Keeping the faith in hard times

South Louisiana was still reeling from the effects of the Civil War in the spring of 1872, and times were tough. The Planters’ Banner, the newspaper that had served much of the area since 1848, was one of the businesses that fell prey to hard times.

But editor Daniel Dennett was optimistic about the future of the region, even as he wrote his last editorial in the last edition of his newspaper, published on April 17.

He said the immediate future promised hard times that would be “severe and trying,” but that south Louisiana had too much going for it and the hard times would not last forever.

It turned out that he was right.

“We do not doubt that a glorious future will soon dawn on this land so favored by nature,” he wrote.

He predicted that railroads would soon open the region to widespread commerce and that they would carry not only the produce of farms and plantations, but also let entrepreneurs capitalize on the huge mineral wealth to be found here.

They would link the newly developed salt mine at Avery Island to the world and “hundreds of thousands of tons of salt [will be] taken to the Teche, and to New Orleans on cars which run from Algiers to the very pit from which salt is taken,” he predicted.

But that was not all.

“Wait until the sulphur mines of Calcasieu parish … loads trains of cars regularly for the New Orleans market,” he urged.

Those sulphur mines eventually became what some have described as “the richest 40 acres in the United States” and for three decades dominated not only the market in New Orleans, but in the world.

“Wait until a branch railroad extends to Abbeville, and until the Donaldsonville and New Orleans road is built to Vermilionville, and the road is completed from Vermilionville to Opelousas, and to Alexandria and Shreveport.”

That railroad reached Vermilionville in 1880, and, while branches did go north to Opelousas and Alexandria and Shreveport, the main line turned west, across the southwest Louisiana prairie.

Whole new communities sprang up where the rails ran – Jennings and Crowley, and Eunice, among them. In fact, there was soon a community of some sort every five miles from Vermilionville to the Texas border, built around railroad water towers and section houses.

“Wait until this country has an influx of new capital and enterprise,” Dennett continued – with no idea of how the discovery of oil 30 years after his words were published would bring men and money and new ideas to south Louisiana and even into the Gulf of Mexico.

“Wait patiently … and you will see this a thrifty land, and hope and prosperity will make the people cheerful, friendly, and enterprising,” he promised, not knowing that friendly and cheerful people would one day create a tourism industry to show off this land “favored by nature” and its people and culture.

“These will be set down as utopian views by many,” Dennett wrote in those hard days, “but we consider them truths. So wait, and don’t give up the ship, or jump overboard, when we are in sight of land.”

Dennett did not live to see much of what he predicted. After closing his newspaper, he served for a time as an editor of the New Orleans Picayune, then retired to Brookhaven, Miss., where he died at the age of 73 on Jan. 6, 1891.

But his optimism remains, and this land of agricultural and mineral and cultural plenty continues to justify that outlook.

You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jhbradshaw@bellsouth.net or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.