a woman and her three children perish in the 1926 storm
Houston Foret by Don Davis and Carl Brasseaux, 2009; 4700.2072
Click photo to enlarge
Flood, one year later, in rural Louisiana.
TEMPESTS: Storms in the Archives
Houston Foret: [Pointing to a cemetery] They got like a little fence mainly just here. There's a blue house right here. At the front end, you'll see the crosses and the cement and everything else. I'm going to tell you a little story about that. The woman and the three kids was there. Old Man Henry, he was an oyster fisherman. Well, he passed the hurricane over water out while he was fishing oysters. He didn't come in. The people that were from Cocodrie would go over there. They stopped, they would look, they'd say, "Let me pick you up and we going to bring you up with us." "Oh no," she said. I can't go," she said, "when my husband comes in, if he finds out that I rode with another man to go up," she said, "he's going to beat me. He's a jealous man." The woman and the three kids stayed right there and they all drowned. They picked them up on the other side of Lake Boudreaux over there. That's where they floated them. But they could've saved those people's lives. In those days that's how people were.