Lafayette (LA) Daily Advertiser, November 25, 1997

You didn't smoke at the sawmills

by Jim Bradshaw

Coldon J. Darce went to work, probably in "Big Jim," as a small boy. He explained in a reminiscence as an old man, "When I became nine years old, I quit school because one of the boys told a teacher I was smoking, and I wasn't. So I told my father I didn't want to go to school. He told me I could either go to school or go to work. So I went to work at 35 cents a day for 12 hours. Only two small boys worked at the saw mill, all the rest were men."

Among his reminiscences about the early cypress lumber industry there:

• "Men working at the saw mills went along the bayou to smoke, because they could not smoke on the saw mill grounds."
• "Along the bayou from Albania to Hubertsville were hundreds of logs on the other side. Men rode the logs to the mill to have them cut up for lumber. Between the logs were some water lilies, green all year round, and in springtime the flowers were just beautiful."
• "A good many of our men worked in the swamps. They had a season to deaden the cypress trees, a season to cut them down, especially when the water was high. Each one of these men had a pirogue and a first-class axe, and they knew what to do with it. Most of them had a double-barreled shotgun to kill squirrels, rabbits, birds, and sometimes a deer. These they brought to their camp."
• "At that time, Jeanerette was covered pretty much with lumber from both saw mills, all along the bayside from Bridge Street to the city park. And some of the lumber was stacked up on Main Street all along to the City Hall. And where the City Hall is, from Main Street to Church Street, from Ed LaGuarde's property to the Macione's property was also covered with stacks of lumber going up as much as 20 feet high."