Harlan Kirgan
The crawfish boat is a common sight around this area, but that wasn’t always the case.
The boats were developed about 35 years ago to help farmers harvest crawfish.
The boats evolved over the years and merited the attention of John Laudun, a University of Louisiana Lafayette English associate professor and folklorist.
Laudun wrote a book, “The Amazing Crawfish Boat,” that tells the story about the boat and the people who created it.
A Lafayette native, Laudun said, “For many people this doesn’t seem like a very interesting thing or it seems like an agricultural thing, so why would an English professor be writing about a piece of agricultural equipment?”
In a presentation to the Eunice Rotary Club, Laudun explained he is folklorist.
“My goal is to really go out and meet people I wouldn’t ordinarily meet and find out how they are doing and how they think about the world and how does that work for them,” he said.
The folklorist’s interest turned into a 234-page book published this year by University Press of Mississippi.
The crawfish boat innovators named in the book should be familiar to people in Acadia. They include Fruge, Richard, Cormier, Quirk, Olinger, Hughes, Benoit, Courville, Abshire, Venable and Habetz.
“I spent a lot of time driving around the countryside looking to find all different kids of crawfish boats. Looking to find who made them. Who ran them,” he said.
The boats looked the same, but not exactly the same, he said, and that’s what captured Laudun’s interest.
“I’m not going to go off and study a Ford Focus,” he said. “They are all made at the same place and they are all made exactly the same. I’m looking for things that are part of a dialogue.”
Laudun said he found the crawfish boats were something of a community effort. The inventors, farmers and machine shop operators, experimented with designs on each feature.
“This is like living history,” he said of the boats.
“I want to make clear the power at work here is ideas and implementation,” Laudun said. “These guys, anyone of them, could have copyrighted this, but they weren’t about copyrights, they were worried about making a solution to a problem that everybody faced and they were drawing ideas from each other.”
The title of the book is about the crawfish boat, but Laudun makes it clear the book is about people.
“The crawfish boat is really an amazing thing and it was invented right here 35 years ago and that’s happening all around. Even now people are coming up with things to get work done and they are inventing...,” he said.
In an introduction, Laudun stated, “The men who invented the crawfish boat were and are farmers and fabricators. They are ordinary men: they get up in the morning and walk or drive to their shops or equipment sheds, which in many instances are next door to their homes.”
Laudun identifies Greg Fruge, of Eunice, as “... the man who seems to have made the crawfish boat popular...”