Farmers and businessmen rolled out the red carpet in the early summer of 1906, when a dozen men from Pennsylvania chugged across the south Louisiana prairies in a special railroad car. The “capitalists and investors” were here to see for themselves if a proposal by the Union Irrigation Company could really turn south Louisiana into “a veritable paradise,” as some newspapers claimed, or whether the company’s plan was just so much pie in the sky.
The project was the brainchild of a fellow Pennsylvanian, Franklin Schell, who had studied the landscape for more than a year and found that the prairies tilted enough toward the Gulf of Mexico that water pumped from Bayou Courtableau would naturally flow to the south. The bayou in north-central St. Landry Parish is about 70 feet above sea level and the land slopes southwest from there toward the mouth of the Mermentau River. That’s perfect for someone wanting to run a gravity-fed canal through the middle of the rice country.
Schell wanted to build a main canal that was 150 feet wide and 30 miles long, and to branch smaller canals off of it. He said his canal system would irrigate a half-million acres that had no regular water supply, opening it up especially to rice growers but also to farmers who wanted to grow practically anything.
The problem was that Schell was long on ideas but short of money. He needed a million dollars — more than $25 million today — just to get the thing started, and this was his second try at getting it. He’d formed another irrigation company several years before, but couldn’t raise the money he needed. This was a make or break tour.
He’d gone back to his native Pennsylvania to promote the scheme and was able to talk some pretty important people into coming south. They included bank presidents, several “wealthy farmers,” a writer for the influential Manufacturer’s Record magazine, tobacco growers and the president of a company that made cigar boxes, and other manufacturers. Their guides included H. M. Sheppard, editor of the Crowley Signal, civil engineering professor W. B. Gregory of Tulane University, and Schell himself. The group traveled by train from New Orleans to Opelousas, then to Ville Platte and Mamou and Eunice in horse-drawn carriages, then back on the train to Crowley and Jennings.
“It was a representative and cosmopolitan body of men, this delegation from rock-ribbed Pennsylvania, the state where wealth and rugged honesty stand out in bold relief,” according to one news account. “In it were the tidy banker, the plain farmer, the rotund brewer, the shrewd, inquisitive manufacturer, the easy-mannered retired capitalist.”
As they toured the area, they “evidenced that they had come here for business; that they appreciated the vastness of the possibilities of this country, and were willing to give the enterprise substantial aid.”
They looked at the land, they looked at the newly built Duson and Abbott pumping plants in what is now Acadia Parish, they toured the Evangeline oil field, they asked “hard questions,” —and they bought into Schell’s idea.
“One million, five hundred thousand dollars is the amount of money that Pennsylvania capitalists have been persuaded to invest,” the Jennings Times-Record announced on June 5, 1906.
Schell got to work quickly, buying rights of way and digging equipment, hiring workers, building a pumping plant to lift water from the Courtableau and give gravity a boost. But it was ‘slow going.
It wasn’t until April 1911 that the St. Landry Courier reported that thousands of people watched as “Little Miss Erma Schell,” Franklin’s daughter, “touched the electric button that held in thrall the [1,000 horsepower] pumps of the Union Irrigation Company.” When “the powerful machinery jumped into action the sound of [spectators’] huzzas thundered down a hundred miles of rich but arid plain and foretold the coming of life-producing waters … [to] more than 2,000,000 acres of land.”
It was a grand start, but a short-lived project. It turned out that Schell needed more rock-ribbed capitalists than he’d anticipated. Only four miles of canal had been built by the time the Union Irrigation Company went bankrupt in 1914. It had spent more than $10 million and was pumping more red ink than water.
There was a glimmer of hope that the project might go on, perhaps on a smaller scale, when a wealthy railroad man bought most of the company assets in the bankruptcy proceeding But he looked at the bank book and looked at the debts and looked at how much more money would be needed, and said, “No way.”
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.
