I was looking for something else last week when I came across a listing of every post office in the United States at the beginning of 1851. It points up the fact that most of south Louisiana was still a sparsely settled place just 15 years before the Civil War, and that it was no easy task for mail or people to get across swamps, marshes, and prairies in those days.
There were fewer than 20 post offices listed in south Louisiana west of the Atchafalaya River, and only two of those, Lake Charles and Ballew’s Ferry (near Vinton on the Sabine River), west of the Mermentau. It would be 30 years before a railroad would bring towns and people to the southwest Louisiana prairies; people traveled either on rivers and bayous by boat or by horseback on trails cut through the tall grass by wandering herds of wild cattle.
The places listed in the “Table of Post Offices in the United States on the First Day of January 1851” (W. & J.C. Greer Printers, Washington, D.C.), almost all sprang up on waterways of one size or another. In addition to Lake Charles and Ballew’s Ferry, they include Abbeville, Alligator (St. Mary Parish), Bayou Chicot, Bayou Ramos (St. Mary). Breau’s Bridge, Fausse Pointe (probably Loreauville today), Franklin, New Iberia, Opelousas, Pattersonville (now Patterson), Perry’s Bridge (now Perry), Plaquemine Brulee, St. Martinsville [sic], Vermilionville (now Lafayette), Ville Platte, and Washington.
Mail from the outside world usually traveled first to New Orleans and from there was sent by various means into the interior. Newspaper publisher Daniel Dennett, who was also postmaster in Franklin, described a typical journey in 1876 in his book “Louisiana As It Is” (Eureka Press, New Orleans). The trip then was probably not much different than it would have been when the 1851 list was compiled.
The Morgan Louisiana and Texas Railroad had been operating from Algiers (across the Mississippi from New Orleans) to Brashear City (Morgan City today) since 1857, but travelers and mail bags still had to find other means of transportation from there.
According to Dennett, “The steamers of the Attakapas Mail Transportation Company leave Brashear City daily, for New Iberia, a distance of 72 miles, halting at Pattersonville, Centreville, Franklin, Charenton, and Jeanerette, and at intermediate landings. They usually extend their trips to St. Martinsville three times a week, 102 miles from Brashear.”
The mail might also be sent into the interior aboard “half a dozen or more small jobbing boats” that travelled to “Vermilion River, Grand Cote, Cote Blanche, Belle Isle, and the mouth of Bayou Sale.” These smaller boats did “a large business towing rafts of cypress logs for the saw mills … and in bringing pieux [split cypress timbers] and other split lumber … to the planters on the Teche.” They carried the mail only when it was convenient.
Going north, “United States Mail coaches leave New Iberia three times a week for Washington [in St. Landry Parish], passing through Vermilionville, Grand Coteau, and Opelousas, and tri-weekly U.S. Mail coaches leave Washington [La.] for Alexandria,” according to Dennett’s account.
Another mail coach ran “regularly” between New Iberia and Abbeville,” and, for the rest of the region, “a horseback mail extends to all the postoffices [sic] off the main traveled routes.”
Dennett’s idea of “regularly” might not have been as regular as one might expect. His newspaper often railed about long intervals during which no mail made it through from New Orleans. It could sometimes be weeks between deliveries.
It appears part of the problem was that, then as now, there wasn’t a whole lot of profit to be made in carrying the mail. Typically, a letter could be sent from anywhere in the eastern United States to a settlement out on the prairie for a penny or less — and that penny had to be split between the railroad operator, the steamboat captain, and the guy riding horseback “off the main travelled routes.”
A collection of Jim Bradshaw’s columns, Cajuns and Other Characters, is now available from Pelican Publishing. You can contact him at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.
