Lafayette (LA) Daily Advertiser, October 28, 1997

Rice industry turned Jefferson Davis prairie green

Early settlers had come here to produce wheat

by Jim Bradshaw

What they found, however, was something different from their Midwestern prairies. The soil seemed much the same, but the subsoil was almost impervious to water. When water was put on the fields, it stayed on the fields. This was a place to grow rice, not wheat. Luckily, rice was a crop that could be cultivated with the steam plows, cultivators, and harrows the farmers had brought with them from the Midwest.

Seaman A. Knapp came to Louisiana when rice cultivation was just getting under way. He was a knowledgeable agricultural scientist and a seasoned administrator who would play a great role in transferring wheat technology to rice.

Knapp at first moved to Lake Charles in 1885 and began to organize and supervise farm demonstrations, sightseeing tours, and inspection trips for J. B. Watkins, the primary land developer and promoter in the Lake Charles area. But Knapp and a few others were almost immediately intrigued by the possibility of applying wheat cultivation and harvesting techniques to rice.

In 1884, Maurice Brien, an Iowa farmer, successfully adapted his wheat twine binder to rice. It worked well. The Southern Pacific Railroad shipped one twine binder into southwest Louisiana in 1884, 200 of them in 1887, and 1,000 in 1890. Steam tractors, threshers, and mechanical seeders soon followed. Then came harvesters, something that a lot of people didn't think would work in the rice fields.

According to a 1947 report by the Jefferson Davis Parish Planning Board, "In the earlier years it was a universal opinion that rice could not be harvested by machinery. In 1887 a rice machine was brought to Calcasieu Parish and tried with success. Three years later William Deering & Co. Started to improve their harvesters. ... At that time a Mr. E. S. Center advised the firm to enter this field, but they said to him, 'You might as well send cotton presses to Manitoba as harvesters to Louisiana.'

"Not discouraged, however, he preserved until he was successful, and later cut rice in eighteen inches of mud. To back up his guarantee, he shipped into southwest Louisiana a train load of the William Deering harvesters--a train load of twenty two cars containing three hundred machines.

"The train left Chicago beautifully decorated with flags and flowers, and it was said to be the most beautiful freight train that ever entered the southern states," according to the report. "At every station along the route it was met by large crowds, who hailed it with cheers and speeches of welcome. When the train arrived at Lake Charles, over a thousand people were at the depot to welcome the representatives of the Deering Company. ...Professor Knap (sic) of Lake Charles and Mr. Cary of Jennings made short addresses to the people on behalf of the Deering Company."

William Henry Perrin, writing in 1891, reported that "by the last census ... Louisiana raised 500,000 pounds of rice; South Carolina, 100,000 pounds; Georgia, 50,000; North Carolina, 41,500; and Alabama, Florida, Mississippi and Texas, all told, 285,000. Thus it will be seen that Louisiana produces more rice than all the other States of the Union put together."

Perrin continues: "The editor of the Jennings Reporter gives some figures on the acreage of rice planted in that part of (Imperial Calcasieu) parish. He estimates that between Lake Arthur on the south to China post-office north of Jennings, and between the Mermentau River, the Nezpiqué and Grand Marais, there will be about nine thousand acres planted in rice, which, at ten barrels per acre, will give 90,000 barrels of rice, and of this amount he expects 60,000 barrels at least or about four hundred car loads to be shipped from Jennings. Two years ago only twenty-six car loads were shipped from Jennings; last year one hundred car loads. (A carload equaled about 20,000 pounds of rice.) All this rice, should Jennings not get a rice mill, would eventually find its way to Lake Charles and be shipped northward on the Kansas City, Watkins & Gulf Railway. This is only a small portion of the rice acreage of this parish, and every bushel raised in the parish should be hulled on mills here instead of being shipped to the New Orleans mills."

The first rice mill in Jennings would be established in 1896, but there was still a revolution going on in the prairies. Mechanized agriculture had been unknown in Louisiana and most other Southern states. With the improved efficiency brought on by machines touted by Knapp and Cary and others, the Southwest began to blossom. Shipments of rough rice from the prairies of southwest Louisiana rose from 2 million to 20 million pounds between 1886 and 1892, and kept going.

Knapp estimated in 1892 that over the previous 10 years, rice planters in Louisiana had spent "no less than $675,000 for binders, steam threshers and mowers, gang plows, and riding cultivators." He estimated that mechanization had improved the efficiency of the farm worker at least 300 percent over the five years before 1892.

Brochures put out by the Southern Pacific railroad announced: "Rice is raised at about the same expense as wheat in the North, can be sown and harvested with the same machinery, and the average value of the crop is more than double."

Soon, rice farmers began looking for better ways to sell their rice, at better prices for the farmer. Until the early 1890s, all of the rice raised in southwest Louisiana was sold in New Orleans, at prices set by New Orleans brokers. Now rice farmers in southwestern Louisiana, in part under Knapp's leadership, organized the Farmer's Cooperative Rice Milling Co. and built their own mill at Lake Charles. Soon there were other new mills at Crowley, Gueydan, Rayne, Jennings, Welsh, Morse, Midland, Abbeville, Kaplan and Lake Charles.

Most of that rice was shipped by rail, but some of it was also sent out by boat. There was a Derouen rice mill operating in Lake Arthur before the turn of the century, to which growers hauled rice from a radius as far as 40 miles. The owner, D. Derouen, purchased the rice outright, milled it, and sent it by schooner to Galveston.

His rice was shipped in barrels. Schooners came into Lake Arthur from Galveston, discharged their cargo of grocery products and empty rice barrels, and left town laden with rice or cotton.

A 1916 article in the Lake Charles American Press described the operation of a typical rice mill of the time.

"The rice is received at the mill warehouse in sacks weighing about 180 pounds each, which are unloaded from the (rail) cars by belt conveying machinery of a character somewhat similar to that employed in the grain elevators of the West," the article reported. "From the bins the rice is run through separators, which remove all foreign substances from it. It is then fed into the center of the hulling stones, where it is revolved at the rate of 250 revolutions a minute and, through centrifugal action, through the perforated ends of the upper and lower stones, a process which removes the hull from the grain. From these the rice is passed through the fanning machines, which remove the hull by suction. A very ingenious German separator then turns back the undulled grains to another set of stones, for about twenty-five per cent of the rice that goes through the initial set of stones comes out undulled. The rice is then passed through hullers. The huller is a cylinder within a metal case, the rice going in at one end and coming out at the other. This removes the oily cuticle that covers the grain, this by-product being known as rice bran. From here the rice goes to what are known as the brushes. The brushes are upright cylinders covered with leather, which polish the rice against a wire screen, leaving behind a white powder known as rice polish. From the brushes the rice goes to the polishing drum, where through friction the highly polished appearance which is found in nearly all finished rice is obtained. From there the rice goes to the clean rice separator, where the broken grains are separated from the whole, and the various commercial grades are separately packed."

When drought severely damaged the crop in 1883 and 1884, the prairie farmers began to look for ways to deal with that. A farmer from the Midwest, David Abbott, who operated a rice mill near Crowley, began experimenting with pumps and irrigation systems about 1894. Seaman Knapp, J. B. Watkins, S. L. Cary, and William C. Stubbs, among others, immediately began promoting and urging the development of pump and canal irrigation systems.

In 1894, a private irrigation and canal company was organized by A. D. McFarlain and C. L. Shaw near Jennings. Pumps raised water from the bayous into elevated canals which then could be tapped for cultivating the fields. By 1900, there were 25 canal companies in southwest Louisiana, operating on shares with the farmer.

Typical was the arrangement advertised by one of these companies in a Southern Pacific promotional brochure published about 1900: "To any party having workstock we will build a house and pasture. Any amount of land will be furnished. There are about 25,000 acres to pick from. The seed required will be advanced, same to be returned after harvest. A complete pumping outfit will be rented at cost for the purpose of irrigating the rice field. We pay our share of threshing and furnish our share of sacks. We ask as our share one-fourth of the total crop."

This article is copyrighted © by the Lafayette (LA) Daily Advertiser and is used with permission.  This web site was originated through a grant awarded to Carencro High School (Joel Hilbun/Bobbi Marino, Grant Administrators) by the State Board of Elementary and Secondary Education from the Louisiana Quality Education Support Fund - 8(g).