacco’s export to England and thus, the rest of Europe. But tobacco use in the colonies grew exponentially as the perfect crop – cheap and addictive. The Revolutionary War was also bad for the institution of slavery. Slowly, after the war, the northern states began to embrace the abolition of slavery as the very language of the Declaration of Independence contradicted slavery’s existence. (“We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, the pursuit of Happiness.” An excerpt from the Declaration of Independence). The French Revolution (1789) gave momentum to the successful Saint- Domingue slave uprising (1791-1804). France was forced to grant freedom and full civil and political rights to free men of color and, eventually, the blacks on the island. The Republic of Haiti was the result of the successful uprising. By 1808, slave importation was outlawed in the United States by federal law. But slave smuggling and an internal slave trade continued in earnest, mostly in the South. Slave smuggling and sales prospered in Southwest Louisiana. The pirate Jean Lafitte, operating with impunity, sold slaves on the Calcasieu River, in many cases, to the Opelousas farmer Jim Bowie. According to the late Wendell Lindsey, Lafitte and Bowie would reconnoiter where the Calcasieu River meets at the confluence of English Bayou. It is now the base of what is Fitzenrieter Road. According to the authors John Wilds, Charles L. Dufour and Walter Cowan in their book, Louisiana, Yesterday and Today, Lafitte sold as many as 400 slaves in a day at his headquarters at Grand Terre south of New Orleans. Northern and middle state slave owners began selling their slaves to the southern states where they had much greater value. The Louisiana Purchase in 1803 doubled the size of fledgling America. Prior to that, the United States had negotiated the Treaty of San Lorenzo with Spain who surrendered exclusive ownership of the Mississippi River. That treaty led to three things: Spain was substantially reduced as a world power; the territorial expansion of the United States doubled and New Orleans began its ascent as an important port in America.

20 Two agricultural inventions, within two years of each other, revolutionized agriculture. The first, invented in 1793 and patented in 1794, was Eli Whitney’s cotton gin. The second, in 1795, was a mill which ground sugar from sugar cane. It was invented by Etienne de Bore. Both of these crops were labor-intensive and lucrative. Rice, to a lesser degree, became a third cash crop in early Louisiana. The value of Negro slaves in the South was four times more than the same slave’s value in the North at the turn of the 18th century. Concurrent with the agricultural inventions, the port of New Orleans grew exponentially. In 1794, it had 95 sailings; 1795, 102 sailings, and in 1799, 119 sailings. It would become the second-largest port in early America, one of the wealthiest cities and, until the Civil War, the slave trading center of North America.

21 The Neutral Strip

“It is the case of a guardian, investing the money of his ward in purchasing an important adjacent territory; and saying to him when of age, I did this for your own good."

President Thomas Jefferson, rationalizing his unconstitutional authorization of the Louisiana Purchase

Jean LaFitte

22 Louisiana was claimed for France by the explorer Sieur de La Salle in 1682. More specifically, LaSalle claimed all the land which drained into the Mississippi River as La Louisiane. La Salle had just completed a voyage down the Mississippi River from Canada, also a French colony called New France. He claimed the land in honor of the French King Louis XIV, the Sun King, who built the palace at Versailles. La Salle made his claim at a point very near present-day Venice, La. France was, at the time, a major European power, and was extremely interested in colonization in the New World, as were Spain and England. The French established a post at Natchitoches, La., in 1714 to protect from Spanish incursion along the Red River. Natchitoches is the oldest town in Louisiana. New Orleans was founded four years later in 1718. At this point, slavery was established in Louisiana. The French decreed the Code Noir (the Black Code), which was a series of laws regarding slaves in 1685. It established that all slaves should practice Catholicism and, curiously whites and slaves often attended mass together. However, Catholicism never denounced slavery nor forbade the extreme punishment of slaves. Additionally, the Code Noir forbade racial intermarrying but not fornication. The Code Noir did confer that slaves not work on Sunday as well as religious holidays. Slaves, however, were allowed to hire themselves out on Sundays and to keep monies they earned. The term “escalin,” or bit was a slave’s pay for Sunday work. That translates into two bits or $.25 in today’s vernacular and currency. It was estimated that no more than 20 slaves were present in Louisiana by 1712. One of the first ships bearing slaves landed in Louisiana in February 1729. Of the 284 slaves which left Africa, only 177 survived the trip across the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico. The sailing of slave ships from Africa to North America became known as the Middle Passage. There were no slaves over the age of 30. The price per slave was 600 livres (about $500) which gradually rose to 1,800 livres. The financing model was half the price of the slave down and the rest due in three years. The majority of slaves brought into Louisiana were from the Bambaras tribe. They are described in the late Dr. Joe Gray Taylor’s book, Negro Slavery in Louisiana, as “Tall and slender in build, with finer features, fuller beard and lighter skin from the neighboring people.” France, for a variety of reasons, became weaker and overextended in the New World. They were soundly defeated by the English with American help

23 in the French and Indian Wars (1763) and affectively banished from the New World. In 1762, France ceded Louisiana to Spain by the Treaty of Paris. Spain, concurrently, was unable to govern Louisiana, particularly after the Revolutionary War when young-America had a functioning government. Spain was destitute and had feckless leadership. A Spanish census taken in 1794 of a large land mass which would become the Neutral Strip (roughly Southwest Louisiana) counted 14 heads of families consisting of 37 men, 27 women, 38 boys, 41 girls and 39 slaves. On October 1, 1800, Spain retrogressed Louisiana back to France, basically gave the territory back. Napoleon I, intent on a huge war with Great Britain, could not afford to police Louisiana. In 1803, American President Thomas Jefferson was interested in buying New Orleans and, just as importantly, having unlimited access to the Mississippi River. The U.S. Congress had authorized $2 million towards that purchase. Jefferson sent James Monroe to Paris to negotiate with Napoleon. To Monroe’s great surprise, Napoleon wanted to sell all of the Louisiana territory (828,000 square miles) to the United States. The price was about $15 million and the treaty was signed on October 21, 1803. The American flag was flown in New Orleans shortly before Christmas of that year. The Louisiana Purchase doubled the size of America. The territory was not defined on the southwestern boundary, on purpose. The French suggested that the Rio Grande River be the western boundary, something the Spanish, then in control of what would be Texas, were furious about. The Spanish rightly feared American intrusion into Texas, then the star of the Spanish Empire. Spain’s fears would eventually become true as Americans began crossing the Sabine River into Texas. Mexico declared independence against Spain 1821. The Spanish thought the Sabine River a more just border. The Calcasieu River was the eastern boundary of the Neutral Strip and the Gulf of Mexico, the southern boundary. The west and northern boundaries would not be defined until 1819. The Old Spanish Trail, from Natchitoches to Nacogdoches, was a de facto northern border. The Opelousas Trail, from Lake Charles to Orange, is known as the Old Spanish Trail today. U.S. Secretary of State James Madison said then that “a spacious interval between the Mississippi River and Spain,” might be advantageous and that that area should remain without an established border.

24 The southwest area was populated by fierce Indian tribes including the Tonkawas, Tahuayas, Comanches, Texas, Aises, Hasinca, Nacogdoches, Attakapas and Natchitoches. Both the Spanish and the Americans tried to ply favor with the tribes and dealt with them for furs and pelts. On the Gulf coast lived the fierce Karankawa tribe, which enjoyed a reputation for the taste of human flesh. Additionally, the Neutral Strip, also known as No Man’s Land, was a haven for runaway slaves. If a slave made it west to Texas, under Spanish law, they would be free. The area was blessed with black, alluvial soil, a gift of the rivers that border the area, and was conducive to growing anything grown in North America. There were teeming longleaf pine forests as well as stands of Black Jack oaks. Wild plums, mulberries and strawberries proliferated and buffalo, deer, wild turkeys, wolves, foxes, rabbits and alligators were in abundance. The bayous were full of fish. Open range cattle raising was an early enterprise which did not require slaves. Slave smuggling along the Gulf Coast in the early 19th century from Galveston to New Orleans was conducted by pirates, who would only trade in coin. Jean Lafitte, later one of the heroes of the Battle of New Orleans, was an early slave dealer. Lafitte had been chased from his Grand Terre hideout, south of New Orleans, by a combined force of the U.S. Navy and Army. He retreated to the island of Galveston and named his residence Campeachy. It was from Campeachy that Lafitte seized slaves from Spanish vessels. Lafitte would sell the slaves from Campeachy or have them marched to a spot on the Sabine River near the present-day Niblett’s Bluff, an early crossing point of the river. The slave buyer had the responsibility of moving the slaves into Louisiana or to New Orleans for resale. The going price was $1 a pound, more if a slave had a skill, like blacksmithing. Lafitte’s lucrative Campeachy operations would come to a halt when the United States Navy landed and ordered him off the island in 1820. A year earlier, the U.S. Congress made piracy of any sort a capital crime. The Spanish and the American armies tried to rid the Neutral Strip of lawlessness but it was an easy place to hide. Spain, now in almost full retreat as a world power, feared the Americans and thought eventually, Americans would continue west into Texas, then West Spain.

25 Even when Louisiana was admitted as a state in 1812, the western and northern boundaries of the Neutral Strip remained undefined. Finally, on February 22, 1819, the United States and Spain agreed to the Adams-Onis Treaty which was not completely finalized until 1821. The Sabine River became the western boundary which tracked north until the 32nd parallel, roughly at Logansport. The Calcasieu River was the eastern boundary and the Gulf of Mexico, the southern boundary. At the time of statehood, Southwest Louisiana was part of St. Landry Parish. In 1840, five parishes – Calcasieu, Cameron, Beauregard, Jeff Davis and Allen – were divided out of the larger parish. Calcasieu Parish is composed of nearly 2 million acres. Its population at the time it was spun off from St. Landry Parish was 2,057 people.

26 Thomas Rigmaiden

“We must remember that intelligence is not enough. Intelligence plus character--that is the goal of true education. The complete education gives one not only power of concentration, but worthy objectives upon which to concentrate. The broad education will, therefore, transmit to one not only the accumulated knowledge of the race but also the accumulated experience of social living.”

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Rigmaiden Tombstone

27 One of the earliest and most concise recollections of daily life in early Calcasieu Parish was by the area’s first school teacher in Southwest Louisiana’s first school, Thomas Rigmaiden. The school was located near Bayou D’Inde and the original teaching was done in the home of Jacob Ryan, Sr. A separate schoolhouse was subsequently built. In a diary covering the years 1836 through 1865, the year of his death, Rigmaiden made an almost daily notation even if it was only a sentence about the weather. The diary was discovered by Maude Reid, a preeminent Calcasieu historian who seemingly never threw anything of note away. Reid had the entire diary photocopied but when those copies began to fade, she retyped the diary, 505 pages, in its entirety. Reid lent the original diary to Amy S. Boyd who copied it and gave her copy to the Calcasieu Parish Library System, where it was bound and exists today. Rigmaiden was born in England on October 28, 1786, and migrated to Calcasieu Parish early in the 1800’s. Little is known of his early life although he received monies from England over the course of his recorded life here. Rigmaiden was from a landed family in a small town of the same name. As often happened in feudal societies, Rigmaiden’s older brother inherited the family estate and Rigmaiden was left virtually penniless. He was hired to teach here by a group of families who all contributed until a public school could be established so he was here after the area attained statehood (1812). At some point during or shortly after the War of 1812, Rigmaiden met Henry Moss and it was at Moss’ invitation that Rigmaiden settled here. He married Eliza Ryan on October 30, 1826, the daughter of Jacob Ryan, Sr., who had begun a lumber mill on Lake Charles (the lake) in 1816 and was a leading early citizen and patriarch. The first formal school was in Jacob Ryan’s house beginning around 1820. Thomas and Eliza had eight children: Thomas, James, Elizabeth, Mary Ann, Henry, Catherine, Albert and Jacob. Rigmaiden’s diary is significant because he was a slaveholder and settled near Bayou D’Inde in an area close to the Calcasieu River and south of the site of what would become Mossville. The Rigmaiden name is very prevalent in Southwest Louisiana and significant in the birth and growth of Mossville. Slaves would not take the name of their master if they were not somewhat benevolent, certainly an oxymoron in any description of slavery.

28 In 1820, Samuel Adams Kirby built a one-room, log cabin near the corner of Ryan and Bilbo Streets which was the first schoolhouse in Lake Charles and the first building where children were taught separately. Southwest Louisiana did not utilize the Plantation Model of slavery which stressed benign cruelty in the cultivation of cotton, rice and tobacco on a large scale in the central and eastern parts of the state and usually near a body of water for transportation. Slaves here were treated as free-labor domestics and farm hands – but they were still slaves. When Rigmaiden makes reference to a slave, he uses a single name only. When he refers to a white person outside of his household, he uses the first and last names. Still, as Rigmaiden confirms, slaves were chattel, to be bought and sold or to be rented to other white people. In the slave census of 1850, Rigmaiden owned two slaves, a 24-year-old woman and a three-year-old girl, presumably her daughter. In the 1860 slave census, Rigmaiden owned five slaves ranging in age from 31, a female, down to one years of age, all males. Slaves were not identified by names, only by their masters, ages, sexes and colors of their skin, black, brown or mulatto, in the 1850 and 1860 census. Life in early West Calcasieu was largely subsistence for whites and blacks. Rigmaiden worked in the fields alongside slaves and slaves were utilized to hunt (so they were sometimes armed) as game was plentiful in Southwest Louisiana, particularly pork, deer and an occasional bear. Rigmaiden’s school year tracked the planting and harvesting of crops, where many of his students participated, and he often boarded students. Students under his tutelage in 1829 reflect many of the area’s white, pioneer families. The children included: Emily, Sarana and Jacob Ellender; Martha Reeves; Eliza Roya; Jacob Landry; Ann, Levi, Asa and Issac Ryan (children of Jacob Ryan, Jr.); Joseph LeDoux; Warren Johnson; Alfred DeRosier; William and Laura Bilbo; Issac Perkins; Macellette, Ann and Lastie Vincent; and Selong and Alcendore Ellender. There is nothing in Rigmaiden’s diary to suggest that he ever taught a black child or an adult. The deliberate lack of literacy to blacks was yet another enforcement mechanism vehicle to keep slaves subservient. It was, until the end of the Civil War, against the law to teach blacks. The lack of education to Negroes here was to continue past the Civil War and well into the end of Reconstruction when the black population began educating themselves and all by themselves.

29 The mercantile exchange here was largely bartering. Rigmaiden, in addition to his teaching duties, also made whiskey from corn, a staple crop. This was much to his marital detriment, according to his diary. The following entry from Rigmaiden’s diary on Christmas Eve, 1838, speaks volumes to the status of Negroes here: “Went to Ryan’s (Sr.) house for the division of eight of his Negroes; one to each child, except for Susan and Christeen who received $519 in place of a Negro.” The presumption is that Susan and Christeen were too young to have their own slaves. The March 26, 1839 entry is probably typical of the seemingly casual oversight of blacks, who really had no place to go unless they were lucky enough to be part of the Underground Railroad. Runaway slaves were, again, chattel and there were rewards for capturing and returning them. Additionally, Southwest Louisiana was probably too remote for runaways. “Alfred and Erastus ran away – Emily (his oldest daughter) brought them back,” wrote Rigmaiden. His diary notes the establishment of Calcasieu Parish and the division into six wards on June 15, 1840. His brother-in-law, Jacob Ryan, Jr., was one of the parishes’ first police jurors and an early sheriff . Rigmaiden documents sharing food with slaves, although the majority of the butchering of pigs and cattle were done by slaves. It is in a late diary entry of 1840 that Rigmaiden uses the term “choates,” which is a small pig. Prior to the naming of Mossville, the area was known as “Choates Prairie.” There is a sweeping incongruity throughout Rigmaiden’s diary on the Sabbath days when he worked; he asked for salvation and forgiveness “for breaking the Sabbath.” Yet he had no qualms about slavery or about the value of a Negro’s life, excepting that as a “hand,” or the invaluable services of a Negro midwife, which he refers to several times. Her name was “Sukey.” The following entry of July 31, 1848 is startling in its horror: “Allan’s negro hung.” That is the entire entry, no mention of the crime although it could be something as minor as theft. An October 1848 entry said that Negroes were owned by “Certificates,” and white slave owners could transfer ownership by merely exchanging “certificates.” Rigmaiden defines the price of labor in this February 17, 1854 entry: “Hired Felonize from Austin for $7 a month.” Almost all of the slaves cited in Rigmaiden’s diary had French names although Louisiana had been part of the United States since 1803.

30 Poor Felonize had bad luck as Rigmaiden’s laborer; on June 1, 1854, Rigmaiden wrote, “Felonize has a swelled face.” Two days later, his entry was, “Pantel lanced Felonize’s swelled face; sent for a doctor; did not get one.” This period in the history of Southwest Louisiana marks the beginning of the lumber industry here, particularly the mining of the longleaf pine and to a lesser degree, cypress trees. There is conjecture that runaway slaves might have been hired or re-enslaved for the most dangerous aspects of the primeval lumber industry, as lumber camps in the early days were entirely self-supporting and highly portable. There is documented evidence that blacks were certainly hired into logging crews following the Civil War, as the lumber industry reemerged and then boomed until the 20th century. A May 24, 1858 entry notes that “Mr. (Captain Daniel) Goos passed here,” and just as notably, on June 22, 1859, “Mr. (John) McNeese came here.” Goos was a German immigrant who pioneered lumbering and the construction of shallow-draft schooners here. John McNeese, for whom the local university is named, taught here at least as early as 1873 and became the parish’s first superintendent of education from 1888 until his death in 1914. An April 11, 1859 entry notes the escalation of the price of slaves as the Civil War looms: “W.W.C. Gill here, bargained to sell him Taunton for $900. Received $500, balance to be paid in one year.” Rigmaiden’s January 4, 1860 entry (a New Year’s resolution?) describes a frailty: “Made Eliza a promise to quit the bottle.” (Eliza is often gone for a month at a time and then reappears in Rigmaiden’s diary). There is an interesting notation on May 21, 1860, as a “James Moss (Negro) is on the land he declared.” James Webster Moss and Eli Vincent were two early free slaves and land owners who cut lumber and floated it along the Calcasieu River to the sawmills. James Moss became the U.S. Postmaster in 1907 when the area known as Choates Prairie became Mossville and had its own post office. The post office was discontinued in 1916 and moved to Westlake. Rigmaiden hardly mentions the Civil War which began on April 12, 1861, and continued until the South surrendered on April 9, 1865. At the onset of the Civil War, the United States was the largest slaveholding nation in the world. President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, and the 13th Amendment to the Constitution confirmed it. Louisiana was very removed from almost all of the warfare during the Civil War. Inasmuch as slaves were considered real property, this entry is revealing: October 15, 1863 – “Eliza mentions that the work of Sol and Felonize is valued

31 at $75,” which is probably an annual valuation of their work were they to be farmed out. The last passage in Rigmaiden’s diary is May 22, 1865, in which he says, “Heard of the surrender of the (Confederate) states.” Except for the capture of two Union gunboats, the U.S.S. Wa v e and Granite City at the Battle of Calcasieu Pass on May 6, 1864, the Civil War mostly bypassed Southwest Louisiana. (An earlier reference was of a Union schooner which sailed into Lake Charles in the middle of the war. The schooner inflicted no damage save perhaps to terrorize the inhabitants.)

32 “A Happy Cemetery”

“First Purchase African M.E. (Methodist Episcopalian) Church was in the Quarters outside the southern town limits, across the old sawmill tracks. It was an ancient paint-peeled frame building, the only church in Maycomb with a steeple and bell, called First Purchase because it was paid for from the first earnings of freed slaves. “The churchyard was brick-hard clay, as was the cemetery beside it. If someone died during a dry spell, the body was covered with chunks of ice until rain softened the earth. A few graves in the cemetery were marked with crumbling tombstones; newer ones were outlined with brightly colored glass and broken Coca-Cola bottles. Lightning rods guarding some graves denoted dead who rested uneasily; stumps of burned-out candles stood at the heads of infant graves. “It was a happy cemetery.”

Jean Louise (Scout), Finch, the principal narrator of To Kill A Mockingbird, by Harper Lee, 1960

Mt. Zion Baptist Church

33 Rev. Desmond Wallace, Deconess Nicole Greene, and Senior Deacon LaSalle Williams

Mount Zion Baptist Church, the oldest, continuously-operated church in Calcasieu Parish, celebrated its 150th anniversary November 6, 2016. The November 6 worship began at 11 a.m. at Mount Zion. The memorial celebration began at 3 p.m. with the Rev. Lionel James presiding. The Rev. Desmond Wallace is pastor of Mount Zion. Mount Zion was founded in 1866 by newly-freed slaves. The land was donated for the church, at East Burton and Church, by James Webster Moss, a freeman and landowner before the Civil War. Moss may have been the first black landowner in Mossville. Moss had homesteaded 81 acres in Section 30 of Calcasieu Parish. He would homestead an additional 81 acres and his claim to the lands was confirmed by President Grover Cleveland on August 13, 1894. Moss was a deacon at Mount Zion as were Isam Perkins and Tolbert Lyons. The first pastor was the Rev. Griffin Braxton. Braxton founded the first subdivision in Mossville, Braxton Subdivision, in 1897. The first church at Mount Zion was a brush arbor, a construction of natural materials which were indigenous to 19th century Central Louisiana religious sites.

34 An area was chosen with as many saplings in a row as possible. The saplings were bent over, tied together, and brush was hung atop the overhang. The dirt floor was then hoed clearly of all vegetation and swept clean before every service. The pulpit was a four-foot tall stump in the center-front of the arbor with split logs on either side for seating. From a brush arbor, Mount Zion used a tent then built a log cabin. The Great Storm of 1918 demolished the cabin and communicants met in a tent until their church was rebuilt with a frame building that same year. That frame church house served Mount Zion until 1957 when the present church was built under the tutelage of the Rev. R.L. White. The pastors at Mount Zion have been: Braxton, the Reverends James Glynn, S.J. Mitchell, H.H. Williams, M.M. Cuby, O.J. Simmons, B.C. Garrett, R.L. White, A.L. Taylor, and Arthur Etienne. In his book, Negro Slavery in Louisiana, the late Dr. Joe Gray Taylor said more than anything other than faith, freed slaves wanted land and education. They needed education so that they could read the Bible, something slaves wanted to accomplish before they died. To slaves, said Taylor, “Heaven meant freedom, that their suffering would be rewarded and they would find solace and comfort,” in the afterlife. The actual Mount Zion is a hill on the western section of Jerusalem. It is just east of the Old City and is revered because it is thought to be the site of the palace of King David. It is representative of the entire land of Israel and there is a theory that King David brought the Ark of the Covenant to Mount Zion. The local Mount Zion is located on a 22-acre site with an extensive graveyard on the northern border. Many of the grave markers date to the late nineteenth century. The theme of the 150th anniversary service was “Remembrance and Survival: Celebrating Our Past and Anticipating Our Future.” When the author walked into Mount Zion, I sat on the back row, fearing I would take a regular’s seat somewhere. An usher, Vanetta Briscoe, walked up to me and said “Welcome.”

35 She took my arm and we walked to the front of the church. She gave me a seat on the second row and said, “We are all family here, my man.” Vanetta Briscoe was the first black female police officer in Sulphur, La. She was recently called out of retirement and is working on the force part time. The nine-lady choir walked in, all resplendent in their red robes. There are no hymnals in Mount Zion; all the parishioners knew all the words to the hymns. The first hymn was “Praise the Lord With Me, Hallelujah,” with everyone in praise, standing and clapping. Freedom was part of the service almost from beginning to end. Rev. Wallace, in his initial comments, said “We are set free in the name of Jesus. “Thank you God for your presence and your mercy,” he said in a rich, baritone voice. Sister Gaila McKinney gave the reading which often quoted the lesson of the day, Psalm 145: 3 & 4. “Great is the Lord and most worthy of our praise; his greatness no one can fathom. “One generation will commend your works to another; they will tell of your mighty acts.” McKinney continued, “We praise God for his glory for the past 150 years. He has truly blessed this church. “Our ancestors answered God’s call 150 years ago. We have moved from outdoor bathrooms, open windows and candles to this church, with air- conditioning and rich surroundings. God has truly blessed this congregation. “Now, there is no excuse for not learning, reading in order to praise God. We must teach our children diligently to honor our many deceased members, who lived in love and walked in faith,” said McKinney. LaSalle Williams, senior deacon at Mount Zion, then rang the bell 15 times, each chime signifying ten years of service. McKinney reminded that “Bells were once a sign of communication throughout our community. Today, they are a signal of celebration,” she said. As the author rode down Old Spanish Trail on my way to Mount Zion, I saw a tall man riding a bicycle with a suit coat neatly folded over one arm. As I parked, the bicyclist leaned his bike against a tree and very carefully unfolded his suit coat and put it on. Then we walked into Mount Zion, “The Church where you are never a stranger.” In the period following the Civil War, freed slaves also moved northeast of Mossville into a smaller black community which became Willow Springs. The area, between the Little River and the Houston River, once had fresh water springs in abundance, hence the name.

36 In 1909, residents of Willow Springs established the Willow Springs Baptist Church, which has been in operation ever since. The land for the church was donated by Walter Smith, a small lot, 53 by 208 feet deep. A small black school was across Willow Springs Road from the church site.

Mt. Zion Baptist Church prior to 1918

The church at Willow Springs was led initially by the Rev. Jefferson Davis Braxton, who was the son of the Rev. Griffin Braxton, the first pastor at Mount Zion. Mount Zion was the mother church to Willow Springs. Willow Springs Baptist Church resembles a smaller Mount Zion, with the pastor’s podium in front of the choir seating. In 1944, the Rev. B.C. Garrett, who had been a pastor at Mount Zion, moved to Willow Springs to lead that church. He was to remain as pastor the next 38 years as the little church grew. The present pastor at Willow Springs is the Rev. Austin Jourdan, who was a deacon there prior to 1979, when he was ordained. Jourdan recalled Garrett: “The board of deacons decided that Garrett would no longer preach; and that is what killed him.” The Rev. Alvie Young replaced Garrett. Jourdan’s congregation totals 74 people who attend the 11 a.m. Sunday service.

37 “When Sasol (large industry to the south) came in, I lost members. But I still have the hard-headed ones who drive in from Lake Charles,” said Jourdan. Jourdan said that Willow Springs has been “blessed. See that organ; it doesn’t work anymore. The man who donated it played it every Sunday and when he died, the organ quit working. “We just left it there,” said Jourdan. “The Lord has always been in this church. For years, we had a parishioner, Tank Griffin who was a born- again Christian. He and his wife would come to church in a horse and buggy,” said Jourdan. Rev. Austin Jourdan, On a tour of the church Pastor of Willow Springs Baptist Church grounds, Jourdan pointed out some of the oldest graves in a graveyard next to the church. He said that recently, a man purchased the lot next door to the graveyard. “He’s going to build a house there and tear down all the bushes between the graveyard and his site. When he told his children his plans, they said, ‘Oh no, daddy, we don’t want to have to look at a graveyard.’” “He told his children, ‘That’s the best possible neighbors we could have,’” said Jourdan with a laugh. Jourdan, a tall man with a jovial demeanor and a big smile, said he thinks he knows his role in the Willow Springs history. “In the last 23 years, things have calmed down quite a bit (since the outroar over the Browning-Ferris hazardous waste site around the corner from the church).

38 “We just couldn’t deal with Browning-Ferris. After the lawsuit (1999) , CECOS (who purchased Browning-Ferris) came around and talked to us. “They’re down to one or two trucks a day,” said Jourdan. Jourdan looked wistfully around the church grounds, scenic on a cloudless day. “I’m not important; I’m just a servant. “I’ve been here 30 years now; I’m ready to go,” said Jourdan. (The first church in what would become Calcasieu Parish was the Antioch Baptist Church, founded on October 21, 1827 in Big Woods. The founders were: Joseph Willis, elder; Drury Bunch, William S. Wellboan, Elizabeth Bowan, Martha Perkins, Jindey Perkins, Harriet Neyland, Nancy Hamperer, Sarah Ashworth, Ann Berry, Jesse Ashworth, Phyliss Blackman and Rees Perkins, clerk. Two cemeteries are on the church grounds: Antioch Baptist and Big Woods. The second cemetery of 13 acres was donated by J.W. Bryan, a Confederate veteran and the publisher of the Lake Charles Daily Echo. The first person interred in Big Woods was Hardy Perkins in 1844.

39 Ralph Clifton Reynaud

“In the past, not very much attention has been given to the education of the Negro,”

F.W. Hamilton, Calcasieu Parish Superintendent of Schools, 1915

The seminal study of black public education in Calcasieu Parish for the years 1888 – 1938 is the master’s thesis of Ralph Clifton Reynaud, An Historical Study of The Negro Schools of Calcasieu Parish, Louisiana,” published in 1939. The thesis was submitted to and approved by Atlantic University in Atlanta, Ga. Reynaud (October 22, 1885 – March 27, 1967) moved to Lake Charles a second time in 1914 as principal of the Second Ward Colored Elementary School where he remained until W.O. Boston High School was built in 1949. He became Boston’s principal in 1952, and served there until his retirement. Reynaud Middle School, 745 S. Shattuck St., was named in his honor in 1964. The school closed in 2014. The early emphasis in the Reynaud study is that local industry Ralph Clifton Reynaud can fuel public education, both by population increases (poll taxes) and through increased property assessments. The earliest boom industry in the parish was lumber and Reynaud dates the first public education of blacks as early as 1890, when the lumber industry was in full bloom.

40 There were no black school buildings as such, but Reynaud writes that pupils were taught in churches prior to a designated school building which was often a structure abandoned by white people, moved and rebuilt by black people. “Separate schools for whites, Negroes, Indians and Redbones (a mixed race of white and Native Americans) were taught in churches, halls and shacks of various descriptions,” Reynaud wrote of the early years in question. Reynaud makes the assertion throughout his thesis that schools in Louisiana were classically underfunded and through his lifetime, that state revenue was about 50 percent of true educational needs. Additionally, as Reynaud suggests, funding for “colored students,” stayed at or below half of monies appropriated for white students, teachers’ salaries and costs per pupil. The first Calcasieu Parish School Board meeting in November 1887, “Makes no mention of Negro schools.” However, remarkably, Reynaud writes that in an interview with W.O. Boston, who was then principal at First Ward School well after that meeting, that he “Substantiated the fact that the school at Choates Prairie (now Mossville) is probably the oldest of all Negro schools in the Parish.” That may have been the Mossville Negro School. That school no longer exists and the site is unknown. Then-Supt. John McNeese orchestrated a donation from the Anna T. Jeanes Fund for Rudimentary Schools for Southern Negroes, which was dispersed through Dr. J. H. Dillard to the Calcasieu Parish School Board in 1908, probably the first funding for black schools. The Jeanes Fund was the legacy of Anna Jeanes, a Quaker, from Philadelphia. Jeanes never married and was the sole beneficiary of a fortune from her father and brother. She became an outspoken advocate for black education through the training of African-American teachers in the south. She also advocated the training of supervisors for black schools. To that end, she established the Jeanes Fund with $1 million in 1907, then an incredible sum. Dr. James H. Dillard, a white Virginian, was the son of slaveholders. He graduated from Washington and Lee where he taught for several years. In 1891, he began teaching at Tulane University where, three years later, he became the dean of the School of Arts & Sciences. Dillard was also a tireless advocate for black education in the South. He became the director of the Jeanes Fund in Louisiana in 1907, the same year that Anna Jeanes died.

41 The Jeanes Fund later became known as the Negro Rural School Fund which helped educate black educators and supervisors. The Jeanes Fund also encouraged blacks to vote. For his tireless efforts in promoting black education, when New Orleans University and Straight University merged in 1930, the new school was named Dillard University in his honor. By 1952, twelve years after Dillard’s death, the Jeanes Fund had produced 510 Jeanes’ teachers, all in the South. The program ended in 1968. Dillard also oversaw the opening of a Carnegie Library in New Orleans which was open to blacks. His efforts saw state appropriations for black education increased from $3,000 to a $1 million in Louisiana annually. The Jeanes’ monies could have been for a planned black school in Westlake but neither Reynaud nor the board notes record how much money was donated or what it went for. It was the first fiscal donation from outside the state given to Calcasieu Parish for black education. Boston was still active in education in 1938 at the time of his interview with Reynaud. Boston taught in 1891 at Choates Prairie. His salary was $40 a month. Also on the Choates Prairie faculty was B.C. Garret, $35 a month and Annie Green, who taught at Choates Prairie beginning in 1895, for $35 a month. B.C. Garrett, writes Reynaud, “Was one of the first teachers. He taught at Choates Prairie and was at that time the leading colored teacher in the parish.” They were paid by a separate fund of the Calcasieu Parish School Board. The 1898 state constitution empowered parishes to vote special taxes to build and maintain school buildings. Still, a large racial disparity existed and no money would be appropriated unless there was a “building.” Jumping ahead a bit, in the parish collection of education receipts for 1910, Calcasieu Parish schools collected $129,684 through property taxes, and from the state, $16,748. The average monthly salary of a white teacher was $72.18 and colored, $38.10. The average spent on a white student was $1.88 and colored, $.75 a month. In 1911, parish collections were $153,251 and state, $21,570. The average monthly salary of a white teacher was $74.76 and colored, $40.16. The monthly cost per white student was $2.14 and colored, $.92. In 1912, parish collections were $221,924 and state, $22,590. White teachers were paid $70.05 a month while colored teachers were paid $44.19. The monthly cost per white student was $1.98 and colored, $1.12. Reynaud’s charting of the early years of Calcasieu education ends with the year 1913. That year, the parish collected $239,067 and the state paid $26,533.

42 The average monthly salary for white teachers was $67.21 and colored $42.50. The average monthly cost for white students was $1.79 and colored, $.98. Separate but not nearly equal. A telling statistic is that black schools only operated an average of 3.8 months a year in these early years while white schools were in session 7.5 months a year. This disparity was because certified black teachers were a rarity and black schools were open during the summer months when college students were on break. In an interview with W.O. Boston, he told Reynaud that Supt. of Schools John McNeese would write “college presidents and ask that their prospective teachers,” if they might come to Calcasieu during the summers to teach black students. During this period under McNeese’s tutelage, Calcasieu Parish teacher’s salaries were higher than the state average. Reynaud also points out that in this period, 1888-1913, “In many parishes of this state and in much of the South there are NO (author’s emphasis) schools for Negroes. “In Lafayette Parish, just 75 miles east of Lake Charles, there was but one school for Negroes in the whole parish as late as 1910,” he adds. At the end of the 1913 school year, Choates Prairie had five teachers: Cornelia Rigmaiden, Annie E. Green, M.M. Hartman, Charles N. Robertson and Penelope Posey. The average salary was about $35 a month. Supt. McNeese died on June 3, 1914, and Reynaud gives him much credit for the educational improvements in the parish, black and white. The year before, 1913, Imperial Calcasieu was divided into the four parishes of Calcasieu, Jefferson Davis, Beauregard and Allen. Cameron Parish, still the state’s largest parish, was spun off in 1870. It is impossible to overstate the contributions of McNeese in the educational oversight of an area as vast as Imperial Calcasieu and Reynaud cites his merits at the end of McNeese’s life. Black children, notes Reynaud, were not taught “beyond that of the elementary level (through third grade), still these (early) schools were fairly accessible and fairly well taught, despite the lack of well -organized supervision.” McNeese’s successor was F.W. Hamilton. In a 50-page, special pamphlet he published in 1915 about Calcasieu Parish schools, he devoted two-thirds of one page to black students. “During the past not very much attention has been given to the education of the Negro. The idea has seemed to prevail that the Negro should remain ignorant and that to educate him would only tend to make a fool of him.

43 “We are glad to see signs that this idea is rapidly disappearing and we feel assured that within the next few years, ample and wise provision will be made for the proper education of the Negro youth. “The average length of session for Negro schools in Calcasieu Parish is 6.8 months. This is really below the standard set by the Board, an eight month term being granted to all Colored schools maintaining an average of ten,” Hamilton wrote. Prior to the division of Imperial Calcasieu (four parishes), there had been 21 colored schools in that huge area. But that number is deceiving because at least some of those schools were in temporary sawmill towns. Reynaud explains: “As a mill cut out its timber, the school there would invariably cease to exist. Sixty-three colored teachers taught at different times and for a varied number of years during the 15-year period ending in 1913,” near the dusk of the timber industry here. In 1914, the parish had its own school board; it oversaw 12 schools, increasing to 15 in 1918. The school board took one step forward and several steps backwards when, in 1914, an offer was made to the board to buy 40 acres of land near the existing (white) Westlake school. The cost was $600. This was seemingly the first step by the new board in building an “industrial training school,” exclusively for blacks. That term means that the “training school,” would offer classes upwards from the basic three elementary grades and offer classes in agriculture and other industrial skills. Dr. D.S. Perkins, the Westlake school board member, wanted to consolidate the three existing colored schools at Westlake, Lockport and Choates Prairie into one facility. Dr. Perkins would be the first mayor of Sulphur, 1914-1918. Nothing happened and Dr. Perkins’ forward-thinking dream would have to wait. As the 20th century dawned, a near-miracle occurred for southern Negro education: the partnership of Booker T. Washington, the prominent black educator of the late 19th and early 20th century, and Julius Rosenwald, the son of a Jewish-German immigrant. Washington, born into slavery in 1856, was illiterate at the time of emancipation (1865). On his own, he graduated from Hampton Institute, Hampton, Va., and began Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, Tuskegee, Al., in 1881, from a church and several dilapidated farm buildings. From that humblest of beginnings, Washington preached black education, racial moderation and black enfranchisement even as black lynchings in the South reached their height in 1895.

44 He became so prominent that he was befriended by Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. But it was his friendship with Rosenwald that promoted black education in the South through the training of teachers. The condition of black education after 1900 in the South was deplorable, a continuation of one of the essences of slavery. Rosenwald, an employee of Sears, Roebuck since 1897, took notice when the U.S. Postal Service decided to send the mails to rural America for free. To that end, Rosenwald invented the mail order catalogue which catapulted Sears, Roebuck as the world’s leading retailer and Rosenwald as the company’s chief executive officer. To promote black education, Rosenwald and Washington decided that school buildings in black communities as well as providing sites for teaching, would also serve as meeting places and a source of pride in those towns. To that end, Rosenwald invented the matching grant. If blacks in a rural community could come up with a contribution and the white school boards agreed to operate the school and pay the teachers, Rosenwald would contribute cash, usually one-fifth of the cost of the total project. By 1932 when the grants ended, 5,357 new school buildings had been erected in the South throughout 883 counties and parishes in 15 southern states. At least one of every black school in rural Louisiana communities were Rosenwald schools. Of that number, 435 schools had been built in Louisiana. In 1920, Rosenwald grants helped pay for four Negro schools in Calcasieu Parish; two-room buildings in Newton and DeQuincy and three-room buildings in Mossville and Westlake. The school’s were designed by two architects from Tuskegee and were built to uniform specifications and sizes. The Calcasieu Parish School Board adopted a motion that year to build yet another Rosenwald school in Vinton as soon as the locals came up with their contribution. For the period 1914 – 1923, Mossville had eight teachers. Their names and monthly salaries were: Penelope Posey, $40; W.A. McMahon, $50; Viola Clark, $50; Ezora Lyons, $50; Mabel McMahon, $40; Bessie Owns, $50; E.O. Jenkins, $60; and P.O. Rogers, $70. Over this same period, beginning in 1914, colored teachers’ salaries totaled $3,714 in the parish. By 1923, the total salaries had increased to $7,826. On reflection, this reads like a doubling of black educators’ salaries but the parish had hired an additional six teachers during this period.

45 In 1917, enrollment in black schools had grown to 944. However, attendance was only 627, so only about 67 percent of Negro children attended school on a regular basis. The length of annual attendance in black schools had increased to 7.6 months in 1918, the year of the Great Storm here which destroyed many parish school buildings, black and white. In 1922, then-Supt. of Calcasieu Schools F.K. White reported that there were 85,000 white students in the state and 130,000 black “educables, ” out of school. There was still neither a junior high nor senior high in the parish for black children. In 1928, black residents of DeQuincy, site of the largest black school in the parish, sent the school board a petition, urging them to build a junior high with a nine-month term. The first petition was ignored so a second one followed, stipulating that the parents of the DeQuincy area would pay “all costs of teachers’ salaries and building facilities for such grades.” The school honored that request and for one year, the first black junior high operated in DeQuincy. The experiment lasted for only one year when the school board refused to pay salaries and maintenance after that. In 1928, the largest black school was in Westlake where black parents hoped the first junior and senior high might be built. Things went backwards when in his report of October 24, Supt. White said, “I regret to report on the evening of October 26, fire of unknown origin destroyed the Westlake Negro School.” Black parents scrapped for school buildings. An old school building at Niblett’s Bluff was dismantled and rebuilt at Mossville. This was the modus black parents had to adopt in order to get any funding from the school board. For the period 1924 - 1937, the following teachers and their salaries taught at Mossville: L.H. Harris, $85; Cornelia Wilford, $60; R.S. Austin, $85; LaMaude Bellamy, $60; H.S. Williams, $85; Gladys Johnson, $50, and Florence Laws, $45. It is interesting to note the discrepancy in salaries between male and female teachers back in the day. By state law in 1934, the parish had to extend the term for colored schools to 6.4 months a year. Reynaud made an egregious discovery in 1937, towards the end of his graduate research. The state appropriated monies to each parish based on the number of “educables,” in the parish as defined by race. “It frequently happens that only a part of the State funds for Negro educables is used for their benefit, and no local funds whatsoever is made available to them,” wrote Reynaud.

46 In 1937, the number of Calcasieu Parish black educables was 1,789. The total state apportionment to the parish based on $14.17 per black educable was $25,350.13. However, of that amount, only $11,122.99 was actually spent on black education. That is 43.9 percent of the allocated state monies. It is not the lowest percentage of the state’s 64 parishes but is a reprehensible figure. Reynaud notes in his concluding pages that “A cautious progress (has been made) in the (parish’s) public schools. This progress had to be sure of itself in each measured step it advanced lest public opinion throughout the parish register an objection.” To make his point, Reynaud quotes State Supt. of Education T.H. Harris who said in 1937, “(State) figures leave no doubt whatsoever that there isNO (author’s emphasis) motivation to provide school facilities for Negro children.” Reynaud concludes: “As a full appraisal of all the conditions which concern the schools of this section of Louisiana discussed in this treatise, no factor has promoted a finer public interest than the spirit of cooperation and good will shown by the Negroes themselves in their own education. “Out of their meager means, they have bought land for school sites, dismantled old buildings and re-erected them in their own communities, added new rooms and fixtures to buildings constructed by school boards, and furnished schools with many little articles so necessary to the well-being of their children.”

47 Ward Four

“Reconstruction was a vast labor movement of ignorant, muddled, and bewildered white men who had been disinherited of land and labor and fought a long battle with sheer subsistence, hanging on the edge of poverty, eating clay and chasing slaves and now lurching up to manhood.”

W. E. B. Du Bois

The largest ward in Calcasieu Parish is Ward Four, located nearly in the middle of the parish. It is composed of 178.75 square miles. It is part of the Prairie Terrace, which slopes one foot per mile south to the Gulf of Mexico. A ward is a political subdivision. There are eight wards in Calcasieu Parish. The term “parish,” only exists in Louisiana, a holdover from the state’s French period. It is synonymous with the term “county,” which is used in the rest of the United States. The second-largest ward in the parish is Ward Seven at 165 square miles which surrounds Vinton to the west and extends to the Texas state line. The small, African-American community known initially as Choates Prairie and later as Mossville, is west of Westlake and east of Sulphur and primarily north of U.S. Hwy. 90. Mossville is almost in the middle of Ward Four. The boundaries of Ward Four track the Calcasieu River to the east and the Calcasieu Ship Channel going south to the Cameron Parish line. The Ward Four line moves west from Turner’s Bay in Calcasieu (Big) Lake to a point just south of the Intracoastal Canal where it begins going northerly in almost a straight line where it parallels Selene Road. The line goes north to its northwest border near Marcantel Settlement where it intersects the Houston River and follows the river back easterly to its confluence with the Calcasieu River at approximately the Salt Water Barrier. The 1870 Federal Census, the first after the Civil War, identified everyone in a ward by name beginning with the head of household. The census began June 1, 1870. From the names column, the columns include: age, sex and color which are defined as white, black, mulatto, Chinese and Indian.

48 Columns 16 and 17 in the census identify whether a person cannot read or write; 18 stipulates to a person who is “deaf, dumb, blind, insane or idiotic.” Column 19 identifies “male citizens 21 or older,” while column 20 identifies “male citizens 21 and upwards whose right to vote is denied or abridged on other grounds than rebellion or other crimes.” The 1870 census for Ward Four totaled 520 persons. Of that population, 372 were listed as white; 77 as black; 68 as mulatto and three as Indians. The primary occupation in Ward Four was farming (73), mostly men. The second-largest occupation was in some capacity of the lumber industry (29), all men. The census listed five sawmill owners: William and Matthew Smart, Hardy Gill, Austin Clifton and Alfred Moss. The lumber industry in Calcasieu Parish rebounded with a flourish after the Civil War. It attracted entrepreneurs from all across America and helped found Lake Charles. Lake Charles was incorporated in 1867 as the little town flourished. Lake Charles is in Ward Three of Calcasieu Parish. The lumber industry in Southwest Louisiana was the first industry after the Civil War where pictures exist of black and white men working together in the lumber companies that sprang up and then moved on as the lumber was cut out. At one point, there were 24 sawmills in the parish. In the census, Hiram Liles and W.J. Hughes were listed as school teachers in Ward Four. The white children were often identified as “in school,” while the black and mulatto children were often identified as “servants.” There were no black or mulatto children listed as “in school.” There are five heads of families with the surname Moss in the census. They are both black and white families. Two of the Moss’ were sons of Henry Moss, a very early settler in Calcasieu Parish. Prior to the end of the Civil War, a man’s wealth in Louisiana was calculated, in part, by his slave holdings. A slave had a declared value like a head of cattle or acreage. After emancipation, Henry Moss’ net worth fell considerably although he was probably still the wealthiest man in Ward Four. Ezra Moss, then 35, was a farmer, according to the census. He was married to Amanda Moss and they had four children, all white. He is one of two of Henry Moss’ sons living in Ward Four.

49 The second Moss in the census was James Webster Moss, 33. Moss earned his freedom and also acquired land before the Civil War and may have been the first freeman of color in the parish. Webster Moss was married to Milly and they had three children. He was early on the largest black landowner in Ward Four. His occupation was listed as a farmer. The third Moss in the census is Harry Moss, 70, a black man. He was married to Elvina and they had four children. He is also listed as a farmer. In the census, both Webster and Harry Moss were listed as not being able to read or write. However, they were both categorized as “Male citizens of the U.S. 21 years of age and upwards.” This category implies that both Webster and Harry Moss could vote but blacks in this era were denied the right to vote through the Jim Crow laws after 1877. The fourth Moss in the census was Amanda Moss, 18. She was black and had two young infants. She is listed as a housekeeper. The fifth Moss was Alfred Moss, also a son of Henry Moss, who was 40. He was married to Mary and they had 17 children, white, black and mulatto. According to the census, 11 of Alfred and Mary’s children were white. They were: John, 17; Camelia and Andrew, both 16; George, 13; Benjamin, 11; Mary, 9; Rose, 8; Elizabeth, 6; Arthur, 4; Christopher, 2; and Clara, four months. The first black child was Milly, then 26, who was listed as a servant. In descending order, the other mixed Moss children were: Lucinda, 8, mulatto; Benjamin, 6, black; Narcissus and George, who were twins, black; and Medora, four months, who was black. There were some omissions in the 1870 census. For instance, Henry Moss was not listed in the census although he was alive in 1870 and was to live for five more years. More importantly, another free black (the author’s presumption) prior to the Civil War who is not listed in the 1870 census is Eli Vincent, who became a substantial landowner in the area. Following the Homestead Act of May 20, 1862, squatters could settle on land and if they retained residency for five years, they would eventually own the land. On July 15, 1878, Eli Vincent deeded to Sally Vincent, whose maiden name was Braxton, Lot 6, Block One in Section 29. Eli and Sally Vincent, sometimes referred to as “Sallyana,” were husband and wife. This area is in the heart of what would become Mossville.

50 The first subdivision in what was to become Mossville was the Braxton Subdivision which was developed in 1897 and accepted by the Calcasieu Parish Police Jury in 1906. The Braxton subdivision was bordered by Evergreen Street and what is now the Sabine Diversion Canal. The land left the public domain on May 10, 1883, when it was deeded to Griffin Braxton and later confirmed on March 26, 1892, through Homestead Exemption No. 3412 to Braxton. Braxton Subdivision was initially 11 lots located in Section 20, and is directly north of Section 29. Braxton had been deeded 162 acres or nearly one-fourth of Section 20. In 1897, Griffin Braxton subdivided the subdivision, keeping a 60-acre tract for himself. He gave identical 10-acre lots to: Nelone (Melvin) Braxton; Sallyana Braxton Vincent, wife of Eli Vincent; Jack Braxton; and the heirs of Jane LeDoux, a daughter of Jane Braxton, Griffin’s wife, by a first marriage. Jane LeDoux died in 1900 leaving a son, William LeDoux. Other family members receiving lots in the Braxton Subdivision were: Salina Braxton (Antoine) Rigmaiden; Jeff Davis Braxton; Hannah Braxton (Reuben) Tillman; Mary Braxton (Jerry) Perkins; Henderson Braxton; and Carter Braxton. In 1906, as a result of Griffin Braxton’s death, the last of his six lots were given to: Jack, Henderson, and Carter Braxton; Salina Rigmaiden; Sallyana Vincent; and Milner Braxton, a grandson. Eli Vincent also acquired 162 acres in Section 29 which was confirmed by President Benjamin Harris on June 25, 1890. Section 29 of Ward Four contains a number of streets mostly south and north of the Old Spanish Trail which were the heart of Mossville. They include: Lyons, Watertower, Smith, Edwards, Fisher, Prater, Pryor, Cedar, Moss, Braxton, Reeves and Perkins. The second subdivision in Ward Four was the Elsie Reeves Subdivision which left the public domain on February 10, 1881, to Henry Perkins, a black man. This was another Homestead Exemption. Perkins was given 160 acres in Section 29. This subdivision was bordered by Prater and Lyons Streets. On January 23, 1892, Perkins sold 16 acres of land in Section 29 to Pleasant Prather for $80. Perkins signed the warranty deed with an “X.” The abstracts dating back to the late nineteenth century are unclear as to the timing of a land sale from Prather to James Moss, who is probably the same James Webster Moss who was involved in the Braxton Subdivision.

51 Sometime after 1892, Prather sold five acres to James Moss. On January 11, 1905, James Moss sold those same five acres to Elcie O. Reeves for $85. Those lands, in the northerly portion of Section 29, were divided into 25 lots, approximately 50 feet wide and 112 feet deep. The northern boundary of the subdivision is the “brick road to Westlake,” while the western boundary is identified as the “gravel road.” The lot sales are not noted in the abstracts but on June 2, 1924, Reeves’ subdivision was put on the delinquent tax rolls and advertised in the Lake Charles Weekly American Press for sale to satisfy $5.96 in taxes. Reeves redeemed the land prior to the tax sale. Elcie Reeves was the illegitimate daughter of Elvina Reeves Robinson Perkins. She never married or had children and died shortly after she had redeemed her land on July 20, 1925. A petition was filed in the 14th Judicial Court of Calcasieu Parish awarding the five acres to the remaining children of Elvina Reeves: Robinson Perkins, Lou Robinson Perkins, John Perkins, Charles Perkins and Susie Perkins Hines in varying interests. The court made the award. The Braxton and Reeves’ subdivisions were the first two in the area which would become Mossville until after World War II. The most common name in the Ward Four census with 63 names is Vincent. Of those 63, only four were listed as black. Lottie Vincent is a single person and Henry Vincent has a family of three. The other Vincent’s, all white, listed by the head of the household and number of family members, are: Valentine, three; Sylvania, a woman with seven children; Joseph, two; William, six; Dozite, three; Nathaniel, five; Joseph, five; Urin, five; Thomas, six; Simeon, eight; and Martin, four.

52 Life: The Struggle

"The future looks dark, and we predict, that we are entering upon the greatest political contest that has ever agitated the people of the country-a contest, in which, we of the South must be for the most part spectators; not indifferent spectators, for it is about us that the political battle is fought. The issue is fairly joined."

Loyal Georgian (black newspaper), 3 March 1866

There is very little written history of Mossville during the 19th and well into the 20th century. The little town was originally known as Choates Prairie because of an abundance of mostly small pigs who roamed in the thick forests.

53 At some point around the turn of the century, Mossville was known as Brimstone. That vernacular changed in 1907 when the U.S. Postal Service granted what became Mossville a post office. The building was on land donated by Webster Moss who may have played a definitive role in the area’s renaming. The post office and a singular West Calcasieu identity were not to last. In 1916, the postal service moved the Mossville post office to Westlake, La., where it has remained ever since. There was an abbreviated story in the Lake Charles Commercial under the byline of Albert S. Gatschedt, who was on the staff of the U.S. Bureau of Ethnology. The date of the entry is hard to discern but the year of the activity was 1909. Gatschedt wrote about the Istak Atakapa Indians, a tribe indigenous to Calcasieu Parish who, like all Native Indian tribes, suffered mightily from the migration of early Americans into their native lands, including Southwest Louisiana. Cyprien Duhon, for whom Prien Lake was named, was deeded 651 acres of land through the Swamplands Act of 1849 along the eastern shore of Prien Lake. Duhon’s land spanned from the present I-210 bridge to an area south of the Lake Charles Country Club on what is now the Big Lake Road. Duhon’s lifetime was June 24, 1803 to March 25, 1878. He built his home on the present site of the country club. The remaining Atakapa tribe settled on Duhon’s waterfront lands where they could fish and gather shellfish and crabs for sustenance. Towards the end of Duhon’s life, he began selling the valuable Prien Lake waterfront property and the Atakapa were forced inland to forage for themselves. Duhon’s heirs continued the sale of the properties around Prien Lake. In 1909, what remained of the Atakapa had moved inland from the present- day Prien Lake Park. They were invited to move to Mossville, a short canoe ride across Prien Lake and up Bayou D’Inde by the then Mossville citizens. The Atakapa must have accepted the invitation. There is very little history of the tribe in the years following 1909. The earliest notes of Mossville history found in the archives of the American Press date to 1930. The first entry on May 14 was about graduation ceremonies at the Mossville Elementary School on Old Spanish Trail. The Rev. C. C. Cuba, pastor of Mount Zion Baptist Church, presided. The second entry, July 10, 1930, was about the Calcasieu Negro Orphanage which was located in Mossville. The story notes that the residents of the orphanage operated a farm across the street from the orphanage.

54 The third story from 1930 concerns Hardy Edwards who was arrested on September 4. Edwards was charged with “manufacturing and selling intoxicating liquor for beverage purposes.” Edwards was, according to the Press, “In possession of a five-gallon still and a quantity of liquor.” This was in the second year of a nationwide prohibition on alcohol. Mossville never incorporated and thus, had no tax base on which to fund improvements. The town has been dependent on the Calcasieu Parish Police Jury for all of its existence. Calcasieu Parish Planner Wes Crain said that there are other non-incorporated towns in the parish including Moss Bluff, Carlyss and LeBleu Settlement. The small communities were able to form water and sewerage districts through the police jury but basically, those small, unincorporated towns are “Governments within themselves,” said Crain. “They (unincorporated towns) like rural living. Mossville has been predominantly residential and they have always expected to be protected by the police jury,” said Crain. Mossville never had a police force or a fire department. Law enforcement came from the Calcasieu Parish Sheriff’s office and fire protection from the municipalities of Westlake or Sulphur. “They were founded mainly by the families who were born there and grew up in that area,” said Crain, adding “Those families who were born in Mossville have a passion for that area; their roots run deep.” In order for Mossville to fund improvements and services to the area, such as water and sewerage, they would have had to tax themselves through incorporation “in order to bring the property values up – and they didn’t,” said Crain. The problem with getting a potable water supply was to plague Mossville for the duration of its existence. Under the provisions of Homestead Exemption passed in the state’s Huey Long era (1928) all homes valued at $75,000 or less are exempt from property taxes. Crain said that probably applied to most of the homes in Mossville until recent history. Crain said that Mossville, because it had no geographical distinction, couldn’t call for a bond issue for improvements. Again, it was dependent on the police jury who could establish sewage, water and fire protection districts, but that should those districts fail, they – and any debt - would revert to the police jury. In a first step towards some type of municipal organization, the Mossville Progressive Organization was formed on September 9, 1954. The Rev. J.B.

55 Rigmaiden was named president and he implored those present to “Form some sort of community government for this colored community.” McKeever Edwards was named vice-president; A.H. Braxton, secretary and Dallas Moss, treasurer. At that meeting, it was noted that Mossville had 230 registered voters. In 1955, Mossville High School was built at 3300 Old Spanish Trail. The grades were K – 12 and the school had 60,527 square feet. The school meant that Mossville children could go to school at home rather than be bussed to Lake Charles for any education beyond the sixth grade. On March 11, 1958, through the auspices of the Calcasieu Parish Health Unit, a health clinic was opened in Mossville. Helen Dardonne, a registered nurse, and Lawrence Estaville, a public health educator, oversaw the opening. Dardonne gave 64 polio shots, 21 DPT’s (diphtheria, pertussis and tetanus) shots and four smallpox shots. For all of its history through the middle of the 20th century, Mossville residents depended on shallow water wells for water. Sewage was treated through outdoor plumbing or septic units from the homes into the ditches. In an effort to get more visibility for Mossville, on July 4, 1963, Gradis Braxton, then 36, announced his candidacy for the Calcasieu Parish Police Jury from District 14. Braxton owned Bel Air Cleaners and Bel Air Furniture Store. He was the first African-American to run for the police jury. Braxton finished ninth in a nine-man race. On September 10, 1964, construction began on the Rigmaiden Recreation Center on Old Spanish Trail. The center was funded through the Sulphur Recreation District on 15 acres. The recreation center had the first swimming pool in Mossville in addition to baseball fields and a playground. A large meeting room with offices are part of the center. For many years, LaSalle and Betty Williams were the summer directors of the center. Butch LeMelle succeeded the Williamses as a fulltime director at Rigmaiden. The center remains functional but is not as well used. The recreation district is District One of Ward Four and is well-funded through ad valorem taxes on area industry. Board Member Bobby LeTard in March 2017, said participation at the center “Is disheartening,” because “not many people use it.” On September 23, 1965, the Mossville Civic Improvement Board was created. The board asked the police jury to create a water and sewage districts for Mossville with a sewage collection and treatment facility.

56 James Rigmaiden, the board’s president, told the police jury that “There has been a high incidence of intestinal parasites and numerous cases of infectious hepatitis in our past.” On November 3, 1965, the police jury created the Ward Four water and sewage district. On January 5, 1967, Mossville residents were asked to vote on funding the water district through front foot assessments on their property. The front foot assessments would affect about 800 families. The vote on the water district failed. On February 14, 1969, a Housing and Urban Development (HUD) grant was secured for the Mossville water district. Residents who were connected to the water district were required to post a $20 deposit back to HUD for water meters. The district’s creation meant that for many residents, they would have to pay for water. The grant was debt which has to be repaid through water district billings. The water district and tower were completed in 1973. The consumer lines were as small as two inches and as large as eight inches. The lines were of asbestos concrete pipe and it was named the Mossville Water Works. The tower’s capacity was 100,000 gallons. The tower is not in use at present but intends to be operative in the near future because of an enhanced industrial water need in the area. Most of the remaining residents in Mossville buy water from the Westlake Water Works No. 4. In 1980, a sewer main was built from Westlake to Sulphur and included the Mossville subdivisions of Bel Air and Lincoln Heights. The main bypassed the older subdivisions in Mossville which still had to depend on septic systems. On June 24, 2004, the police jury secured a grant for a $1 million sewer system for the western parts of Mossville, where raw sewage still went into the ditches. That same year, Westlake water was routed to Mossville for the remaining residents. Additional money for sewage was received in August 2004 for the same western areas of Mossville. On June 2, 2005, more sewer mains are laid in the Queensboro subdivision and along parts of Prater Road. The residents affected by this sewer main still have to provide their own septic systems, an economic hardship for most of the residents.

57 Coach

“All of a sudden, this stuff (plum, fig, peach trees and muscadines) just disappeared.”

LaSalle Williams after the Lake Charles Chemical Complex began.

Perhaps the most venerated man in Mossville history is LaSalle Clarence Williams, known affectionately and reverentially as “Coach.” Williams was adopted shortly after his birth on June 8, 1931, by Arthur and Agnes Williams of Mossville. In addition to LaSalle, the Williams’ adopted his biological mother, and they became members of the family together. He and his wife of 65 years, Betty, live in the middle of Mossville on Patty Moss Lane. It was in Mossville that they raised five children, four of whom are their biological children and one they adopted. They have five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. They aren’t moving anywhere. “I guess if Sasol gave me a $1 million, I’d sell,” said Williams, with a big grin. “But that’s not going to happen. Betty is satisfied here; I might be the last one to leave but I grew up here,” said Williams. Williams grew up in the midst of the Great Depression but there was a great natural resource in Mossville – trees. “My daddy had a business and it was a wood yard. Back in those days, in this area, we didn’t have fireplaces but everyone had a wood stove. “We didn’t have (natural) gas or electricity so everything was wood stove. So wood was a valuable commodity. “He sold to mostly wealthy, white people who had fireplaces. One of my earliest memories is that I learned to use a crosscut saw. I cut so much wood with a crosscut saw, and I broke so many blocks, and stacked wood. “We had to walk to (elementary) school. We didn’t have buses. The school was located in this area (Old Spanish Trail). School was one big building with two big rooms with a partition in the front. “And that’s where I got my basic elementary education. I can still remember the principal, the teachers that were here at the time. In the afternoon when we got out of school, we walked home and then we had chores. “Everybody had to do chores. We didn’t have telephones but people knew how to communicate. In other words, if you did something somewhere, by the time you got home, your parents knew about it.”

58 Betty and LaSalle Williams

A lifelong commitment to sports began early. “On weekends, we had recreation. We had our own little ball field. We didn’t have any real (base) balls. We made our balls out of rocks and tape and rags and sewed them up. “We had broom handles like that as our bats and we had all kinds of fun with that. But the big game in Mossville was marbles. We played cowboys and Indians and the Tarzan movies were real popular back in those days. “In the woods in those days were big rattan vines. We pretended we were in the jungle and we’d go play Tarzan in the woods. Those big, old vines grew up real high and they were real strong. We would swing all over the woods with them. “So we had a lot of fun with that. We had a lot of fun in Mossville,” said Williams. His parent’s home was a three-bedroom house. Williams had one of the bedrooms. “The floors were wood and we didn’t have wallpaper like they have today. “My parents took regular newspaper and would mix it up with flour and make a paste and pasted their walls with newspaper. We didn’t have air conditioning. You slept at night with the windows open but we had screens to keep away the mosquitoes. “My father raised a lot of chickens and ducks, geese and guineas and he had a big farm in the back yard. He would plow that farm with two horses. “We had chickens all over the yard. When we were ready to eat one, they put them in the coop and clean them out for a couple of days.

59 “Daddy showed me how to kill them by wringing their necks and then I had to pick them. Same with ducks. I couldn’t catch the guineas so they were safe from me,” said Williams. “He raised corn, beans and everything that he raised we ate. And we shared with other people in the community. We also had a lot of hogs and we survived; we thought we had everything,” continued Williams. “My father was a real hard worker, mostly around home,” said Williams. Williams’ mother, Agnes, had a car, a rarity in Depression-era Mossville. “I think it was a (Ford) Model T. I don’t know how they did it but she always had an automobile. “She would haul women from Mossville every day to Sulphur to work for the wealthy white folks, mostly in the restaurant business and that’s what she did for most of her life. “I learned to drive in that car. One day, I stole it and crossed the field with it and learned how to drive. My mother was quite an instrument in Mossville, particularly helping other people. “I’m going to tell you about one of the worst whippings I ever got. Me and my little buddies, we had some little devil in us. So we all had BB guns. We were trying to shoot marsh hens but we weren’t too successful. “So this man we knew had a bunch of chickens and we decided we were going to shoot some of his chickens. So we did and then we dug a hole in the ground and made a barbeque pit. “We thought we were getting away with it. We were having fun, we barbequed and ate but we got told on. “When I got home, I didn’t get a good whipping like I would have with a switch. My momma, she got her Bible and she went to the Book of Proverbs. I say, ‘Well this is the worst whipping.’ “And I still say that. Because she worked on my mind,” Williams remembers. “In the woods were plum trees and muscadine vines and we’d go and collect them. We also had fig and peach trees and big, old healthy plum trees. “And all of a sudden, this stuff just disappeared and I think I know why. That’s when industry started coming in,” said Williams of the years prior to and after World War II. “We mostly raised everything we needed except sugar and coffee and we had to go to the store for that. We had one grocery store in Mossville, Garrett’s Grocery Store. “Ira Garrett let people buy on credit. He’d write it on the book and we’d pay it off at the end of the month,” said Williams. Originally, Mossville was called Choates Prairie. A choate is a wild pig which were prevalent in Mossville.

60 “They’d run all over the place. We would kill them and eat them. Some people wouldn’t eat them because they were wild. “They were dangerous; they would cut you so we didn’t get too close to them. They were hard to hit with a gun so most people trapped them and then shot them. “We still got wild hogs in the area and they are still real dangerous,” said Williams. Williams was raised in the St. Paul Methodist Church which was on Prater Road. But eventually, he moved to the Baptist Church, Mount Zion, where he has worshipped for the past 50 years. He is the head deacon at Mount Zion and has been on the Deacon Board for the past 20 years. “I used to be the superintendent of the Sunday School at the Methodist Church and when I went to the Baptist Church, they made me the superintendent there which I did for about 15 years. “Every Sunday, you were going to wind up in church. No ifs and buts about it. You were going to church whether you learned anything or not, you were going to be there. “But it’s not like that today. They go if they feel like it. But back then, church was a must. I don’t care if you went out on Saturday night, you were going to church. You ain’t going to be in bed on Sunday morning,” said Williams. According to Williams, most of the leadership in Mossville came from people associated with the three principal churches: Mount Zion, St. Paul Methodist Church and Morning Star Sanctified Church. Morning Star was on Old Spanish Trail. It was purchased by Sasol and demolished although the Morning Star graveyard is well-maintained and intact just south of Old Spanish Trail. “Everyone (all the communicants in the three churches) got along. Somebody had an activity going and they all went and helped the other church. “It’s not like today; they’re all too selfish. They’re too busy to be about helping,” said Williams. Williams talked about his early education. “I went to school here in Mossville and it was during the time of segregation. Mossville went to the sixth grade and the idea was when you completed the Sixth Grade in Mossville, you had graduated from school. That’s the furthest you (blacks) could go. “In time, they put in a seventh grade but my parents were insistent that I go to high school. I had to go by a white high school (Westlake) to go to Lake Charles over the drawbridge.

61 (The drawbridge across the Calcasieu River at the Port of Lake Charles was the east-west passageway on Hwy. 90. The drawbridge was torn down in 1952 when the Interstate 10 Bridge opened over the river). “My mother loaded me up and my brother and sister and drove us to Lake Charles to the Second Ward School on Mill Street. That was a city school and they had city and parish schools districts then. “The people who paid taxes in the city went to the city schools. The ones outside (the parish) couldn’t go because they were not taxpayers there,” explained Williams. The city and Calcasieu Parish schools combined in 1967 and are all operated by the Calcasieu Parish School System. In 1949, W.O. Boston High School was built and Williams began attending there. On many occasions, Williams would ride his bike down Old Spanish Trail to the drawbridge over the Calcasieu River and to Mill Street to attend high school. He rode back in the evening, after football practice. That is, Williams estimates “About ten miles,” one-way. Williams says it with a shrug like that twice-a-day bike ride wasn’t a big deal. His legend may have begun with those bike rides. “That only went on for about a year and a half. I had an auntie who lived on Mill Street and I used her address. Then we were able to catch a bus from Mossville which dropped us off on Broad Street in Lake Charles. But we still had to walk to school,” said Williams. At W.O. Boston, Williams went out for football. “And what the coach did, he lined everybody up and made us run 100 yards to see who was the fastest. That’s the way of picking out who his halfbacks were. “And unbelieving to me, I was 30 yards in front of everybody. So then they knew what kind of speed I had. I became a football player. I also had the best track record(s) in Lake Charles. “There was the white coaches who were keeping up with me at Lake Charles High because we did all our running on their track. I knew that at some time, integration was going to take place. “We still had to ride the bus to Lake Charles. It passed right by Westlake High School,” said Williams, shaking his head at the memory. Williams graduated from W.O. Boston in 1952, where he was all-state at halfback. He enrolled at then-Grambling College on a full track scholarship. “The first year I ran at Grambling, I did so well. And the same white track coach who watched me in high school saw my record and he recruited me to McNeese State (College) to run track.

62 “Integration had happened, at least on the college level. So I transferred to McNeese and that’s where I got all my three degrees at McNeese; my bachelor’s, my master’s and my Plus-30. “That same school that I had to pass by, I wind up working at it. At Westlake High, coaching and teaching,” said Williams, shaking his head again. Williams was drafted into the U.S. Army during the Korean Conflict in the middle of his undergraduate career. He returned to McNeese with athletic eligibility left but a rabid segregationist, State Sen. William Rainach of Summerfield in Claiborne Parish, passed a law which hindered his collegiate athletic career. “Rainach passed a law after integration that no black could compete in sports against whites. So that kind of held things up when I was at McNeese and they were about to send us back to Grambling. “But Miss Dorothy Combre who was president of the NAACP chapter here, she hauled us back and forth to court in New Orleans. So they finally wiped that law out and that’s why you see black athletes competing at McNeese now. “That law was declared unconstitutional but I got caught up in that,” said Williams. Although he was denied participation on the McNeese football team, he lettered in track as a sprinter. Rainach, a failed candidate for governor in 1959, committed suicide in his back yard on January 26, 1978. McNeese State College graduated its first black students in 1956. McNeese was one of the first Deep South schools to integrate, and did so quietly and most of all, peacefully. Much of the credit to McNeese’s integration was excellent leadership. Dr. Lether E. Frazar was president at McNeese in 1952, and when the Korean Conflict ended in 1953. As black veterans petitioned McNeese to admit them, Frazar met with Hugh Shearman, a World War II Marine veteran, who was assistant publisher of the American Press, the daily newspaper in Lake Charles. Frazar told Shearman (the author’s late father) that he could not, in good conscience, refuse admission to those returning veterans. He asked Shearman if admitting black students had to be a news story. Shearman said, “It’s not a news story; it’s the right thing to do. I served with black soldiers and, at the very least, they deserve an education.” Williams graduated from McNeese in 1960, and went to Mossville High School which was first grade through high school as a coach and later, as an assistant principal.

63 Williams inherited a powerhouse athletic program at Mossville. In his first year at the school, his Pirate football, basketball and track programs won state, still an outstanding feat for a school with a small enrollment. In 1970, he was transferred to Westlake High where he was the only black coach. Coaches had to teach Social Studies and his classes were a little different from the other coaches’ classes. “The most important thing to them (other white coaches), and it looked like the kids looked forward to it, was the Civil War. That was great, and that’s what they were teaching. “Of course, I did it a little differently because I went back into slavery, see. And I had a lot of white kids in those classes. But that’s how I taught Sunday School, with teaching and praying,” said Williams. “When they integrated the schools here, they’d call the best black teachers and send them to the white schools. What they called the weak teachers they left in the predominantly black schools. “You ever seen the old chalkboards in school? Well, when all those kids got in my class, I went and took all these dates and events and I put them on the chalkboard. I had two chalkboards because I never did teach sitting down. “It was like a timeline. Then I took an eraser and erased them. They (students) couldn’t see them but I could see them (dates and events) because I put them up there. “So when I got up and went to teaching and when I got through rattling them dates and events, and what happened, they (students) went back and told their parents, ‘Oh, Coach is a smart man. We all going to get in his class cause he knows,” said Williams, smiling a huge grin. “They (students) would follow me in the book and they’d say, ‘Gawd Dog, he’s right on this. We are looking at it in the book. He ain’t using no paper or anything,’” Williams remembers. “I guess I was blessed with that because I don’t think I’m that smart, but I got away with it,” said Williams. One of Williams’ favorite teachers at Mossville was Zora Lyons. He remembers: “She was considered a mean teacher but strict. “The bell rang one day and there were some books, some magazines, that this girl left on the floor. I’m the last one and she said, ‘Look, pick up those books and put them in place.’ “I made the mistake of saying, ‘I didn’t put them there.’ I got one of the worst whippings! Man, it took me to understand later she didn’t care who put them there; she gave me an order to move them. “And that stuck with me today and I can see why. ‘Look, I gave you an order, you do it.’ And I feel that way today,” said Williams.

64 In 1975, Williams was the president of the Southwest Chapter of the NAACP. Although the early refineries, Conoco and then-Cities Service, had integrated following construction and during WWII, the union plant stewards had been successful at stifling black promotions. The stewards allowed blacks to work in the labor, motor pool and custodian jobs. Williams was one of the plaintiffs in a suit against the refineries. Both refineries settled the suits and opened the employment venues. Williams taught and coached at Westlake until 1978, when he was transferred back to Mossville as a coach and principal. He stayed there until he retired from the school system because of decreasing attendance at Mossville in 1991. By then he and Betty had over 30 years in the Calcasieu Parish School System but because they had not paid into Social Security, Coach wasn’t sure if they had enough income to retire. He had had a second job in the summers as director of the Rigmaiden Recreation Center, next to Mossville High. Betty served alongside Coach and that’s how they spent the summers. In 1980, when Wayne McElveen was elected Calcasieu Parish Sheriff, he gave Williams two commissions as a volunteer deputy. Williams served in that capacity until 2000, when Beth Oakley Lundy was elected sheriff. “Her father (Charles Oakley) was the superintendent (of the Calcasieu Parish School Board). He called all the principals and retired principals to a meeting and said, ‘I want all of you to support my daughter (Beth Lundy),’ for election. “I told Oakley that I had supported Wayne and that I wouldn’t work against his daughter and that I wouldn’t work for her either,” said Williams. “Almost as soon as she took office, she took away my commissions. Then when Tony (Mancuso) was elected, he called me and offered me a full-time job as an assistant jailer at the parish jail,” a job Williams continues to do from 5:30 a.m. until 1 p.m. five days a week. He plans to work for two more years when he thinks he’ll have enough income to retire in comfort. He will be 87 years old. If all of his civic and professional service weren’t enough, he is the longest- serving member of the Calcasieu Parish Planning and Zoning Board, having begun there on May 4, 1987, when he replaced Dallas Moss, another Mossville legend. Planning and Zoning membership is “A service,” said Williams, “but it comes with a lot of criticism.” In 2003, Calcasieu Parish Police Juror Hal McMillan was successful in having a Ward Four road named Coach Williams Drive. “It is very unusual to have a roadway named for someone who is still alive,” said McMillan but the naming met with no criticisms from the other police jurors.

65 Williams is shy about the road but he appreciates the sentiment. “Hal was in one of my classes (at Westlake). When I had to leave the classroom, Hal would take over for me. “He’s an old friend but he talks too much,” said Williams with a laugh.

66 Sam

“My memory of Lincoln Heights was that it was always well-maintained, that people were very proud of their homes.”

Carola Lipsey Bacque whose father Sam developed Lincoln Heights

The last subdivision developed in Mossville was Lincoln Heights, located in the northwest corner of Section 28 of Ward Four in Calcasieu Parish. The subdivision was developed by the Pelican Land Company whose principals were Sam Lipsey, Dr. Stan Levy and Bob Royer. That area dates back to the estate of Thomas Rigmaiden, to whom a much larger acreage was granted in 1817 from the Louisiana Purchase. Rigmaiden gave 160 acres of Section 28 to his son Albert, who married Caroline Hewitt. When Albert Rigmaiden died, his widow, Caroline, inherited the acreage on April 13, 1872. The land patent was confirmed by virtue of the Homestead Act of May 20, 1862, and deeded to Caroline on January 15, 1878. The patent was signed by President Rutherford B. Hayes. Caroline Rigmaiden defaulted on her property taxes and lost the land on January 23, 1890, to Joseph C. Gibbs, who bought the land for $40 at a tax sale, or $.25 an acre. On July 29, 1902, William Henry Managan, patriarch of a Southwest Louisiana lumber family, bought the land for $800 from Emile Guillory, who signed the Sam Lipsey deed with an “X.” William Managan fenced the entire quarter section, dug a water well, and rented the property to tenant farmers who grew rice on the acreage.

67 Managan also enjoyed royalties from a pipeline crossing, and gas and electric lines which crossed the property. He also sold off most of the lumber. Managan’s son, Luther Managan, bought the property from his father on January 1, 1930, for $5,000. He continued to permit tenant farming as well as timber sales. Luther Managan’s widow, Lessie T. Managan, and her two children, sold 30.3 acres of the property on January 1, 1955, to Lipsey, Levy and Royer, all of Lake Charles. The three were equal partners in Pelican. The price was $27,926. 75, or slightly less than $1,000 an acre. Lipsey was president of Pelican; Levy, vice-president; and Royer, secretary/treasurer. From this corporation emerged Lincoln Heights Subdivision, One and Two, the name, according to Lipsey’s children, a compliment to President Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln Heights consisted of 134 lots, approximately 50 by 124 feet each, bordered by Electric Drive, Lincoln Avenue, and Fifth through Eighth Avenues. The subdivision was accepted by the Calcasieu Parish Police Jury on June 7, 1955, and the five streets, all paved with shell, were declared public property. Lincoln Heights’ articles of incorporation include some interesting language; in it is stipulated that Pelican “Intends to erect homes, office buildings,” and “own, operate and maintain shops for the manufacture of windows, doors and other appurtenances necessary for the erection of homes.” Lipsey had come to Southwest Louisiana prior to World War II, to join his father, Louis Lipsey, in the rejuvenation of a bankrupt lumber company, Lumberman’s Supply, which occupied one side of an entire block on Goos Avenue in Lake Charles. Lumberman’s emerged out of bankruptcy largely through lumber sales for the construction of rice mills and dryers in the period when the Port of Lake Charles was the leading rice exporter in the world. After the opening of the Port of Lake Charles and the improved Calcasieu Ship Channel in 1941 and well into the late 1960’s, the world price for rice was set at the Port of Lake Charles. In interviews with Lipsey’s children, Michael and his oldest daughter, Carola Lipsey Bacque, a unique business model emerged in the sale of lots - and homes - in Lincoln Heights. Lipsey was the operative of Pelican. He would sell the lots – and homes - to Mossville residents through a unique financing method, bond for deed. Through this mechanism, bonded through Gulf National Bank in Lake Charles, Lipsey would secure the bond and the homeowner would pay Lipsey directly, mostly in cash.

68 More uniquely, once a lot was sold, Lipsey would sell - and then prefabricate the homes at Lumberman’s Supply - truck the frames over the Calcasieu River to Lincoln Heights and settle the home-to-be on the lot. The homeowner and his neighbors would continue fabricating, wiring and plumbing the home to completion. All of the homes were approximately 1,500 square feet, usually two or three bedrooms with one or two bathrooms. All of those materials would come from Lumberman’s. “Daddy handled all the paper; he placed the loans at Gulf, and all the materials came from Lumberman’s,” said Bacque. “Most Sundays, Daddy would go back to bed after breakfast with the newspapers and mother (Katherine Camola Lipsey) would take us all (three girls, one son) to Mass. Michael Lipsey remembered: “At exactly 2 p.m. on Sundays, Daddy and I would jump into his Buick Electra and drive to Mossville. It was always kind of like a carnival to me. “We would meet Wasey Rigmaiden who was Daddy’s caretaker (at Lincoln Heights) and Wasey would hand us dozens of eggs and cash in an envelope. “We would meet at Wasey’s house and park under one of the biggest pecan trees I have ever seen. In addition to the eggs, we would sometimes get a huge bag of pecans. “Daddy was never tough. He would meet with individual homeowners who were late on their mortgages and sympathize with them when they were in a jam. “On at least one occasion, a homeowner was nearly a year late on his mortgage payments but Daddy let him slide because his wife was sick. “Daddy had a pistol in the glove box of his car but I never saw him take it out. A white guy and his little son in this neighborhood of all black people in the late 1950’s and 60’s,” said Michael Lipsey. Sam Lipsey closed Lumberman’s in 1984, retiring at 75. He lived until 2004, when he died at 95. Carola Bacque remembers, “He still kept an office and went in nearly every day. Those mortgages were still paying out but he finally sold them all to Gulf National at a discount. “I don’t remember that anyone ever defaulted on a mortgage. My memory of Lincoln Heights was that it was always well-maintained, that people were very proud of their homes. “I don’t think most of the people in Lincoln Heights could have owned a home in any other way,” said Bacque.

69 BFI

“Be careful; there is enough poison here to kill everyone in the world.”

Herbert Rigmaiden, Willow Springs resident

Herbert Rigmaiden

The Browning-Ferris Industries Chemical Services (BFI) site on Willow Springs Road was built on an old shoreline called the Ingleside Barrier Bar. That shore was once a beach on the Gulf of Mexico and as land emerged, it became a sandy hill descending hundreds of feet into the Chicot Aquifer. The Chicot Aquifer is a huge, underground source of fresh water to 15 south Louisiana parishes. The aquifer descends to a depth of about 1,000 feet through a combination of sand, water and dirt. Early water wells drilled into the aquifer usually hit fresh water at a depth of 35 feet. The Chicot Aquifer provides approximately 600 million gallons of fresh water daily to those several parishes which include Calcasieu Parish.

70 The aquifer is about 9,000 square miles in size. After the Civil War, freed slaves settled in the area of Willow Springs. That area got its name because there were many fresh water springs in the area, a valuable resource. Willow Springs is just northeast of Mossville and shares much of the same history. Willow Springs was an isolated community, mostly self-contained, surrounded on three sides by branches of the Calcasieu River, once another source of fresh water which teemed with fish life. In the 1960’s, Walter “Butch” Elkins, Sr., leased the site on Willow Springs Road and began hauling in oilfield and industrial waste which was dumped into lagoons or open pits he dug on the site. He called his company Mud Movers, Inc. The site also contained an abandoned oil well which had been drilled to 4,000 feet before it blew out. Elkins began injecting hazardous waste in the well which is well below the depth where fresh water is in abundance. In 1969, Elkins got a permit for the disposal of waste at Willow Springs and negotiated a 99-year lease on the 85-acre property. As the citizens became aware of the toxicity of Elkins’ operations, mostly through odors, a spokesman for the company told them he was going to build a resort on the property with swimming pools and fishing ponds. In 1968, in a harbinger of things to come, a Willow Springs resident, Mabel Rigmaiden, a member of a pioneer family in the area, went to a meeting of the Calcasieu Parish Police Jury, armed with a petition opposed to the Mud Movers operations. Her petition had little impact. During this period, Louisiana had practically no regulations regarding the disposal of hazardous wastes. BFI bought out Elkins in 1972 and the truck traffic and activity at BFI increased exponentially. As the public clamor increased about the BFI site, Calcasieu Parish Sheriff Henry A. “Ham” Reid sent the director of his lab to the BFI site in the late 70’s. That chemist, Donald Starkovitch, was almost overcome by the fumes. His report to Reid was that BFI was disposing of priority pollutants and that the company had been deceptive in their reporting. One of the first people to call attention to the BFI site was Ruth Shepherd, a Sulphur housewife and mother, who was driving down Willow Springs Road out of curiosity in 1977. Willow Springs Road dead ends into the Calcasieu River. On the north side is a beautiful cypress swamp.

71 As Shepherd turned around, she noticed a large tank truck pull onto a shell road and followed it. The BFI facility was unfenced and shortly after the truck pulled in, the driver unrolled a large hose and began dumping a liquid chemical into an open pit. In April 1977, Shepherd and Michael Tritico formed the High Hope Road Committee to mobilize and publicize the BFI operation. That first meeting was in the Willow Springs Baptist Church with about 200 people in attendance. The church forbade the committee from using the church again after, reportedly, BFI paid the pastor $200. The BFI site became infamous following a railroad car derailment on September 28, 1982, when 41 Illinois Central Gulf rail cars carrying hazardous waste derailed in Livingston Parish. The ensuing explosions sent plumes of purple smoke into the air and 2,700 people were evacuated. It was the worst rail car derailment in Louisiana history. A month later, truckloads of the contaminated dirt from the Livingston derailment began being shipped to the BFI site for disposal. According to the Environmental Historian Peggy Frankland, the trucks were overloaded and by the time she became aware of the influx of contaminated dirt, over 40 truckloads had arrived and unloaded. Frankland lives four miles from the BFI site. The irony of the shipments of contaminated dirt was that BFI had a disposal site in Livingston Parish. But the Livingston Parish Police Jury said that the waste could not be disposed of in their parish. Frankland located the unfenced BFI site and immediately noticed the foul odor. As she went house to house around the BFI site, the residents almost all had medical problems, usually with no air conditioning and were too poor to relocate. She and a friend, Mary Ellender, began a petition drive that led to 4,389 signatures and delivered them to the Environmental Control Commission (ECC) and then-Gov. Dave Treen. Skirting over state officials, Frankland was successful in getting a congressional hearing over the effects of groundwater contamination at the BFI site through the efforts of Sen. J. Bennett Johnston, who had promised Frankland an alternative water supply for Willow Springs. Rep. John Breaux, (D-LA.) hosted the committee meeting. At that hearing on June 22, 1983, a Willow Springs cattle rancher and longtime resident, Herbert Rigmaiden, testified. In Frankland’s book, Women Pioneers of the Louisiana Environmental Movement, she recounts Rigmaiden’s testimony.

72 It was the first time Rigmaiden had been more than 20 miles away from his Willow Springs home, a 50-acre site that had been in his family for six generations. He is descended from the Perkins family, who date back to slavery. Rigmaiden found six head of his cattle dead near the BFI landfill. He cut open their stomachs and found them full of green, noxious liquid because they had been eating grass off the BFI landfill. “You gentlemen have got to remember that every time you throw a beefsteak or hamburger up to your face, you are eating that meat which comes of that contaminated water underneath because I have no other way to water my cattle,” said Rigmaiden in the hearing. The BFI landfill was capped in 1984 and BFI continued to use the injection well. That same year, the state Supreme Court ruled in the IT Case, Save Ourselves vs. the Environmental Control Commission, that the “Louisiana government has a constitutional obligation to protect the natural resources of the state in making decisions for (waste) permits.” Frankland thinks that important legal decision was a direct result of the publicity surrounding the BFI site. Also in 1984, CECOS International (CECOS) began operating the BFI site, which continues operations today. The notoriety surrounding the BFI operation may have been a motive for the state legislature to form the Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ), also in 1984. In 1980, following a Calcasieu Parish Police Jury tour of the BFI site, they suggested the site was a “nuisance.” That same year, 402 residents around BFI filed a suit against BFI, claiming that the company had been negligent in its operations, that odors surrounding the site were noxious, if not deadly, and that as a result, the land values around the site had plummeted. The Rev. J.W. Bartlett and his wife, Roselma, and Gentry Vincent were the lead plaintiffs. The Bartlett’s lived near the site and Vincent lived next door. The plaintiff’s attorneys were Lenn Knapp, a former Calcasieu Parish district attorney, Don McKnight, and Raleigh Newman. After much pre-trial maneuvering, the case opened in state district court on October 18, 1993, 13 years after it had been filed. Through the vagary of the state’s regulatory processes then, BFI continued to operate. On December 1, 1993, the jury came in and on a 9-3 vote ruled for BFI and awarded no damages to the defendants. On an appeal to the Third District Court of Appeals, the court, in a split decision, confirmed the lower court ruling.

73 The case was appealed to the state Supreme Court who ruled, again in a split decision, that the plaintiffs should be recognized as a class action suit and remanded the case back to the district court for further proceedings. At this point, with some successful mediation already In place, BFI began to mediate damage payments to some 150 families left in the litigation from the area. The late Allen Smith, Jr. handled the mediation. McKnight explained the huge volume of time and issues in the litigation. “This case was fairly novel for Louisiana and toxic waste sites and the fear of cancer. “How do you prove that (exposure to cancer, what level of exposure)? Can you recover property damages? It was novel,” said McKnight. “We wanted to try it again. The courts were split over the case and when we got class action status, it was significant. BFI had a lot of investment in that litigation and it had become very expensive,” said McKnight. “You have to remember there were very few (state) regulations when this fight started. We didn’t think the site was environmentally safe but as we went along, the regulations change and the companies had to react to the regulations. “Dumping was the cheapest way possible (to handle hazardous waste). But the increased environmental activism at that time motivated state government because eventually, government will react to the people,” continued McKnight. Michael Tritico saw things a little differently. “I was physically sick when the jury came in. I thought we had the strongest possible plaintiffs. The three jurors who ruled for the plaintiffs were in tears. “What we learned in that trial was that the polluters had a huge head start (in defense). The (state) regulations came in way behind the concerns for the environment,” said Tritico. After all the mediation, BFI paid the remaining plaintiffs approximately $8 million. In a February 2017 interview, Herbert Rigmaiden said he got “A little over $20,000.” He is a vibrant, outspoken man, now 83. As we walked into his yard, he said, “Be careful; there is enough poison here to kill everyone in the world.” He speaks in a lilting voice, almost a brogue, with an emphasis on nearly every vowel. Tritico thinks it is a dialect indigenous to Willow Springs residents. “Before the lawsuit, you couldn’t sit out here and that is the flat truth. All the old people here have died from cancer; it is a miracle I’ve survived,” said Rigmaiden. He won’t drink his water which is now piped in from DeQuincy. He and his brother Raymond drink only bottled water although his cows drink the public water.

74 He recalled his congressional testimony. “Peggy (Mrs. Frankland) and those ladies turned us loose on those devils (BFI),” said Rigmaiden. “When we got in that room with (Rep.) John Breaux, the men sitting around didn’t write anything down. “But those ladies, they wrote everything down. Overall, I lost 38 head of cattle, most of them with babies,” he added. Rigmaiden has about ten head of cattle now which he brings to market at DeQuincy. At the entrance to Rigmaiden’s acreage just inside the front gate is a small family cemetery. Rigmaiden pointed to it and said “That’s where I’m going; I’m never going to leave here.” The BFI site is about a half-mile away. Tritico has reflected on the impact the BFI controversy served as Southwest Louisiana’s first environmental imbroglio unfolded. “It (BFI) caused a public awareness of things they had not thought much about before. Words like ‘aquifer,’ and ‘hazardous waste,’ went statewide as the media got involved because the people had gotten involved. “There was unity among the neighborhoods, black and white, rich and poor; everybody worked together. It was a model of true democratic cooperation among groups as diverse as hunters and animal rights advocates. “The people, not the politicians, led the fight. The High Hope Road Committee was YEARS (Tritico’s emphasis) ahead of the politicians but we just could not sustain the momentum that the Willow Springs grassroots had generated,” said Tritico.

BFI Gate

75 Mickey from Mossville

“Mossville was concluding. There was a certain element that began creeping in, fellows not interested in school.”

Mickey Smith, Jr.

Mickey Smith, Jr.

76 Huber “Mickey” Smith, Jr. brought his saxophone into the NBC studio where the Today Show was being filmed in December 2016. It was the day the Christmas tree was to be lit at Rockefeller Center. He played his sax during the commercial breaks and no one seemed to mind. Certainly no one took it away. “This older lady was sitting next to me and she kept saying, ‘Play it, play it; they won’t stop you,’ and they didn’t,” said Smith. Co-host Al Roker, still at NBC, had heard Smith play and all of a sudden, Roker’s microphone was in the bell of Smith’s sax. “Talk about your 15 seconds of fame; all I could think to play was “O Christmas Tree,” and it seemed hugely appropriate.” “I was glad to be recognized but it was more about what I represented, not me. This ‘Little Man from Mossville’ was on national television,” Smith sighs. Smith, the head band director and a Fine Arts teacher at Maplewood Middle School, was born in Mossville in 1980. He spent the first 17 years of his life there until his family home became part of the first CONDEA Vista/Conoco buyouts in Mossville. The family home was located on the corner of Fifth and Lincoln in the Queensboro Subdivision. “I can’t remember what our house looked like. My dad, (Huber Smith, Sr.) who is 84, lived there for 30 years and he can’t remember exactly where it was. “My neighborhood has disappeared. It’s sad. But I do have wonderful memories. Everyone knew everyone. Growing up, everyone had vigilant parental figures; Mossville was so intimate. “We rode horses; we did a lot of sports. We didn’t realize the bigger picture. The flare on VCM Road (east of Mossville and on the present-day Sasol complex) was so bright at night, we could play basketball; we didn’t need a streetlight,” said Smith, shaking his head a little at the memory. His nickname, ‘Mickey,’ came from the famous Disney character. “Everyone in Mossville had a nickname. I’m not sure how I got that one but it stuck,” said Smith. His father was a longshoreman at the Port of Lake Charles and occasionally, other ports. His mother, Emmer, worked at Gulf States Utilities (now Entergy). He has a younger sister, Addie Smith Anderson. “My parents worked a lot and we spent a lot of time at my grandmother’s house growing up (Lillie May Sullivan Smith). She was a huge influence; she opened the (musical) door.

77 “She cleaned people’s houses. She (and us) woke up at 5 a.m. and we picked figs and pears. She made preserves and she gave them to people in her neighborhood. “I never saw her take a dime. “She would ‘let’ me cut her grass for $1.25 and all I had to use was a push mower (no motor). If we were lucky she would take us to the Tastee Freez. She would buy us gum and cut a stick in half! “She never, ever forgot the (Great) Depression,” said Smith. “She was a member of the Pentecostal Church, Lighthouse Tabernacle on Prater Road and she prayed nearly every day for an hour. She would start out quiet and then she would pray out loud. “I didn’t resent that at all; I thought it was a very serious affirmation of her faith,” said Smith. Lillie Mae noticed her grandson liked music. “I had shown an interest in music and tried to play a little piano but I wasn’t good at all. Besides, then, I would rather play basketball where at least I had a little skill. “Then one day, she bought me a Conn Alto saxophone, my first one. I took that as her investment in me. I started playing in the sixth grade (S.P. Arnett) but really, I was just fooling around. “Then when I got to (Westlake) high school, the band director was Jay Ecker. He really pushed me, more than anyone ever had. I had no idea I could be any good, but I started taking it seriously,” said Smith. “I would play outside at my parent’s house. I’d go into the woods and play; the squirrels would run and the birds would fly; they were my audience. “Then one day, my dad was listening and he opened the door and said, ‘Son, come play in the house.’ “That validated to me what was happening. I thought I sounded better too,” said Smith. But Ecker was THE influence. “In high school, he got me situated. He said, ‘We may have something here.’ “If you can hear it, you can play it,” said Ecker to Smith. “Music is very linguistic to Jay. He thinks you have to be able to play by ear and the way you learn how to do that is to play one note over and over. “Jay told me, ‘I’m weird on this (one note at a time) but this is how you make it special,’” said Smith. Slowly, the work ethic was seeping in; lots of practice for just a little reward. Then one day, the work ethic came home with a resounding thud following an academic shortfall.

78 At the end of one six-weeks period at Westlake, Smith made a D in Chemistry. “My father is a man of few words and I remember I was in the tub when he walked in and saw my report card. “He didn’t say much but he did say ‘I want you to come to work with me tomorrow,’ at the port. “When you open the doors of those railroad cars (at the port), the heat is tangible and the smell of whatever, corn, soybeans, just overwhelms you. I spent three days there slinging those 110 pound bags out of the railroad cars. “At the end of the third day, my hands cramped up completely but I got the message. I never made another D in my life,” said Smith. Smith went on to be the drum major at Westlake and was a member of the All-State Band. He went to McNeese State University on a full-music scholarship, was in the famed Cowboy marching band, the Pride of McNeese, but still wasn’t sold on his life’s ambition. “I was in a General Business curriculum and then my second summer, someone said, ‘Why don’t you teach; you love kids and you love music.’ The light went off and I changed my major that summer.” said Smith. “No one in my family had ever gone to college. And my family was not destitute; before I got the scholarship to McNeese, I had been accepted to LSU (on scholarship). “I have been lucky! One day in high school, a counselor said, ‘Mickey, there is this brand-new state program called TOPS. They pay you go to college.’ And, they keep paying you if you make good grades,’” Smith remembers. “I looked into it; it was brand new. One of the requirements was that you have a second language. So every day, I went to Sulphur High and took Spanish. Talk about paying off; I was in the first class of TOPS,” Smith smiles. In the McNeese marching band, the saxophones march next to the French horns. “The girl next to me was Eugenia Martin and she was pretty,” said Smith. They married in 2005, after Smith finished his master’s degree in Secondary Music Education. They have two children; Mikayla, 13 and William, 11, both Maplewood students. Eugenia teaches at S.P. Arnett. Smith had settled in at Maplewood Middle when the hurricanes came in 2004. “It was crazy; after Katrina, we had all these inner-city (New Orleans) kids who evacuated here. “Then a month later, Rita hit here and we had to evacuate. We stayed with Eugenia’s brother in Oklahoma for a while. Then I got a job at West Orange- Starks.

79 “But in 2006, we came back; this is home. There had just been a bond issue passed that included Maplewood. Back then, the band room was a little pod behind the school. “When I was at McNeese, I had a project to design a band practice room. I did it, got it graded and almost forgot about it. Then one day, our school board member came by school and asked me if I needed anything. “I said I would sure like a real (band) practice room. He said, ‘What do you have in mind?’ I showed him my sketches from college and he said, ‘Who did this?’ “I said, ‘I did.’ The next day, the school board’s architect showed up at school and asked me to show him my sketches. He asked me the same thing: ‘Who drew this?’ and I told him I did and it was my ideal practice area. “And here it is,” said Smith, with an expansive wave of his hand to the area outside of his office. Of the 330 middle school students at Maplewood, over 40 percent (140) are in the band. There are little subtleties in Smith’s band room. The electric plugs are wired into the floor so there is not a cascading flood of extension cords; the seats are comfortably apart; everyone’s gaze is directed forward. “I have a lot of different stories here. I had one kid last year who was living out of a car. But that kid came in early (to practice) because every kid here has the same opportunity. “My feeling is music is the vehicle to teach the principal, not just of discipline, but cooperation, collaboration; how to be good citizens. “You can be (in band) part of something greater than ourselves – music is that consensus. There is always something to work on; my fulfillment as a teacher is them getting it,” said Smith, soaring almost evangelically as he speaks. His musical influences are the leading Progressive Jazz saxophonists: Grover Mickey Smith, Jr. and Huber Smith, Sr. Washington, Jr., Gerald Albright, and Kirk Whelum; his choice of voices is The Rev. Al Green and on guitar, B.B. King. “That’s what it’s supposed to sound like,” said Smith, rolling his eyes. In September 2014, Smith helped found Music Makers 2U (MM), the brainchild of Eva LeBlanc, an administrative assistant in McNeese’s Department of Performing Arts. MM solicits used musical instruments, has them refurbished and donates the instruments to students in the five-parish area who have an interest in music. Smith said that over 300 students have been served by the program which gives the instruments to middle and high school students as well as students entering the McNeese music program. Every May since 2014, MM has a half-day camp where all the area students come and form a band, for many, the first band in their lives.

80 “But in 2006, we came back; this is home. There had just been a bond issue This year’s camp will be at passed that included Maplewood. Back then, the band room was a little pod the Lake Charles Civic Center behind the school. and Smith beams with pride “When I was at McNeese, I had a project to design a band practice room. I as he recounts the ongoing did it, got it graded and almost forgot about it. Then one day, our school board success of the program. member came by school and asked me if I needed anything. “For many of these kids, “I said I would sure like a real (band) practice room. He said, ‘What do you MM is the only way they have in mind?’ I showed him my sketches from college and he said, ‘Who did could be introduced to music. this?’ You cannot imagine the “I said, ‘I did.’ The next day, the school board’s architect showed up at school pride of owning your own and asked me to show him my sketches. He asked me the same thing: ‘Who instrument; you can’t imagine drew this?’ and I told him I did and it was my ideal practice area. how badly they want to “And here it is,” said Smith, with an expansive wave of his hand to the area succeed,” continued Smith, a outside of his office. Of the 330 middle school students at Maplewood, over 40 MM board member. percent (140) are in the band. Very recently, the Grammys, There are little subtleties in Smith’s band room. The electric plugs are wired the nation’s preeminent music into the floor so there is not a cascading flood of extension cords; the seats are competition opened a new comfortably apart; everyone’s gaze is directed forward. category: the Music Educator’s “I have a lot of different stories here. I had one kid last year who was living Award. The description of the out of a car. But that kid came in early (to practice) because every kid here has award is for an educator “who the same opportunity. makes an impact.” “My feeling is music is the vehicle to teach the principal, not just of discipline, Smith was nominated by but cooperation, collaboration; how to be good citizens. his friend, Sean Ardoin, the “You can be (in band) part of something greater than ourselves – music Zydeco instrumentalist. “I is that consensus. There is always something to work on; my fulfillment as a didn’t take it seriously at all. I teacher is them getting it,” said Smith, soaring almost evangelically as he speaks. mean, you are competing with Mickey Smith, Jr. and Huber Smith, Sr. His musical influences are the leading Progressive Jazz saxophonists: Grover people who teach at Juilliard, Washington, Jr., Gerald Albright, and Kirk Whelum; his choice of voices is The all classes of people,” said Smith, seemingly talking about someone else. Rev. Al Green and on guitar, B.B. King. “It’s a year-long (vetting) process. One day, Sean calls and says, ‘Mickey, you “That’s what it’s supposed to sound like,” said Smith, rolling his eyes. in the Top Ten!’” Then the Grammy people called to say I was the runner-up,” In September 2014, Smith helped found Music Makers 2U (MM), the said Smith of the February 2015, salutation. brainchild of Eva LeBlanc, an administrative assistant in McNeese’s Department “I’ll tell you the truth; it was significant to be recognized but the bigger of Performing Arts. picture is what I represent and it is not all me, at all. This has gotten such good, MM solicits used musical instruments, has them refurbished and donates the good attention to our community,” said Smith. instruments to students in the five-parish area who have an interest in music. His thoughts go back to Mossville, to the little homogeneous, African- Smith said that over 300 students have been served by the program which American community where his life began; where he can’t locate his family gives the instruments to middle and high school students as well as students home, not even the site. entering the McNeese music program. “Mossville was concluding. There was a certain element that began creeping Every May since 2014, MM has a half-day camp where all the area students in, fellows not interested in school,” said Smith, his voice tailing off a little. come and form a band, for many, the first band in their lives.

81 It is early evening at Maplewood Middle as Smith walks to the door. The hallways are empty, the patter of children gone for the day. It is the quiet peace that follows a day’s tribulations. Huber “Mickey” Smith, Jr., is the last person to leave school; as he leaves, he turns out all the lights.

82 Heaven

“People got to eat.”

Claude Rigmaiden

Timothy Bourgeois, Claude Rigmaiden, Crystal LeBlanc and Chrissie James

83 Heaven On Earth, a barbecue and seafood restaurant at 615 Prater Road, is the last commercial operation in Mossville. Heaven is midway between Hwy. 90 and the Old Spanish Trail. It hosts five tables and does a bang-up, take-out business. The owner, Claude Rigmaiden, is about to add 1,500 more square feet to his operation. Rigmaiden, 38, has operated Heaven for the past five years. He said his sales have increased every year since he took over. “I’m the last business standing,” said Rigmaiden. “I’m optimistic. I’m in between Sasol and Axiall; there is a man camp going up behind me and a 44- acre recreational vehicle park right over (south) there.” Pointing north, Rigmaiden said, “There used to be a convenience store (Trahan’s) right there. It was more than a convenience store; people could buy whole hams and stuff but it’s closed. “And it’s sad (Mossville depopulation),” noting the discarded and decaying homes on either side of Heaven. “But people gotta eat,” said Rigmaiden with a smile. Heaven was opened in 1992 by his parents, Lorce and Doris Rigmaiden, like Claude, all Mossville natives. Rigmaiden has a mixed opinion of everything that has happened to Mossville since the first buyouts in the late 1990’s. “There were really no poor neighborhoods in Mossville. And really, some people have really benefited (from the buyouts),” said Rigmaiden. “Sasol (industry which led the last rounds of Mossville home buyouts), didn’t really replace the neighborhoods. I don’t know where all the people went. “There was a whole lot of strife over the money, who gets what but as far as I’m concerned, business is business. I really think we are located in a unique location, from Topsy to Iowa, Vinton to Lake Charles. “I mean, we are right in the middle of industry,” said Rigmaiden. His mother, Doris Rigmaiden, said the family home used to be in Bel Air but that she accepted a Sasol buyout a couple of years ago. “Those buyouts just tore up the neighborhood. It’s where we grew up but the spills just devalued our community. “In my dreams, I wish Sasol had bought our entire community and put us all back together, all our people. I know it would have been hard to find a place but what happened was just not done right,” said Doris Rigmaiden. She said Sasol’s offer to her was “Fair, at least to me. I thought it included all the years we were there,” she added. She said her family would continue to hold on to Heaven On Earth. “I think we are the last business but it is what it is,” said Doris Rigmaiden.

84 CONDEA

“They should have given us gas masks.”

Sally Montgomery Comeaux

Phillips 66 Gate

85 The first overt indication of groundwater contamination near Mossville was in the water of the Sheraton Chateau Charles (SCC), a large, very popular hotel on LA. 90, just north of the community. In addition to the hotel rooms, the SCC had a large swimming pool that was open to the public through memberships and to hotel guests. SCC had two water wells which supplied drinking water to the hotel. Michael Tritico remembers the sequence from the late 80’s. “The SCC got its water from two wells which they checked every month. When one well checked positive (for contamination), they would close that well and draw water from the other well. “Then they would check the operative well and it would test positive (for contamination). They always found it,” said Tritico. The swapping wells strategy was to avoid a state rule that if a well tested for contaminants, it would have to be shut down. They finally posted warnings in the showers about using the water to bathe, said Tritico, adding, “That was all so crazy!” Eventually, the SCC shut down both of its wells and began getting water from an alternate water system. SCC has since been torn down. The contaminant found in the SCC water was ethylene dichloride (EDC). EDC is a hydrocarbon, which is an artificial molecule manufactured from chlorine, hydrogen and carbon. It was invented prior to WWII by Dutch scientists. It is one of the basic molecules in the production of plastics including polyvinyl chloride (PVC). It is a colorless liquid with a chloroform odor. EDC is highly suspect as a carcinogen. It is almost impossible to break down in nature and its emissions in production are very hard to breathe. “I believe that those fumes (from EDC production), from volatile organics, caused cognitive dysfunction to those people in Mossville. There is no escaping that air,” said Tritico. The Conoco Refinery, now Phillips 66, was built during WWII as expeditiously as possible to try and accommodate the wartime need for fuels, particularly motor fuels, diesel and jet fuel. Conoco also built a chemical plant (Conoco Chemicals) which was fed hydrogen, a feedstock for EDC, which it refined. The pipeline which transferred EDC to the Conoco docks was built in 1947. In 1968, Conoco built a vinyl chloride plant (VCM) on the north side of the refinery. That plant was sold to Georgia Gulf in 1998, then to Axiall (formerly PPG Chemicals) and is now owned by the Westlake Group. The plant is very close to Mossville.

86 In 1984, Conoco Chemicals was sold to a group of Conoco engineers through a leveraged buyout and named Vista Chemicals. In March 1996, Vista Chemical was bought out by R.W.E., DEA, a German chemical company, and renamed CONDEA Vista. CONDEA Vista continued to utilize a pipeline to the Conoco docks for export of EDC. EDC was often stored in a huge tank farm that Conoco owns on Old Spanish Trail prior to the product being sold. There were spills from the tank farm which created EDC hot spots which flowed into the surrounding ditches and into Mossville. On Easter Sunday, 1994, a barge was being loaded near the Clooney Loop off the Calcasieu Ship Channel when a strong odor was detected and workers noticed a large fish kill in the surrounding waters. In time, a leak was discovered in the pipeline which had spilled into the Calcasieu estuary. Conoco and CONDEA Vista recovered 3.8 million pounds of spilled EDC. A second leak was discovered in 1994. CONDEA Vista and Conoco shared responsibility for the leak as well as the cleanup. Tritico remembers: “Those leaks had probably been going on for decades. There was EDC in the Gulf (of Mexico) and way upstream, all from the Conoco docks.” In 1994, EDC contaminants were found in the sands underneath the E.F. Gayle subdivision in Mossville. In 1995, CONDEA Vista confirmed the underground Mossville leakage. Val Montgomery was a legend in Mossville. He was one of the first blacks to be employed at Conoco and he owned a popular nightclub, The Paradise Club, and the adjoining auditorium where be brought in big name entertainment. The clubs were on Prater Road. Montgomery died on September 10, 2016. The clubs are gone. When the EDC leaks in Mossville were confirmed, Montgomery called Perry Sanders, a Lake Charles attorney. Sanders contacted Hunter Lundy, also a Lake Charles attorney, and together with Clayton Davis (now a district judge) the two law firms filed a class action suit, also known as a mass tort, against CONDEA Vista and Conoco on March 7, 1997. The original suit, filed in the th 14 Judicial District, listed approximately 1,000 plaintiffs including minor children and persons living in the Mossville households. The suit was assigned to District Judge Al Gray. Around this point after the litigation had been filed, CONDEA Vista employed Prudential Relocation, a large, Houston-based real estate firm to estimate the cost of relocating the eastern and northern homes of Mossville, in their entirety.

87 CONDEA Vista decided not to pursue that alternative. The damage suits against CONDEA Vista and Conoco were based on three loss factors: the market value of the homes and property with improvements; the enjoyment of life, and a factor “Built way above those which was punitive, way beyond nuisance,” said Lundy. Lundy began building his case around two expert witnesses: Dr. Bill Mundy, a real estate economist who had estimated the Exxon Valdez damages, and Dr. Phillip Bedient, a Rice University geohydrologist. Bedient began defining the size and scope of the EDC spill in Mossville, which became known as the plume. The geographic size of the damaged area in litigation was west to the Kansas City Southern railroad tracks and south to Old Spanish Trail. A number of people opted out of the class action, thinking they might get larger damages as the result of diseases if they could prove exposure as a pathway. Sally Montgomery Comeaux, Val’s daughter, was the lead plaintiff in the suits. Her home had been on VCM Road, next to the plant. She related the horror: “When the smell got so bad, we tried to put the windows down but then it was too late. You could not get that smell out of your house no matter what you did. “The smell of those chemicals was so bad, you could taste it in your mouth. It was so dangerous; I am glad I’m still alive. They should have given us gas masks,” said Comeaux, 69. Conoco settled their portion of the suit almost immediately, said Lundy, for $16 million. CONDEA Vista kept the pending trial in depositions up until the time Judge Gray set the trail date. Lundy was approached by CONDEA Vista’s lawyers, Phelps-Dunbar and Kean-Miller who were represented by Bill Jarmin and Freddy Pitcher. They asked Lundy if he would agree to a continuance. They also tendered a very large unconditional monetary advance towards an eventual settlement were Lundy to agree. Lundy agreed and Judge Gray granted the continuance. CONDEA Vista then asked to mediate the damages and the two lawyer groups as well as members of CONDEA Vista’s board of directors, met in Houston for four days of mediation before setting the suit for $32 million. Of that amount, $14 million was directed towards a Mossville property buyout. Sally Comeaux got $1.2 million, by far the largest payout from the settlement. “I was happy but lots of people took the first offer. And that wasn’t done right; those old people lost their homes and they had no place to go.”

88 After the attorney’s were paid, the remaining funds were put in a court- ordered trust and a fairness hearing was held on buying the Mossville homes and restitution. Mike Carleton was in charge of reading the deeds and handled the closings. Prior to issuing the checks, Winn Little, a Lake Charles attorney, conducted title opinions and could approve the payouts. The actual payouts were overseen by CPA’s Jim Stulb and Kristi Carter who dispersed the checks. To satisfy the court, they videotaped the individual distributions. Lundy termed the title work a “succession nightmare. We just could not find everybody.” Stulb said some of the remaining monies were given to the state treasury in hopes that Mossville people with title claims might eventually get their money. The final portion of the money was given to the McNeese State University Foundation which established the Lundy/Davis Conoco DuPont Scholarship. Those monies have been put in an endowment and now total $193,000. MSU Foundation Director Richard Reid said very few people have shown an interest in the scholarships. The scholarships are open to anyone with a Mossville connection. Mossville began disappearing.

89 Buyout

“The Environmental Protection Agency’s advice to us was that we should act as though we were visitors to the (Mossville) community.”

Mike Hayes, Sasol spokesman

Sasol continues to work through existing property offers through its Voluntary Property Purchase Program (VPPP). The opportunity to sign up for the VPPP terminated in November 2013. There are 71 offers that have not been closed and seven other offers “In the wind,” said Sasol spokesman Paul Warner. There are 77 parcels yet to be closed.

90 Because of the close family histories in Mossville, some of the property successions have dozens of title holders, one property dating back to 1913. Warner has used a private investigator to try and locate those heirs. “We’ve had pretty good success. It’s kind of a last resort legal issue and we don’t always end up with a good, good title.” The VPPP was begun August 1, 2013. To date, SASOL reported that it has spent over $75 million in the VPPP program. Sasol, along with Phillips 66, formerly Conoco and Axiall, are the closest major industrial neighbors to Mossville. There were 948 properties in the program area when it began. Of those, 785 property owners signed up for the program while 163 did not sign up. As of March 2016, offers were made to more than 85.5 percent of properties in the eligible buyout areas. The owners of 597 parcels (76.1 percent) accepted the VPPP offers; the owners of 163 parcels (19 percent) have rejected offers, while the owners of 71 parcels (six percent) were pending. Of those accepting the VPPP offers, 526 parcels have been closed which is 88.1 percent of the accepted offers. There are 17 industrial sites in the area, primarily dirt pits, and 13 Calcasieu Parish properties. Both of those areas are not eligible for the VPPP. Warner estimated that Sasol owns approximately 2,000 acres as a result of the VPPP. There were two buyout areas. The largest began at the Kansas City Southern railroad tracks just east of Lyons Avenue; south of Prince Street; west along Perkins Avenue, continuing across Patty Moss Road and Coach Williams Drive to just east of Isabella. The buyout area continued north and east on Wallace Road, north along Evergreen Road to the most northerly point just past Ora Street. There was a smaller buyout area to the north of the larger area, bounded by Houston River Road on the east and north in a rectangular-shaped area which included portions of Brentwood Drive and Independence Road. The smaller buyout area marks the northern-most point of Sasol’s expansion. The buyout program enlisted licensed local real estate appraisers to help homeowners in discerning the value of their homes and lots. Each parcel had two to three appraisals and a median was formed from those appraisals. Sasol paid for all the appraisals. After the closings, homeowners are given $15,000 to demolish the properties. Warner said homeowners were allowed to take anything of value from the homes but that Sasol only wanted “clean lots.” “We have only had to demolish one house. Some of the buyouts moved their homes and relocated them on other property,” said Warner.

91 Sasol’s formula was to add 60 percent to the appraised value of a home. If a home appraised for less than $100,000 the property was assigned the value of $100,000 plus 60 percent of the appraisal value. The most recent subdivision developed in Mossville was Lincoln Heights I and II. The subdivision was accepted as complete in 1955 by the Calcasieu Parish Police Jury. Other subdivisions and their completion dates in close proximity to Lincoln Heights include E.F. Gayle in 1942 and Bel Air, 1952. (The origin of the Lincoln Heights subdivision is developed in an earlier chapter in this book). Sasol owns all of Lincoln Heights I and II, all but three parcels in E.F. Gayle and one home in Bel Air. Lincoln Heights was built to accommodate a Mossville population which had promising employment opportunities in the Lake Charles Chemical Complex during and after World War II. In its applications to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) prior to its planned expansions, the EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice was key in ratifying Sasol’s permit application. Sasol’s Mike Hayes said that “EPA’s advice to us was that we should act as though we were visitors to the (Mossville) community. “We met with Dorothy Felix, one of the founders of the Mossville Environmental Action Now (MEAN) committee. She said she had two primary concerns; that the residents of Mossville be allowed to move and that we would promise to preserve the Morning Star graveyard. “We honored both requests. We (Sasol) have no plans for the Mossville properties we’ve acquired. They are not included in our expansion plans,” said Hayes. Warner said Sasol-owned properties west of the Kansas City Southern railroad line “Are not going to be used,” in the company’s expansions. He said Sasol would build on the former Mossville High School property which it owns on Old Spanish Trail. In 2011, SASOL purchased the Mossville School from the Calcasieu Parish School Board. The school was constructed in 1955 and served as a grades 1-12 facility until 1979, when its student population was reduced to kindergarten to ninth grade. The school’s most populous years were 1965-66 when it had a student body of 831 students. The school was recommended for closure in 1985 when its student population had shrunk to 270 pupils.

92 Sasol’s formula was to add 60 percent to the appraised value of a home. If a home appraised for less than $100,000 the property was assigned the value of $100,000 plus 60 percent of the appraisal value. The most recent subdivision developed in Mossville was Lincoln Heights I and II. The subdivision was accepted as complete in 1955 by the Calcasieu Parish Police Jury. Other subdivisions and their completion dates in close proximity to Lincoln Heights include E.F. Gayle in 1942 and Bel Air, 1952. (The origin of the Lincoln Heights subdivision is developed in an earlier chapter in this book). Sasol owns all of Lincoln Heights I and II, all but three parcels in E.F. Gayle and one home in Bel Air. Lincoln Heights was built to accommodate a Mossville population which had promising employment opportunities in the Lake Charles Chemical Complex during and after World War II. In its applications to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) prior to its planned expansions, the EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice was key in ratifying Sasol’s permit application. Sasol’s Mike Hayes said that “EPA’s advice to us was that we should act as though we were visitors to the (Mossville) community. “We met with Dorothy Felix, one of the founders of the Mossville Sasol has demolished the school, once a considerable source of pride to Environmental Action Now (MEAN) committee. She said she had two primary the Mossville community. Sasol also purchased the Morning Star Sanctified concerns; that the residents of Mossville be allowed to move and that we would Church on Old Spanish Trail and demolished it. promise to preserve the Morning Star graveyard. Sasol paid $188,780 to the Louisiana Foundation of Christ Sanctified Holy “We honored both requests. We (Sasol) have no plans for the Mossville Church for the facility. It had last been used by congregants of New Jerusalem properties we’ve acquired. They are not included in our expansion plans,” said Christ Sanctified. Hayes. Sasol is an international chemical company headquartered in Johannesburg, Warner said Sasol-owned properties west of the Kansas City Southern South Africa. The company was founded in 1950 to produce oil from coal. railroad line “Are not going to be used,” in the company’s expansions. He said In 2001, Sasol purchased the assets of CONDEA Vista and in that purchase, Sasol would build on the former Mossville High School property which it acquired considerable acreage east and north of Mossville from an earlier owns on Old Spanish Trail. property buyout by CONDEA Vista. In 2011, SASOL purchased the Mossville School from the Calcasieu Parish In 2004, Sasol announced that it would transfer its North American Research School Board. The school was constructed in 1955 and served as a grades 1-12 and Development Resources from Austin, TX to the Lake Charles Chemical facility until 1979, when its student population was reduced to kindergarten to Complex. ninth grade. In 2010, Sasol announced plans to construct a new cracker unit to produce The school’s most populous years were 1965-66 when it had a student body hexane and octene from ethylene. of 831 students. The school was recommended for closure in 1985 when its In 2011, Sasol considered building a major gas-to-liquids fuel plant at the site student population had shrunk to 270 pupils. of its Westlake plant and in 2014, confirmed that decision.

93 Sasol’s expansions in America and particularly in Southwest Louisiana have been predicated on the abundance and low cost of natural gas, the key feedstock in the company’s chemical processing. The natural gas abundance is a result of domestic shale mining. Natural gas prices have not exceeded much more than $3 per thousand for several years and the glut in supplies has motivated several new initiatives in liquefied natural gas distribution in Southwest Louisiana, particularly the liquefied natural gas facilities.

94 Summary

In 2010, the surface water, ground water and soil contaminants in Mossville were tested by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to determine if Mossville qualified as a Superfund site. The EPA was assisted in the testing by Wilma Subra, a chemist and owner of the Subra Company in New Iberia, La. She has a long-standing relationship with Mossville dating back to the groundwater contaminations of the late 90’s. The soil samples were specifically tested for dioxin, one of the most toxic chemicals known to science which has no safe levels. In 1997, the Lundy, Lundy, Soileau and South law firm conducted blood tests of five Mossville residents. The next year, the Agency for Toxic Substances & Disease Registry (ATSDR) conducted similar blood testing surveys on 17 residents. Both surveys revealed that those Mossville residents had dioxin levels three times as prevalent as a national comparison group. Mossville did not qualify as a Superfund site. However, Subra notes that the air contaminants were excluded from the overall testing. The air contaminants in Mossville have been monitored by the EPA since 1986, when the agency established Toxic Release Inventories (TRI) for the 31 industrial facilities in Southwest Louisiana. Of the 31 industrial facilities, 14 surround Mossville. In total, they release 3.3 million pounds of toxic chemicals into the air annually. The TRI testing has revealed the ethylene dichloride (EDC) emissions in the parish exceed the ambient air standards of the nation by 18.5 percent, the highest in Louisiana. EDC is a hydrocarbon. It is a feedstock for the manufacture of polyvinyl chloride (PVC). (It was discussed at length in an earlier chapter). In 1998, Conoco sold its vinyl chloride plant to Georgia Gulf (which has since been sold to Axiall and then to Westlake Chemicals, the present owners). In 2006, Georgia Gulf had ten unauthorized emission releases, according to the Calcasieu Parish Unit of Emergency Preparedness (CPEP). The plant released 14,000 pounds of vinyl chloride and 3,700 pounds of EDC. On December 20, 2013, the Axiall plant had a major explosion and fire in the vinyl chloride manufacturing area. The CPEP ordered a shelter in place in Mossville.

95 Additionally, motorists on I-10 were made ill. The emissions were EDC as well as vinyl chloride. Both of these plants, particularly Georgia Gulf, are near Mossville. On May 25, 2009, Subra released a study titled Health Report on Mossville, Calcasieu Parish, which she helped conduct in conjunction with the Mossville Environmental Action Now (MEAN) group as well as the Advocates for Environmental Human Rights, a public interest law firm headquartered in New Orleans. The study had 69 Mossville participants, aged six to 90. Of that group, 37 were female and 32 were males. The average years of Mossville residency were 40. In the study, 57 percent of the participants considered themselves “sickly” and 43 percent “healthy.” Of the percentage who considered themselves sickly, they defined that as “sick at least three times a month to sick every day.” The medical symptoms and the number of study participants who suffered from them were: muscle aches and pains; 43 percent; sinus problems and shortness of breath, 42 percent; arthritis, 39 percent; high blood pressure, 38 percent and joint pain, 34 percent. Also, irritated eyes, 33 percent; skin rashes and feeling weak and tired, 32 percent; skin irritation, muscle pain, swollen and painful joints and allergies, 29 percent. Other symptoms diagnosed in the participants were; coughing, forgetfulness, nasal and throat irritation, difficulty breathing, wheezing, sleep disturbances, decrease in vision, memory problems, dizziness, balance difficulty, fatigue, weakness, reduced muscle strength and tingling in hands. In the report’s conclusion, the age group 50-59 had the most symptoms and medical conditions. The report concludes: “Eleven of the 32 chemicals identified as being associated with the major medical conditions experienced by Mossville community members are regularly detected in abbreviated concentration in the ambient air of Mossville. “PPG Industries (now Westlake Chemicals) releases eight of the 11 chemicals, Georgia Gulf releases seven, Sasol North America and Conoco Phillips release five each,” wrote Subra.

96 Acknowledgments

This is a love letter to all the people who helped make this book better, even the ones who didn’t return my calls. It is impossible to overstate how important the Calcasieu Parish Library System and the McNeese State University library were to this book. Without them and their wonderful staffs, the book doesn’t happen. Nothing I have ever experienced in journalism or technology beats a good library for local history. Kathie Bordelon has read the book twice and perhaps more by the time we go to press. A retired McNeese State University archivist, she brought a history background and a love of research to the editing, continuity and punctuation of this book. She told me editing this book was more fun than quilting. She is a dear friend. Dr. Tom Watson, a retired McNeese State University history professor. Dr. Watson showed me where to look and what was important. His early background in the petrochemical industry here proved invaluable as a catalyst. (No pun intended.) Dr. Janet Allured, a McNeese State University history professor. Her specialty is Louisiana history and in particular for me, her knowledge of all the ramifications of the Civil War. She made it very clear early on that she would not be writing the book for me. Pati Threatt, a McNeese State University archivist. Pati spent seemingly hours with me in the university library as I read the materials pertaining to my search. Her participation and patience were invaluable. (I did not know that an archives staff member must be present when those old stories are unboxed and examined. Otherwise, I was told, sometimes they walk off.) Brandon Shumaker, an archivist with the Carnegie Branch of the Calcasieu Parish Library System. I would call ahead and Brandon would have a small mountain of information pertaining to my search waiting for me. It is incredible to me that someone so young knows so much about so much and where it is. Vera Payne, a native of Mossville. Vera read all of the drafts of the book prior to publication and suggested that I was close. She made a valuable suggestion that someone who knew the genealogy of some of Mossville be included early on in the book’s format.

97 Lenoria Braxton Ambrose was the genealogist who knew her family’s history in Mossville prior to the Civil War and to date. Her contributions are part of the first chapter of the book. Susan Tucker, a retired Tulane University archivist. Turner also suggested that I lead the book with someone schooled in Mossville genealogy. Tucker was the editor of Peggy Frankland’s book Women Pioneers of the Louisiana Environmental Movement. Sally McPherson and Florence Shearman, the A-Team of A Forgotten Community. There is no substitute for young eyes and fresh ideas. I met McPherson when she was looking at colleges and she sat in on a senior-level journalism class I was teaching at LSU. She wasn’t intimidated by the class assignment or her surroundings. I liked that. The Jewish people have a name for it: chutzpa. Florence Shearman is my niece whose photography I have admired. She became invisible on interviews and ended up with frame after wonderful frame, much of which is in this book. Carola Lipsey Bacque, and her brother Michael Lipsey, who told me all about Lincoln Heights and how it came to be. A Jewish lumberman who took a chance on a village of African-Americans and helped them achieve precious American home ownership. Adley Cormier, my Deep Throat, on the history of Southwest Louisiana. The greatest thing about asking Adley a question is that you almost always get more answer than you asked for. He is a treasure. T. Harry Williams Center for Oral History at the LSU Library Center. Susan Reed, the executive director of the Imperial Calcasieu Museum. Reed has spearheaded the Mossville History Project from its inception in 2015 to fruition. She is acutely sensitive of the remaining populations of Mossville. It is due to her energy that this project has built its own momentum. Finally, I thank the Sasol Corporation and their local representatives who funded the Mossville History Project through a grant to the Imperial Calcasieu Museum.

GO PIRATES! - Bill Shearman

98 Works Cited

American Press (Lake Charles, La.) Archives. Ancestry. com. Year: 1880; Census Place: Lake Charles, Calcasieu, Louisiana; Roll: 449; Family History Film: 1254449; Page: 484C; Enumeration District; 008; Image: 0732. Bankens, Barbara and Mary Helen Whiteard. A History of Westlake. Unpublished manuscript, 1995. Bankens, Barbara. Study Regarding Possible Consolidation of Mossville Middle School with S.P. Arnett Middle, E.E. Key Elementary and Western Heights Elementary Schools. Calcasieu Parish School Board, 1983. Bankens, Barbara. Calcasieu Parish School Board Bonding District 21: A Comprehensive Study of Historical and Projected Student Memberships and School Facilities, Calcasieu Parish School Board, 1986. Calcasieu Parish Clerk of Court, Lake Charles, La. Calcasieu Parish (La.) Police Jury website (CPPJ.net). Cormier, Eric. “Gathering At Mossville.” Louisiana Life, Summer 2003, pp. 40-45. Louis XV. Code Noir: Edict Concerning Negro Slaves in Louisiana, 1724. Cowan, Walter, et. al. Louisiana: Yesterday and Today. Louisiana State University Press, 1996. Emancipation Proclamation, January 1, 1863. Frankland, Peggy. Women Pioneers of the Louisiana Environmental Movement. University of Mississippi Press, 2013. Haggard, J. Villasana. “The Neutral Ground Between Louisiana and Texas, 1806-1821,” Louisiana Historical Quarterly 28 (October 1945). Hartley, Richard. 200 Years in the Making: Celebrating the Bicentennial of Louisiana Statehood 1812-2012. Office of the Lieutenant Governor, 2012. Hochschild, Arlie Russell. Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. New Press, 2016. Holy Bible. New International Version, Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., 1984. Lee, Harper. To Kill A Mockingbird. Warner Books, 1960. Maude Reid Collection. Accession #011. McNeese State University Archives, Frazar Memorial Library, Lake Charles, La.

99 Reynaud, Ralph Clifton. An Historical Study of the Negro Schools of Calcasieu Parish, Louisiana, 1888-1936. 1939. ETD Collection for AUC Robert W. Woodruff Library. Paper 2168. Rigmaiden, Thomas. Diary, 1829-1865. Rogers, Gloria. Mossville High School: The Early Years. Unpublished manuscript, 1981. Sayre, Katherine. “Closing Costs.” The Times-Picayune, 2015. NOLA.com. Subra, Wilma. Impacts of Citizen Science in Mossville, Louisiana. 2004. Taylor, Dr. Joe Gray. Negro Slavery in Louisiana. Louisiana Historical Association, 1963. Sasol North America Inc. Voluntary Property Purchase Program. 2013. U.S. Census Bureau. Wallace, Rev. Desmond. Program. Mount Zion Baptist Church, November 6, 2016. Washington, Booker T. Up from Slavery. 1901. Watson, Tom. “Early Exploration and Settlement of the Lower Calcasieu Watershed.” Gateway to the Gulf, Lake Charles, La.: The Port of Lake Charles, 2002. Weekly American Press. Lake Charles (La.).

100 Interviews

Allured, Dr. Janet Ambrose, Lenoria Braxton Bacque, Carola Lipsey Bankens, Barbara Carter, Kristi Comeaux, Sally Montgomery Cormier, Adley Crain, Wes Davis, Clayton Ecker, Jay Finley, Dr. Stephen Franks, Steve Hayes, Mike Hochschild, Arlie Russell Jourdan, Rev. Austin Knapp, Lenn LeMelle, Edward “Butch” LeTard, Bobby Lindsey, Mason Lipsey, Michael Little, Winn Lundy, Hunter Martin, Dr. Lori Latrice McMillin, Hal McKnight, Don Payne, Vera Rigmaiden, Claude Rigmaiden, Doris Rigmaiden, Herbert Shearman, Hugh Smith, Mickey Jr. Stulb, Jim Subra, Wilma Tritico, Michael Tolbert, Rev. Sam Wallace, Rev. Desmond Warner, Paul Watson, Dr. Thomas Williams, LaSalle

101 Index

Ambrose, Alvin 7 Davis, Judge Clayton 87 Ambrose, Lenoria Braxton 4, 6 De la Salle, Sieur 23 Ardoin, Sean 81 Dillard, Dr. J.H. 41 Bacque, Carola Lipsey 67, 68 DuBois, W.E.B. 18, 48 Bartlett, Rev. J.W. 73 DuFour, Charles 20 Bartlett, Roselma 73 Duhon, Cyprien 54 Bedient, Dr. Phillip 88 Ecker, Jay 78 Bore, Etienne 21 Edwards, Hardy 55 Boston, W.O. 43 Edwards, McKeever 56 Bourgeois, Timothy 71 Ellender, Mary 72 Bowie, Jim 20 Elkins, Walter “Butch” 71 Boyd, Amy 28 Estaville, Lawrence 56 Braxton, A.A. 56 Etienne, Rev. Arthur 35 Braxton, Gradis 6 Frazar, Dr. Lether 63 Braxton, Rev. Griffin 34, 37, 51 Frankland, Peggy 72, 75 Braxton, Rev. Jefferson Davis 37 Garrett, Rev. B.C. 35, 37, 42 Breaux, Rep. John 74 Gibbs, Joseph 67 Briscoe, Vanetta 35, 36 Gatschedt, Albert 54 Cagle, Parthenia 8 Gill, Hardy 49 Carleton, Mike 89 Glenn, Rev. James 35 Carter, Kristi 89 Goos, Captain Daniel 14, 31 Clemons, Rupert 7 Gray, Judge Al 87 Cleveland, Pres. Grover 34 Green, Nicole 36 Clifton, Austin 49 Guillory, Emile 67 Comeaux, Sally Montgomery 85, 88 Hamilton, F.W. 40, 43 Combre, Dorothy 63 Harris, Gloria 6 Cowan, Walter 20 Harris, T. H. 47 Crain, Wes 55 Hayes, Mike 90, 92 Cuby, Rev. M.M. 35 Hayes, Pres. Rutherford B. 67 Dardonne, Helen 56 Hebert, Alexandre 49 David, King 35 Hughes, W.J., 49

102 James, Chrissie 71 McMillan, Hal 65 Jeannes, Anna 41 Mitchell, Rev. F.J. 35 Jefferson. President Thomas 22, 24 Montgomery, Val 87 Johnson, Frank 7 Moss, Alfred 49, 50 Jourdan, Rev. Austin 37 Moss, Amanda 49 King, Dr. Martin Luther 27 Moss. Dallas 56, 65 Knapp, Lenn 73 Moss, Elvina 50 Kirby, Samuel Adams 29 Moss, Ezra 49 LaFitte, Jean 22, 25 Moss, Henry 15, 49, 50 LeBlanc, Crystal 83 Moss, James Webster 17, 34, 50, 54 LeBlanc, Eva 80 Moss, Mary 50 LeBleu, Arsene 15 Moss, Millie 50 Lee, Harper 33 Mundy, Dr. Bill 88 LeTard, Bobby 56 Napoleon I 24 LeMelle, “Butch” Newman, Raleigh 73 Levy, Dr. Stan 67 Perkins, Dr. D.S. 44, 51 Liles, Hiriam 49 Perkins, Isam 34 Lincoln, Abraham 13, 31, 68 Perkins, Reese 49 Lindsey, Wendell 20 Pithon, Michael 49 Lipsey, Michael 68, 69 Rainach, Sen. William 63 Lipsey, Sam 67 Reid, Sheriff Henry A. “Ham” 71 Little, Winn 89 Reid, Maude 28 Lundy, Sheriff Beth Oakley 65 Reid, Richard 89 Lundy, Hunter 87, 88 Reynaud, Ralph Clifton 40, 47 Lyons, Tolbert 34 Reeves, Elcie 52 Lyons, Zora 64 Reeves, Elvina 52 Madison, James 24 Rigmaiden, Claude 83 Managan, William Henry 67 Rigmaiden, Doris 84 Mancuso, Sheriff Tony 65 Rigmaiden, Eliza 28 Martin, Eugenia 79 Rigmaiden, Rev. J.B. 55 McElveen, Sheriff Wayne 65 Rigmaiden, Herbert 70, 72, 73, 74 McKinney, Gaila 36 Rigmaiden, James 57 McNeese, Dr. John 31, 41, 43 Rigmaiden, Lorce 84 McKnight, Don 74 Rigmaiden, Raymond 74

103 Rigmaiden, Thomas 17, 27, 28, 67 Wilds, John 20 Rigmaiden, Wasey 69 Williams, Arthur Agnes 58 Roker, Al 77 Williams, Rev. H.H. 35 Rosenwald, Julius 44, 45 Williams, LaSalle & Betty 36, 56 Roosevelt, Pres. Theodore 45 Washington, Booker T. 12, 44 Royer, Bob 67 Whitney, Eli 21 Ryan, Jacob Jr. 14 Williams, Thomas 49 Ryan, Jacob Sr. 28, 30 Sanders, Perry 87 Shearman, Hugh 63 Shepherd, Ruth 71, 72 Simmons, David 49 Simmons, Rev. O.J. 35 Smart, William & Matthew 49 Smith, Jr. Alan 74 Smith, Sr. Huber 76 Smith, Lilly Mae Sullivan 77 Smith, Jr., Mickey 76 Starkovitch, Donald 71 Stulb, Jim 89 Subra, Wilma 95 Taft, Pres. William Howard 45 Taylor, Rev. A.L. 35 Taylor, Dr. Joe Gray 23, 35 Tolbert, Rev. Sam 45 Tritico, Michael v, vi, vii, 72, 74, 75, 86 Turner, Nat 15 Young, Rev. Alive 37 Vincent, Eli 50 Vincent, Gentry 73 Vincent, Sally 50 Wallace, Rev. Desmond 34, 58 Warner, Paul 90, 91 White, Rev. R.L. 35

104