Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2007 - (Page 38)

End of the line: Plaquemines Parish command of Admiral David Farragut from As a gateway to New Orleans and Some landscapes have such a strong proceeding upriver to New Orleans in April control of the lower Mississippi River, presence that they almost overwhelm any 1862. Fort Jackson functioned more Plaquemines was shaped architecturally by building that dares to be there. This power successfully for another war. Several units its strategic location. Fort Jackson, named is something that the Hudson River School were housed there during their training for in honor of Andrew Jackson, was built to artists — Thomas Cole and Asher Durand, World War I. Then in 1926, the fort was safeguard the river approaches to New for example — in the mid-19th century declared surplus property and, later, Orleans from the Gulf of Mexico. It went wanted to capture in their paintings of designated a national historic monument up on the site of an earlier Spanish redoubt mountains, forests, valleys, and cascading and opened to the public in 1962. Severe of ca. 1792 that was destroyed by a water. Ansel Adams‘ photographs of the flooding from Rocky Mountains and Katrina damaged the deserts and the fort and it is forests of the western Woodland Plantation, West Point a La Hache currently closed United States to visitors. similarly awe the Plaquemines viewer. People and was formed from their buildings seem alluvial and delta to be in the picture plain deposits merely to indicate when the how insignificant Mississippi River they are compared to changed its the grandeur and original exit into sublime qualities of the Gulf and nature. chose this route Although its as recently as a landscape is quite the few hundred opposite of these years ago. The mountainous vistas, parish borders Plaquemines Parish both sides of the can evoke similar river for emotions. As one approximately 70 gets closer to the Bayhi Cemetery, south of miles and the mouth of the Belle Chasse and Jesuit Bend river has always been central to Mississippi River where the Plaquemines’ culture and distinction between land and water architecture. After engineer James disintegrates, the sheer physical B. Eads constructed jetties at the presence of the landscape is river’s South Pass in 1879 to force astonishing. It is so flat, so wet, and the river to scour a deep water so fragile that it achieves qualities of channel as a route for oceanthe sublime. To build on this is a going ships, the land that flanked challenge and what has been built it inevitably developed to service has come and gone with greater this industry. rapidity than in many places. The parish’s linear shape also Hurricane Katrina covered has determined the nature of its Plaquemines with more than 20 feet built landscape. A journey from of water, but individual buildings and New Orleans towards the river’s mouth on hurricane in 1795. The star-shaped fort has communities had disappeared long before the west bank includes Belle Chasse, home brick walls that are 20 feet thick and rise 25 Katrina. The Balize, a small fort built of the Naval Air Station, oil wells, chemical feet above a surrounding moat. It looks around 1730 on a little island at the mouth plants, new subdivisions at Jesuit Bend, impenetrably solid and strong, and is the of the Mississippi is long submerged. orange groves, the Bayhi cemetery, herds only one of several forts in the parish that Manila Village, a Filipino fishing settlement of cows, marine terminals, and grain has survived. Nevertheless, Fort Jackson that became a hub of the shrimp drying elevators. There is no simple progression of was bombarded in 1862 and failed to industry in the 1890s, was destroyed by buildings for agriculture to industry or the prevent the Union fleet under the Hurricane Betsy in 1965. KAREN KINGSLEY 38 LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES\Winter 2007-08 KAREN KINGSLEY

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2007

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2007 Contents Friends Editor’s Column Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Katrina: Days of Terror, Months of Anguish Paintings by Rolland Golden The Historic New Orleans Collection The Great Ouachita River Flood of 1932 Jazz Notes Louisiana Architecture Louisiana: Where Land Meets Water Louisiana State Museum Through A Lens Sharply: An Interview with Michael Lewis MR-GO: A “miracle” mired in controversy Louisiana Foodways Louisiana Association of Museums New Orleans: An Autopsy Bookstand Sound Advice Forum

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2007

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