Bradshaw
Abrom Kaplan, the man for whom the town was named, has been described as “one of the greatest pioneers of the Southwestern Louisiana rice industry.” It was a reputation earned by hard work that began when was he was just a teenager.
He was only fifteen in 1887, when he came by himself to the United States from Poland. He was born there on September l, 1872, the 10th son of a liquor distiller. He paid for his passage with 100 rubles, about $50, he’d earned working in potato fields, but hardly any of that money was left when he reached New York City. He had no money, no plan, but a bit of luck and a lot of pluck.
In an interview in the 1930s, he said, “I started walking blindly, in any direction that my nose pointed. After some hours of this, I had a stroke of rarest fortune. I met a man I knew, a coppersmith, who once had worked in my father’s distillery back home. He took me with him to the tenement room in which he lived. Six others lived in that small room. It was cheap lodging and my friend helped me lay in a peddler’s stock — shoestrings, pin trays, combs, collar buttons, chair bottoms, the usual things.
Bradshaw
“I took my stand on the east end of the Brooklyn Bridge and, although I still knew practically no English, I managed to sell a little something. I could make a dollar a day, enough to live on. Then I took my pack on my back and started peddling in Connecticut, out in the country. I would often walk from Bridgeport to Danbury, 24 miles, in one day. Everyone was very kind to me. I made some money.”
During one of those excursions he met a man who told him about new opportunities in Louisiana.
“He said I ought to try it,” Kaplan said. “I shouldered my pack and went south to New Orleans. I went to school there and learned my English ABCs ... and for three years I tramped the bayou backways and highways of Louisiana, peddling.”
He was only 18 in early 1890 when he tramped into Crowley to peddle his goods..
“It was a raw new station on a brand-new railroad,” he said. “Teams of oxen were hauling loads of rice down a muddy main street. This rice was being grown inland by irrigation stored from rain fall. … I felt that I had traveled far enough. ... I decided to stay here and run a store and buy land.”
Kaplan turned from peddler to rice farmer, buying up acres and acres of land between Gueydan and Abbeville and putting it into cultivation. Land sold for anywhere from 12 cents to $1.25 an acre and he scrimped and saved at first to buy every acre he could.
He eventually invested also in an irrigation company that developed what has been described as “the world’s largest irrigation system” and persuaded Southern Pacific to build a rail spur to his land. When the railroad agreed to build the line, he laid out a grid of streets for the town that is named after him. At first, he gave away the land to get people to settle there, and the combination of irrigation, transportation, and good land kept them coming. The town of Kaplan grew from a tent city to a bustling little trade and agricultural center.
Meanwhile, Abrom continued to reclaim thousands of acres of land through huge drainage projects and opened rice mills in Crowley, Estherwood, Gueydan, Abbeville, and Donaldsonville and bought another one in Arkansas.
“He sits now at the president’s desk of a shining, modern American bank and farms either himself or through tenants 25,000 acres of rice lands, all his own,” the 1930s article reported. “His tractors number more than 200, a veritable fleet. His plows, discs, harrows, grain drills and harvesters, were they all to pass in review, would give the effect of an army corps on parade..”
Abrom Kaplan died of a heart attack at the age of 72 on March 30, 1944, at his home in Crowley. His wife Rebecca Lichenstein died in 1931. His only survivor was their son, Irving Bernard Kaplan (1895-1957).
Obituaries said that “Uncle Abe, would be remembered for the farm lands he developed, the irrigation system that supported them, and the rice mills that served them, but also declared that “Mr. Kaplan was only interested in money if he could spend it to help others.” The Crowley Signal said his neighbors would remember him “as a friendly man to whom they could go when they needed help.” He was active in civic affairs, that obituary said, “and often gave a helping hand or assistance to a project but never wanted it to be known he had helped.”
You can contact Jim Bradshaw at [email protected] or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.
