Jim Bradshaw
I was already thinking about Easter eggs when I ran across this statistic: In 1877, steamboats hauled 500,000 dozen eggs from the little St. Landry Parish port of Washington to New Orleans. That’s 500,000 dozen; 500,000 times 12, or six million eggs.
That prompted me to wonder just how many of those eggs got to the city unbroken.
Remember, the egg carton that we take for granted hadn’t been invented and wouldn’t be for another 40 years.
Remember also that these eggs are going down Bayou Courtableau, crossing a notorious sand bar, then turning into the Atchafalaya (often described in those days as “treacherous”), then into Bayou Plaquemine which was often jammed with logs (which meant our six million eggs had to be moved from the boats that left Washington onto wagons that bounced around the jam along a rutted trail then reloaded onto another boat on the New Orleans side), and then had to travel a hundred miles or so down the Mississippi before being manhandled onto the levee there.
That’s a lot to ask of a fragile egg.
And remember, too, these eggs were traveling aboard paddlewheelers that often banged into half-sunken logs or low-hanging oak branches, and that shook and shuddered with every stroke of their big steam pistons that were fueled by boilers that sometimes blew up for no apparent reason.
So how many eggs made it intact? The answer appears to be “a lot more than you might think.”
It all had to do with the packing.
The eggs were shipped in barrels or wooden crates, and didn’t break if they were packed very carefully, according to shippers of the day. One of them, writing in an 1891 edition of “The Cultivator and Country Gentleman” magazine, advised, “The most important items to be considered in packing eggs for shipment are that the danger from jarring in transportation be guarded against … and that the material used for packing be inexpensive, conveniently procured, and easily put together.”
In south Louisiana, the packing material of choice was sawdust. Lumber mills operated across the countryside, generating plenty of sawdust which, in some cases, would be given to anybody who would haul it away. The drawback was that sawdust was relatively heavy, and shipping charges were often set by weight.
A contributor to a long article on the subject in “Poultry World” magazine in 1882, argued that “there is nothing that will equal fine cut hay for packing eggs,” but the drawback there was that fine cut hay was more expensive and harder to come by than sawdust. Another writer suggested that lightweight chicken feathers were ideal, but the obvious problem there was that chickens without feathers tended not to lay the eggs that were to be shipped.
Whatever was used, “Poultry World” writers argued, the eggs had to be placed so that they wouldn’t touch the top, sides, or bottom of the box or barrel and had to be “carefully separated.” They said the packing material should be pushed “snugly” between each egg.
Shippers also had to be sure to pack their eggs with the small end down. Everybody seemed to know back in those days that an egg shipped with the fat end down or, shudder, placed on its side, “will not keep so long or stand so severe a jar” as one that was properly packed.
When all of that was done, it appears that practically all of the eggs weathered the journey down the bayou without cracking, giving substantial meaning to “egg money” in south Louisiana.
By the way, not to brag or anything, but the egg carton was invented in 1911 by a guy named Joseph Coyle, who was a newspaperman. One of the reasons not to brag too much about him is that Joseph, in typical newspaperman fashion, made hardly anything off the cartons. He sank his money into another of his inventions, a little doohickey to trim the ends off cigars — and we all know how many of those we see in the supermarkets today.
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.