Lafayette (LA) Daily Advertiser, June 24, 1997

Abrom Kaplan began as peddler

by Jim Bradshaw

As a boy he began work in the potato fields of the region, until he was 15, when he had saved 100 rubles, about $50. It was this little money that he carried in his pocket when he came to New York in 1885. He had $21 of it left by the time he reached the city.

He said this in a 1930s interview: "I started walking blindly, in any direction that my nose pointed. Some hours of this, then I had a stroke of rarest fortune. I met a man I knew, a coppersmith, who once had worked in my father's distillery back home. He took me with him to the tenement room in which he lived. Six others lived in that small room. It was cheap lodging and my friend helped me lay in a peddler's stock--shoestrings, pin trays, combs, collar buttons, chair bottoms, the usual things.

"I took my stand on the east end of the Brooklyn Bridge and, although I still knew practically no English, I managed to sell a little something. I could make a dollar a day, enough to live on. Then I took my pack on my back and started peddling in Connecticut, out in the country. I would often walk from Bridgeport to Danbury, 24 miles, in one day. Everyone was very kind to me. I made some money.

"Finally, a gentleman I met told me about this new southwestern country and advised me to try it .... I shouldered my pack and went south to New Orleans. I went to school there and learned my English ABCs ... and for three years I tramped the bayou backways and highways of Louisiana, peddling.

"One day, early in my 18th year, I came tramping ... into Crowley. It was a raw new station on a brand new railroad. Teams of oxen were hauling loads of rice down a muddy main street. This rice was being grown inland by irrigation stored from rain fall .... I felt that I had traveled far enough .... I decided to stay here and run a store and buy land."

It was early in 1890 when he moved to Crowley. By 1902, Kaplan was cultivating an extensive rice acreage between Gueydan and Abbeville.

"Land could be homesteaded and was still selling for anywhere from 12 cents to $1.25 an acre," he recalled in that interview.

The 1930s article says, "He sits now at the president's desk of a shining, modern American bank and farms either himself or through tenants 25,000 acres of rice lands, all his own. His tractors number more than 200, a veritable fleet. His plows, discs, harrows, grain drills and harvesters, were they all to pass in review, would give the effect of an army corps on parade. He owns part or all of 12 rice mills and his rice irrigation canals, extending for countless miles beyond his own holdings, weave a quiet silver network over that gray southwestern plain where half of all American rice is grown."

Abrom Kaplan died on March 30, 1944, at Crowley.

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