Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2007 - (Page 39)

reverse. Rather, they jostle each other for position. What is reinforced is the linear nature of it all. Trees, telephone and electricity poles, and houses set up a rhythm against the contour of the levee and beyond it, the river. Boats and ships, of which only the tops are visible, punctuate the levee’s silhouette; hurricane damaged broken trees make the ships more visible now. Plaquemines Parish derives its name from piakemine, the Indian word for persimmon, which once grew abundantly here. The parish’s rich and fertile soil made it important agriculturally, with sugar and rice the principal crops in the 19th century and, more recently, the citrus industry — oranges and satsumas. In 1860, there were said to be 31 large slaveholdings in Plaquemines. The buildings that composed these are almost entirely gone. Woodland survives. The former plantation house, built perhaps in the Plaquemines Parish Government Building, Port Sulphur Winter 2007-08/LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES 39 KAREN KINGSLEY 1830s or in the 1850s, operated as a sugar and a rice plantation in the following decades. Now, in a transformation typical of many such plantation houses, the house is a bed-and-breakfast inn. The wide oneand-one-half-story wooden house is raised on brick piers and has galleries at both the front and the rear, and five dormer windows front and rear. When built, the house was oriented to the river, which was then the principal transportation route and so that side of the house is its proper front. But the duplication of galleries front and rear gives the house a formal appearance when approached from the rear, the road. Despite the Greek Revival influences in the building’s door and window surrounds, the house does not have the central entrance and hall typical of that style. Instead, it follows older patterns with an off-centered entrance. In 1998, St. Patrick’s Catholic Church, a wooden Gothic Revival structure built in 1918, was moved from Port Sulphur to Woodland and renovated as a restaurant for the plantation. Both buildings stand out, are monumentalized, on the surrounding flat terrain. Industry came to the parish in the 20th century. Most interesting was the creation of Port Sulphur in 1933, a Fort Jackson, Port Sulphur townsite and the processing and the closing of the mine, but the town, shipping point for nestled amid trees, was badly hit by the Freeport Sulphur Company‘s sulphur Katrina; trailers now stand in for many of mine at Lake Grand Ecaille. Sulphur, also the homes. And the town’s relationship to known as brimstone, is used for all kinds of the river made more evident by the consumer products and is an important enormous metal wall heightening and component of agricultural fertilizers. The reinforcing the levee. sulphur was brought Further downriver, the town of Buras, to the company’s founded by seven brothers from France dock west of the with the name of Buras, reflects its riverside town. Production location. It is a linear town laid out with its facilities for the three principal streets parallel to the river. It sulphur and the first too suffered terribly from Katrina, but the group of employee brick school and its huge auditorium houses were anchor the town’s core and its rebuilding. completed rapidly, Proceeding toward the Gulf, pausing within the space of momentarily for the passage of historic 12 months. Approxtime at Fort Jackson, the last stop is Venice. imately 200 houses Untidily holding onto land, its architecture were ulti-mately built is support buildings for docks and fishing in a grid plan on boats and the helicopters for oil rigs in the filled-in land to raise Gulf. Around, water threads through the town above the everything and Plaquemines’ marshes storm tide. Churches, dissolve into a quite sublime and sweeping a hospital, a boarding house, and a school landscape of water and sky. were included. At its peak, more than 800 people lived there. In the 1950s, Freeport built an Karen Kingsley, Ph.D., is professor emerita of administration building with a fourarchitecture at Tulane University, author of Buildings columned portico in a Colonial Revival of Louisiana (2003, Oxford University Press), and a style. After the company ceased operations free-lance writer. at Grand Ecaille in 1978, the building Buras High School Auditorium was acquired by the parish and, in 1984, adapted for Plaquemines Parish government. The building’s sturdy red brick walls and pedimented portico give the building an air of importance and weightiness it would not have if built of wood. The town of Port Sulphur survived KAREN KINGSLEY 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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