Be Careful What you Wish For – especially rainfall

Two adages came to mind as I kept noticing weather reports while I was looking for something else in some old newspapers.
The first is, “If you don’t like Louisiana weather, just wait a bit and it will change.” The second is, “Be careful what you pray for.”
It was apparently dry, dry all across south Louisiana in the late spring and early summer of 1918. Crops were scorched, cisterns ran dry, and the days grew hotter as spring turned into summer.
The Weekly Messenger in St. Martinville reported “a good rain” in the middle of May that “was much needed for nearly all the crops” and that would help “rid the planters of the black bug that was doing so much damage to corn and cane.”
But that appears to be the last “good rain” for a while.
By July 6, the Teche country was feeling a drought that “has already caused damage that no amount of rain can bring back.” The Messenger noted that Bayou Teche was “so low that … the large pumps at the Water Works … were left dry.”
Things were even worse by the next week, when the Messenger reported that “a service was held at the Catholic church … to offer prayers … [for] rain to save the burning crops and to give … drinking water to the people who are almost out of their supply.”
The prayers didn’t seem to work right away. The Morgan City Review reported “a terrific rain storm” in its July 19 edition, noting that “the state as a whole has been suffering from the drouth, which undoubtedly has been pretty generally broken by this storm.”
But that was a little optimistic; the downpour didn’t quench St. Martinville’s thirst. A week later, July 27, the Messenger finally was able to report that “a little rain fell here” but that “we need a great rain to give us drinking water, which is now short.”
Finally, at the beginning of August, the whole Teche got “a heavy rain accompanied by a strong north wind,” and “another nice rain” a day later “that gave farmers a chance to plant sweet potatoes.”
Those rains were the harbinger of things to come. Now the rain that everyone had prayed for wouldn’t quit.
The New Iberia Enterprise reported in late August, “The weather … has changed from drought conditions to one of daily showers. … The rains … this week throughout the sugar district were of hurricane character.”
All in all, the Enterprise said, “abundant precipitations … daily have worked like magic on the cane crop … which was suffering … from the drought, so that by now [planters] are talking of a 100 per cent crop this fall instead of the woeful estimate” made earlier in the summer.
Communications were a bit slower in those days so the newspapers from the south Louisiana sugar belt didn’t report how lucky the planters were to get only heavy rains with no cane-twisting winds.
The hurricane that slammed into southwest Louisiana that Aug. 6 killed 34 people and did millions of dollars in damage to buildings and crops in Cameron and Calcasieu parishes, but it was hardly felt east of Jennings.

You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.