Drought, fire, and storms in the marshlands around Grand Chenier
David Richard and Kent Ledoux by Don Davis and Carl Brasseaux 2009; 4700.2070
Click photo to enlarge
Grand Chenier, Mermentau River, "Constance Bayou to Calcasieu Pass," 1928. NOAA.
TEMPESTS:
Storms in the Archives
David Richard: The major trade was done from Grand Chenier by water to Lake Arthur or to
Galveston [Texas]. That trade was in . . . Now, I'm going to talk about before my time now.
Don Davis: That's fine.
Richard: That trade was with Sea Island Cotton going back to the early part of the century.
They had commerce with pecans, commerce with citrus, and probably one of the major money issues as
far as currency is concerned was trapping.There were stores right there along the Mermentau River
that did the shipping. I actually went through Hurricane Audrey in Creole. And there were cotton
gins . . . the old cotton gin was still there near Oak Grove. That was remnant of that cotton period
in time. The rows from that cotton and some of the ditching from that cotton are still there today,
you know, a hundred years later. So my family was associated with a piece of land called Mermentau
Meadow. It was under a land manager, probably 1930, '31. They had hunting people that came in, they
hunted basically on the south side of Grand Chenier. It was in on the area that was open. The north
marsh was pretty solid. Solid with Cladium Jamaicense or saw grass. And until Hurricane Audrey . . .
actually until the drought, probably 1951 to 1953, caused a lot of that saw grass to die, and then
Hurricane Audrey opened that up to where you had areas that were opened up north of Grand Chenier,
Pecan Island, that area. The big burn, you know, was a fire in the twenties that opened up some of
the areas between the prairie and the Cheniers. So it opened up that particular area. So, you know,
I've been involved with the marsh since my earliest remembrance.