Hot weather was on everyone’s mind when the State Immigration Association of Louisiana convened in New Orleans on August 7, 1888. The association deliberately picked one of the hottest weeks of the year to respond to malicious claims that neither man nor beast could live in Louisiana in August.
Those calumnies were made in a series of letters to newspapers in the North that said, “either through malice or ignorance,” among other things, “the thermometer in June 1885 stood at 128 degrees in the shade” in much of south Louisiana, that mules regularly dropped dead on the streets of New Orleans from the heat, and that some crops could not be grown here because they would be “burned up by excessive heat.”
Convention organizers said the best way to dispute the “vile and mischievous reports … was considered to be in the assembling of the former residents of Northern, Western and Middle States … at some critical point in mid-summer … to give their own personal experiences. … The mere fact of the presence of these new settlers in the metropolis of the South on the 7th and 8th of August would disprove these atrocious calumnies more successfully than any other means which we could adopt.”
Seaman Knapp presided over the convention. S. L. Cary was its final speaker. Both men were driving forces behind emigration movements that brought settlers to south Louisiana. Both of them came to Louisiana from Iowa, and all 500 members of the association were former residents of other states. The New Orleans Picayune reported that every seat was filled in Grunewald Hall on Baronne Street. The official summary of the convention listed delegates who had come to Louisiana from 27 states as well as Austria, England, Ireland, Wales, and France.
Knapp declared in his opening remarks that “Louisiana … is the most remarkable piece of geography on the face of the earth.” He said it would be necessary “to take the prairies of Iowa, the rugged timber lands of Maine and the entire delta of the Nile, twist them together and thrust through them the Amazon to produce another Louisiana.”
The first resolution adopted by the convention supported his belief. It proclaimed that “those of us who have come from other States and have found a hearty welcome among a hospitable people, desire to express to the citizens of other States the great advantages to be enjoyed in climate, health, fertility of the soil, its cheapness, and the vast opportunities … which we believe are better than [what is] offered in any other State in the Union.”
Speakers across the agenda addressed our summer heat. Chief Justice Edward Bermudez of the Louisiana Supreme Court judiciously admitted that our summers “although trying at times” were “usually bearable,” and nothing like what the northern naysayers claimed. He agreed with Knapp that Louisiana soil only had to be “tickled with a hoe” and it will “smile into harvest.”
Richard Pomeroy of New Iberia (formerly of Georgetown, Colorado) told the convention that the hottest weather he’d ever seen was in Idaho. In Louisiana, he said, “work can be done out of doors every week of the year, for neither the cold nor the hot are too intense. … [in the Teche country] the heated brow [is] frequently fanned by the cool and balmy breeze of the Gulf of Mexico [and] mid-summer seems to be the favorite season of our people for railroad and steamboat excursions, fairs, horse racing and dancing.”
A. R. Burkdoll of Crowley (via Edgerton, Minnesota) counseled his “friends from the land of blizzards” that “never before have I seen a country [such as Acadia Parish] where nature is more helpful to the enterprising and industrious.”
Cary, in summing up the sentiment of the convention, claimed, “We think that we have found the Garden of Eden.” He said a surveyor he knew, “in digging around for [boundary markers] says he struck some of the roots of the old apple tree” of the biblical Eden.
The proceedings were compiled into pamphlets that were distributed throughout the North, “with the hope that it would bring immediate results,” including “daily arrivals [of new immigrants] announced by the whistling of special trains.”
You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@ gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.
