Iowans led ‘the whole world’ to Louisiana
Midwestern farmers were beginning to take a hard look at the south Louisiana prairies when L. W. David came from DeWitt, Iowa, for a short visit in October 1887.
He spent five days looking over the land and wrote in a letter to newspapers back home that “I like the look of the country very well."
“I found all the people that live [here] are well pleased with the coun- try and contented," he wrote. "They are mostly Iowa people and look healthy and robust. I did not see anybody who wanted to sell out unless they could get a large price."
Most of the land that he looked at had been open, unsettled grass- land only a few years before he visited and he cautioned his neighbors that “a person must not expect to see as much improvement as we have here" but also said that “there is more and better material to improve with" in Louisiana.
Unimproved land sold for five dollars an acre and, David wrote, “I think that if a man buys land from four to eight miles from the railroad and fences it he can pay for the land with one crop of hay."
That was far from the only crop a farmer might consider. Our visitor found people raising “horses, cattle, sheep, hogs, poultry, corn, oats, sweet and Irish potatoes, rice, cotton, sugar cane, watermelons, pumpkins, squashes, and all kinds of fruit and vegetables.” He thought corn grown in Iowa made bigger ears but that in Louisiana “sweet potatoes grow as prolific as the grass” and “watermelons will grow wherever the seed is dropped.”
David saw a fig tree that grew ten feet in a year and thought “vegetables are a grand success.” Wild plants added to the harvest. A farmer’s wife told him she’d picked seven bushels of blackberries near a little woodland that spring “and could have picked that many wagon loads.”
A fellow Iowan said he found raising sheep “a paying business.” The shepherd told him, “The natives shear their sheep twice a year and never feed them a bite – let them get their own living [on prairie grass] the year round.” Cattle were also turned out onto the prairie all year long and, David said, “make as good beef as I ever ate.”
Good lumber was plentiful and inexpensive. One hundred cypress fence posts cost $3, and galvanized wire sold for only six cents a pound, “therefore a man need not be without buildings and fences.” He also found rich, easily worked soil and wells that produced good water without deep drilling. He preferred the taste of Iowa’s water but said Louisiana’s was “all right when you get used to it. … It will quench the thirst.”
He said there was “not a smoother prairie to be found . … In driving over it you will feel no more jar than on the smoothest roads” in Iowa.” As flat as it was, the land drained well, he said. “I did not see any land that could not be plowed on the prairie, except one slough which is called Grand Marie [Marais]” near Jennings,” he wrote.
He went to church in Jennings and met a “nice looking, welldressed, and well-behaved congregation” and heard “as fine music, both vocal and instrumental, as will be heard in the average town church.”
David urged his fellow Iowans “go and see for yourselves and stay long enough to see and know what is there.”
He predicted, correctly, that many of his neighbors would like what they found and join south Louisiana’s growing Iowa colony. “As the clerk of the land office in New Orleans said,” David concluded, “it seems the whole world was going there.”
You can contact Jim Bradshaw at [email protected] or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.
