Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Spring 2008 - (Page 44) CTION W ORLEANS COLLE THE HISTORIC NE MUSEUM LOUISIANA STATE ast of the ire area e ly low-lying the ent was large l vel — a trial Cana g well below sea-le no Indus ved as ite bein h Desp oted — elevation ser ent. mars ely n velopm fact scarc nt in the rush to de impedime Historically there had been some development in the east. In the 18th century, plantations lined Bayou Sauvage, a stream of the Mississippi whose natural levee made higher ground along the Chef Menteur Ridge. Eastward-bound railroad lines were laid through the area in the late-19th century. There were also settlements along Lake Pontchartrain where the ground was higher, but elsewhere it was mostly marshlands and dense cypress swamps. By 1900, wetlands were being drained for agricultural and urban uses. New Orleans neighborhoods such as Lakeview and Gentilly merged from this trend. The East consisted of only a handful of huge parcels of land and one of these tracts, which contains today’s Lake Forest, extended from the Peoples Canal to Paris Road. It was sold in 1906 to New Yorker Edward L. Dwyer who drained and built levees with a series of canals, among them the Dwyer, Morrison and Citrus canals. Pumps were built on the lakefront at Little Woods in 1908 and the Citrus Canal in 1913. In 1911, the New Orleans Industrial Canal Land and Harbor Development proposed an eastward extension of Historical Antecedents top: A scene of “Harvesting Cow Pea Hay” at Little Woods, 1910, reprinted from Southern Louisiana: A Souvenir of the Tribune Land Show, Chicago. The booklet was distributed at the trade fair to “truthfully depict the wonders of the reclaimed lands near New Orleans, the soil of which is the most fertile to be found on the globe.” right: An aerial view of Little Woods and fishing camps jutting out into Lake Pontchartrain, circa 1940s. the Industrial Canal for a substantial area of docks and industrial sites. This never materialized since Dwyer’s vision was for the land to be subdivided into 5-acre orange groves with country villas. Six-thousand acres of land were under cultivation by 1916. Dwyer who claimed that men of intelligence and foresight “are already perceiving and comprehending the future that awaits New Orleans,” saw his dream collapse after the 1915 hurricane inundated the land with salt water, followed by killer freezes in 1916 and 1917. In 1934, Samuel Zemurray, owner of the United Fruit Company, bought the land. He planned a 5,000 home development which never materialized, and twenty years later he sold the land to Joe W. Brown. The lakefront and Chef Menteur Ridge were relatively high and had some limited development in the 1920s. Little Woods and Edgelake date from this time. The latter was promoted as an escape from the noisy, dirty city for fresh 44 LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES\Spring 2008
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