The House That Sugarcane Built : The Louisiana Burguières [1 ed.] 9781626740075, 9781617039522

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The House That Sugarcane Built

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House That Sugarcane Built The

The Louisiana Burguières

Donna McGee Onebane University Press of Mississippi / Jackson

www.upress.state.ms.us The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of American University Presses. Copyright © 2014 by The J. M. Burguières Company, Limited All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America First printing 2014 ∞ Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Onebane, Donna McGee, 1953– The house that sugarcane built : the Louisiana Burguières / Donna McGee Onebane. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-61703-952-2 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-61703-953-9 (ebook : alk. paper) 1. Burguières, Eugene Denis, 1804–1876. 2. Burguières, Jules Martial, 1850–1899. 3. Sugar growing—Louisiana—History—19th century. 4. Sugar growing—Louisiana—History—20th century. 5. Sugar—Economic aspects— Louisiana—History—19th century. 6. Sugar—Economic aspects—Louisiana—History—20th century. 7. Sugar—Economic aspects—Southern States—History—19th century. 8. Sugar—Economic aspects—Southern States—History—20th century. 9. Sugarcane—Louisiana—History—19th century. 10. Sugarcane—Louisiana— History—20th century. 11. Sugar trade—Southern States—History—19th century. 12. Sugar trade—Southern States—History—20th century. I. Title. SB228.O54 2014 338.4’7664109763—dc23 2014001975 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available Cover Art: Blue Coulée at Bayou Salé, 2006 George Rodrigue Acrylic on canvas 30 × 40 inches Private collection of Philip J. Burguières

To Philip J. Burguières

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Contents ix........ Acknowledgments xv....... Preface 3........

1. Origins



From France to the New World, 1660s–1831

14.. ......

2. A New Beginning

30.......

3. Ernest D. Burguières



47.......

Eugène Denis Burguières in Southwest Louisiana, 1831–1850

A Witness to the Rise and Fall of the Louisiana Sugar Bowl, 1850–1878

4. Founding a Sugar Empire



Jules Martial Burguières Sr., 1877–1893

66.......

5. The Sugar Baron in New Orleans, 1893–1899

83.......

6. Brothers in Business, 1900–1912

102......

7. Denis P. J. Burguières and Brothers, 1912–1936

123. . .....

8. Jules M. Burguières Jr., the Florida Everglades, and Southern States Land and Timber Company, 1913–1936

144......



9. Back to the Plantation

The Reign of Jules Martial Burguières Jr., 1936–1960

viii 153. . .....

163......



Contents

10. A Family Business in Crisis

Edward E. Burguières, 1960–1981

11. From the Ashes

Philip Burguières and Ron Cambre, 1978–2013

179...... Epilogue Appendixes

183...... 1. Genealogy 197...... 2. Patents

203...... 3. J. M. Burguières Company Boards of Directors, 1901–2012 211. . ..... 4. J. M. Burguières Family Councils, 2005–2013 213. . ..... Notes 233...... Bibliography 245...... Index

Acknowledgments The House That Sugarcane Built: The Louisiana Burguières has been an eight-year endeavor. A project of this magnitude is possible only with the participation of many individuals. First, I thank Dr. Carl Brasseaux, the former director of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette’s Center for Louisiana Studies; the Center for Cultural and Eco-Tourism; and the ULL Press, which gave me the extraordinary opportunity to research and write this book. I am grateful to the Burguières family, which includes six surviving lines of Jules M. Burguières Sr., for sharing their letters, photographs, business records, and memories with me. In particular, I thank the chair emeritus of the J. M. Burguières Company, Philip J. Burguières, who had the foresight to initiate this story of his family and its role in the Louisiana and Florida sugar industry. I am grateful to Ron Cambre, president emeritus, for his candid input and cooperation in my research; to his wife, Gail Burguières Cambre, for having the good sense to marry him; and to their daughter, Susanne Cambre Dwyer, the current president of the J. M. Burguières Company and the first woman to hold that office. My heartfelt gratitude goes to my editor, Judith Pearlman, for her eagle eye in editing and her unwavering support and enthusiasm, which kept me sane and gave me hope. Neither I nor the book would be the same today without her. I thank Ellen Goldlust, copy editor, whose professional skills resulted in a polished manuscript. The Burguières family and I owe a great deal to Leila Bristow, the great-great-granddaughter of the progenitor of the Louisiana Burguières, Eugène D. Burguières, for her tenacious late-night forays into the abyss of the Internet and her relentless pursuit of the past in dusty tomes. The result was the addition of 270 years of French family history. As a copy editor extraordinaire, Leila meticulously examined the ix

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manuscript for accuracy, a daunting responsibility given the amount of data available. As the family genealogist, she had the foresight to commission the work of Anne Morddel, a genealogist in Paris, whose professional expertise uncovered ancestors and their graves as far back as the seventeenth century. Leila also collected, scanned, and identified stacks of old photographs and documents, a time-consuming and alltoo-often thankless job. So many other family members contributed to my research. Denise Hein’s beautiful handcrafted family history collection provided the foundation of my research; Ernest A. “Skipper” Burguières gave me a personal tour of New Orleans from the perspective of his ancestors in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, assisted me in the interpretation of legal documents, and persuaded his eighty-four-yearold mother, Virginea Burguières, to do an interview with me. I thank sisters Barat P. Leefe and Michelle P. Reed for a wonderful and informative interview at the New Orleans Country Club; the late Joan Burguières Brown and William Perry “Pepper” Brown III, a member of the J. M. Burguières Board of Directors for sixteen years, who shared their family stories with me at Galatoire’s, the historic French Quarter restaurant frequented by their nineteenth-century ancestors; Steve Clayton, Pepper’s partner of many years, who shared a collection of valuable family history and an account of his years with the Burguières; Robin Burguières Bristow and her children (Leila, Marie Robin, and Otis Allen) for their treasured photos, documents, and enlightening stories of the family and their relationships with some of the movers and shakers of early twentieth-century America; Lillamaud and Bill Hammond for their kindness and expert editing suggestions; William and Margaret “Dody” Burguières, Robert and Mary Ann Burguières, Albert Burguières, and Elsie Burguières for an insightful and entertaining interview around the dining room table from the big house at Cypremort Plantation; Albert Burguières for contributing his written memories of his childhood days at the plantation; Patricia and Arthur Fernandez Jr. for trusting me with their precious collection of family postcards from Europe; Dr. Thomas and Janice Burguières and their five daughters (Alexandra, Elizabeth, Genevieve, Juliette, and Victoria), who served dinner on their ancestors’ china, demonstrating their strong connection to family, past and present. Their warmth and hospitality provided insight into who the Burguières are today.

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I appreciate Sam Burguières Sr. and Nettie Burguières for making it possible for me to interview Sam’s mother, Gertrude Reynaud Burguières, not once but twice. Gertrude was the keeper of history and tradition, and she wanted to ensure that generations to come would know about the struggles their family and company endured to safeguard their legacy. I am grateful to Emily Burguières Dalicandro and Martial Burguières, the children of Philip and the late Cheryl Courrégé Burguières, for taking the time to meet with me in Houston and for our shared experience the night the electricity went out in the French Quarter at an annual meeting of the J. M. Burguières Company. I thank Chapman and Linda Burguières, who met with me in Houma, the ancestral home of the Louisiana Burguières. Linda also lent me one of the best sources on Houma history, Helen E. Wurzlow’s I Dug up Houma Terrebonne. My gratitude goes out to Sheila Walker, who invited me to her home for an interview and dinner, and to Marion Christ Clerc and her sister, Helen Christ St. Paul, for sharing their many memories of the Burguières in Pass Christian—on the same day that Hurricane Katrina made its sudden turn to the east, heading straight for Pass Christian. My thanks go to O. J. Reis and his fellow road warrior for visiting me a number of times in Lafayette to ask the overwhelming question, “When will the book be finished?” I can finally answer you. Dale Pfost included me in the Jules Rhum project. Holly Burguières Gluibizzi came from New York to meet with me and other family members in Washington, D.C. Bill Sandefer shared information on the Burguières’ role in the development of Tulane. Dick Leike, a veteran member of the J. M. Burguières Company Board of Directors, shared his written memories of his family. I am indebted to Earl M. Bailey and his mother, Wanda Bailey, descendants of the E. D. Burguières line, who worked especially hard, providing most of the research for their line. Wanda generously shared her cherished collection of photos and documents. I appreciate the efficiency and patience of Debi Lauret, the manager of the JMB office for more than thirty years; Glenn Vice, current president of the J. M. Burguières Company, for facilitating a smooth transition in leadership between generations while I was researching and writing this book; and Stephanie Clement and Rhonda Sonnier for their timely assistance in the JMB office. Local historian Bert Guiberto has spent years documenting Louisiana sugar mills. I thank him for sharing his information with me.

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Richard and Sandra Legnon, lifelong residents of the Cypremort area, told wonderful stories about plucking oysters from their backyard— Vermilion Bay—in the old days at Cypremort Point before hurricanes and saltwater intrusion changed the precious wetland community. Former lessees and field laborers also participated in this book project. Harold Junca gave me a tour of the Burguières properties, sharing his experiences as a farmer, and introduced me to former JMB Company employees Henry Colar and Blackie Tabb. Philip A. Kerne III shared his childhood memories of the Cypremort Plantation and sugar mill, where his father, P. A. Kerne, was chief engineer at the sugar mill. Harvey Blanchard gave me a tour of the ripe cane fields his sons were harvesting. Ida Bourque dug out pictures and memorabilia from her years growing up in the Cypremort/Louisa area. Jerry Bourg introduced me to Leroy Yeggins, a ninety-four-year-old laborer who had worked his entire life for the Burguières. Allied families and distant cousins were also helpful. Both the Patout family and the Burguières are descendants of Isidore Patout. I thank William Patout, president of M. A. Patout and Son sugarcane producers, for sharing his written memoires; Peter Patout, New Orleans antiques dealer, who allowed the use of a valuable photograph from his collection; and Adrienne Patout, who provided information about Patout/Burguières relations. Philip Burguières purchased Blue Coulée on Bayou Salé, painted by George Rodrigue, to use for the cover of this book because it reminded him of the Bayou Salé of his childhood. Alice Burguières had the painting digitized. Charlotte Schillasi put in skilled and time-consuming work on the J. M. Burguières web site. Doug and Cindy Burguières provided photos of the renovated Cypremort House, a massive undertaking they spearheaded. The painstaking work of scholars is also at the center of my book. Though the bibliography lists many sources, I am particularly grateful to Dr. Michael Wade, author of Sugar Dynasty: M. A. Patout and Son, Ltd., 1791–1993, which was of immense assistance in my research; Dr. Richard Follett, whose web site, Documenting Louisiana Sugar, 1845–1917, and book, Sugar Masters, provided vital data and history; Dr. Shane Bernard, author, historian, and curator for McIlhenny Company, for reading my manuscript; Dr. Jordan Kellman, associate professor of history and dean of the College of Liberal Arts, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, for

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sharing his knowledge with me; and Dr. Chris Cenac, author of Eyes of an Eagle: Jean-Pierre Cenac, Patriarch, for his advice and encouragement. Last and most important is my family. My two children, Eve and Jake Onebane, and my two granddaughters, Hillary and Phoebe Mouton, receive my heartfelt thanks for understanding why they saw me only occasionally—and then only when I needed food, water, a new ink cartridge, or more printer paper. I thank my sisters, Caroline and Theresa McGee, who paved the way for me; my mother and father, Dean and Sylvia McGee, from Richard, Louisiana, who taught me to be courageous and outrageous (respectively); and for the constant companionship and unwavering loyalty of my canine assistants, Sam, Molly, and Bay, who never failed to let me know when it was quitting time. Finally, words cannot express my gratitude to my beloved husband, Neal, who has given me the time and freedom to pursue my dreams in this and in all things.

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Preface New Orleans, August 28, 2005

Hurricane Katrina slams into the city of New Orleans, packing 150-mileper-hour winds with gusts up to 180, the epitome of raw nature exposing the vulnerability of humans. Then comes the man-made disaster: storm surges breach the levees, inundating 80 percent of the city, leaving death, destruction, and disease in their path. The world watches, aghast. Seventeen days later, it is a surreal scene in the flooded city. In the blackness of night, television crews prepare for a presidential address to a waiting world. Blinding spotlights illuminate the backdrop for the speech, the St. Louis Cathedral, an icon of French and Spanish history in New Orleans and a testimonial to Roman Catholic influence in South Louisiana. It has been a silent witness to two centuries of baptisms, marriages, funerals, epidemics, fires, the slave trade, wars, and the ravages of time. The birth of jazz, the revelry of Mardi Gras, and the first steamboats gliding down the Mississippi all fell within its purview. For centuries, the three-steepled edifice has welcomed the paradoxical mix of saints and sinners that still characterizes the city of New Orleans. This night, September 14, 2005, the cathedral is the city’s only reassuring symbol of permanence and endurance. Southwest Louisiana, September 24, 2005

Against all odds, less than a month after Katrina, a second Category 5 hurricane, Rita, arises from the warm Gulf waters. As if to outdo its xv

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recent rival, Rita pounds the coastline and rural parishes of Southwest Louisiana with powerful winds that reach 120 miles per hour. Its fifteen-foot storm surge drowns cattle, floods homes, submerges sugarcane fields just before harvest, and even displaces the dead from their pre–Civil War tombs. Century-old oaks are thrashed in all directions; their dead limbs lie strewn around their massive trunks. Like countless earlier hurricanes, Rita batters the already-fragile Louisiana wetland ecosystem. When the waters recede, much of the terrain is a moonscape. But as is nature’s way, within a month, tiny green blades of grass push their way through the cracked brown earth, transforming the gray landscape to spring green in the month of October. Wild roseau, delicate Queen Anne’s lace, and purple Louisiana irises spring from the muck. Nature begins to heal, and humans must do the same. “We have to go on,” local farmer Harvey Blanchard tells me. “We just have to pick back up and get after it. That’s all.” New Orleans, February 18, 2006

Six months after Katrina, in stark contrast to the renewal of the South Louisiana countryside, New Orleans is still only a skeleton of what was once one of the most distinctive cities in the world. Crime is rampant; unclaimed corpses still wait in makeshift morgues; posters of missing persons plaster rotting buildings; the homeless barely survive under Interstate 10; and entire neighborhoods have disappeared. It is truly the City of the Dead. Yet when few residents have returned and only a few intrepid outsiders dare enter the city, nearly one hundred Burguières family members gather in the French Quarter at the Monteleone Hotel for the annual meeting of the J. M. Burguières Company. No matter the conditions, the meeting goes on, as it has for decades. It is a traditional rite that is both business and personal. The year has been difficult, but the clan and the company have prevailed. This act of rejuvenation echoes throughout their history. The House That Sugarcane Built is a saga of six generations, descendants of Parisian patriarch Jean Louis Burguières, whose son, Eugène, immigrated to South Louisiana in 1831. By 1877, Eugène’s son, Jules, had laid the foundation for a sugarcane empire: 137 years later, it is one of

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the oldest family-owned and -operated businesses in the state. From 1877 to the present, the company has had a life cycle of its own, moving from extraordinary success in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to near extinction in the second half of the twentieth century and finally to a resounding resurgence in the twenty-first. Like the company, the Burguières have experienced ups and downs through the generations, evolving from a tight-knit, interdependent clan with extended family living in close proximity into a family with many independent branches that share nothing more than a last name and stock in the same company. Over the years, the Louisiana Burguières have become individuals with different needs and expectations of their company, often carrying emotional and financial baggage of past wounds into the present. The cracks in the foundation reveal traits found in many families, particularly large families, and include distrust, envy, and, some say, intrigue. But the Burguières’ story also illustrates the ambition and perseverance of a family that has achieved the dream of its progenitor, Jules M. Burguières Sr., whose 1899 Last Will and Testament charged his descendants to “always take care of one another.” Part of their legacy is the wisdom to know the inherent strength of blood. They have discovered that intertwining family with business creates both a hothouse and a powerhouse. In fact, this book serves, among other things, as a case study of family businesses, revealing their strengths and exposing their weaknesses. The House That Sugarcane Built also offers a rare insider’s view of sugar planters through the lens of six generations of producers, manufacturers, marketers, and researchers who have been at the epicenter of sugar politics in Louisiana, Florida, and the nation. It provides a glimpse into their professional challenges, failures, and triumphs and a rare view into their families, traditions, relationships, joys, and tragedies. This history also reveals the experiences of French nationals (“Foreign French”) in Louisiana in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It explores their adaptation to a new homeland peopled by a large number of settlers from other parts of Europe, the West Indies, Nova Scotia, and Africa. The story shows how the French developed strong family, business, political, and social networks, cohesive units with all systems working for the good of the clan, supporting one another in this exotic wilderness frontier. Because of the powerful influence of the French in Louisiana and because the Burguières played such a vital role in the

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state’s agriculture, oil, gas, and salt industries, The House That Sugarcane Built tells a vital part of Louisiana’s rich, diverse, and complex history. Yet this is an immigrant’s story, as are the histories of most American families. It is a tale of how one family achieved the American Dream within two generations and then nearly lost it a half century later. It is a tale of the descendants of Eugène Denis Burguières, who left Paris to make a new home in South Louisiana and whose progeny would succeed there beyond his wildest dreams. The House That Sugarcane Built contains a number of recurring motifs that are reminiscent of the Old South and its iconic images—sugar plantations along the bayous, wagons and mules, slaves, “the War,” and what William Faulkner called “the old fierce pull of blood”—the blood of ancestors—the tie that binds them together, the concern for the purity of lineage, and the desire to leave a legacy for the next generation. From the beginning, the Burguières have recognized the supremacy of land, which, as Margaret Mitchell famously wrote, “is the only thing in the world worth working for, worth fighting for, worth dying for, because it’s the only thing that lasts.” The patriarch of the Louisiana Burguières first leased property to farm, but he and his sons quickly showed an aptitude for buying the right land, at the right time, at bargain prices. Today, the J. M. Burguières Company owns 50,000 acres of land in South Louisiana and Texas, with 280,000 acres of mineral and surface rights in South Florida. The Burguières have known all along that land is power. Water courses throughout their long history. For planters, water has always been key, a double-edged sword of prosperity and doom. On the one hand, rain has made the crops grow tall and strong year after year for more than a century, and the rivers and bayous have transported the sugar to the levees in New Orleans for marketing. But damage from too much or too little water—floods, droughts, and hurricanes—has always threatened the harvest. Freezing rain turns the ripe cane stalks into sweet icicles, stripped of their value. The Burguières have been deeply involved in massive water projects, such as the building of canals (the Suez Canal in the nineteenth century, the Intracoastal Waterway in the twentieth) and the search for water in the arid West Texas desert. They have also developed drainage technology to reclaim marshes and muck land in Louisiana and Florida, creating arable farmland for the production of sugarcane, citrus, and cattle.

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Finally, this book is a story of the inexorable passage of time and the influence of the past on the present. To an outsider, all that remains of the past are the concrete foundations of the old Cypremort sugar mill, the rows of oaks shrouded with Spanish moss, the plantation house, and the tombs of generations of Burguières in the family graveyard at St. Helen’s Cemetery on Florence Plantation. Yet today, tractors and combines still rumble past the silent cemetery, harvesting another year’s crop of sugarcane. The family will meet again in February and make more plans for the future. Ultimately, The House That Sugarcane Built proves that the past remains very much alive in the present.

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The House That Sugarcane Built

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1 Origins

From France to the New World, 1660s–1831

With what astonishment did I for the first time view the magnificent levee . . . covered with active human beings of all nations and colors, and boxes, bales, bags, hogsheads, pipes, barrels, kegs of goods, wares and merchandise from all ends of the earth! Thousands of bales of cotton, tierces of sugar, molasses; quantities of flour, pork, lard, grain . . . from the rich and extensive rivers above; and the wharves lined for miles with ships, steamers, flatboats, arks, &c. four deep! The business appearance of this city is not surpassed by any other in the wide world: It might be likened to a huge beehive, where no drones could find a resting place. I stepped on shore, and my first exclamation was, “This is the place for a business man!” —James Creecy, 1834

On April 29, 1831, two young Parisian bachelors set foot on the levee dock in New Orleans, one of the leading ports in the United States. Like thousands of immigrants before them, Eugène D. Burguières (1804–76), a merchant of independent means, and his cousin, E. Denis Lalande (ca. 1808–44), a jeweler, had crossed the ocean anticipating a bright future in the New World. On November 7, 1830, after bidding farewell to their families, their friends, and their country, they had boarded the ship La Glaneuse at Le Havre, carrying a few worldly possessions, their cultural heritage, and a fine education. Though the ship’s sails were set for western shores, unlike the many ships that had left France in the nineteenth century, La Glaneuse was destined not for New Orleans but for Veracruz, Mexico. The two novice trailblazers had been lured by French promoters who had acquired large land grants in exchange for colonizing 3

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1.1 Schooner Jane, 1831.

the region with five hundred French settlers, who were promised shares of the bounty.1 One can only wonder what motivated these two young men to leave France. What dreams were they following? Perhaps they were escaping the political and economic turmoil in their native country. Or maybe they had imagined a pastoral life in an exotic wilderness where they could raise families and live on their own terms. Or possibly the two businessmen intended to stay just long enough to establish mercantile houses and contacts and then move on to Louisiana or even return to France. One thing is for certain: they had been attracted by promises of the one asset that they never could have acquired in France—land. Whatever hopes Eugène and Denis had were dashed even before their arrival when La Glaneuse ran aground off the coast of Veracruz. Finally, after landing at their destination on February 18, 1831, they found themselves in the hinterlands of Coatzacoalcos, a mosquito-infested jungle where their fellow countrymen faced backbreaking work, yellow fever, and starvation, conditions so terrible that they drove many to suicide. Even before they had left Le Havre for Mexico, forty-one potential settlers had died. Only two months after arriving, Burguières and Lalande recognized the desperate situation and boarded the schooner Jane for Louisiana, wiser and grateful to have escaped. Finally, at the end of April 1831, six months after leaving Le Havre, they arrived at the Port of Orleans with a new set of plans.2 In the 1830s, New Orleans already had a population of more than forty-six thousand. Located at the mouth of the Mississippi River, it was the outlet for all trade in the Mississippi Valley and a major entry

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point for world markets doing business throughout the United States, sometimes surpassing New York as the leading port of debarkation. Between 1820 and 1840, the city ranked among the five largest in the United States.3 The Mississippi River transported everything imaginable, from the latest Parisian fashions bound for markets upriver to shiploads of African slaves auctioned in New Orleans. The noisy docks were crowded with river pilots, cotton and sugar factors, and riverboat men, whom Mark Twain described as “rough and hardy . . . rude, uneducated, heavy drinkers . . . heavy fighters . . . profane, prodigious braggarts, yet, in the main, honest, [and] trustworthy.”4 Just beyond the levee was the heart of the city, the Vieux Carré or French Quarter, where the French Market, the Ursuline Convent, the Presbytère, the Napoleon House, the Cabildo, Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop, and rows of Spanish and French Creole townhouses and cottages were crowded side by side. Slaves were auctioned at Maspero’s Slave Exchange (now a restaurant), where Andrew Jackson met with Jean Lafitte to plan the city’s defense during the Battle of New Orleans. A few blocks over, French and Spanish suitors danced with beautiful quadroon (one-quarter black) women in the Orléans Ballroom and selected mistresses in the common practice of plaçage. In the Quarter and beyond, voodoo was practiced by both blacks and whites. On Sunday afternoons, just beyond the Vieux Carré, slaves danced the bamboula to African drums at Congo Square. Though Eugène discovered a mélange of races, nationalities, and languages in New Orleans (including the Spanish settlers who had arrived during the Spanish Interregnum between 1763 and 1800), the population of the city was comprised heavily of French nationals (“Foreign French”) who had fled the political and economic turmoil of the First Empire (1804–15) and later the Restoration (1815–30). Others emigrated because of local famines and epidemics. But according to Louisiana historian Carl A. Brasseaux, French nationals commonly left for economic incentives. After the July Monarchy (1830–48) was installed, “many merchants, artisans, and peasants displaced by economic changes at home sought the opportunities for advancement that the booming New Orleans and rural Louisiana economies then seemed to afford.” Thus, a second wave of émigrés fled to Louisiana. Eugène and his cousin were among the group that left France the year after Louis-Philippe assumed the country’s throne.5

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In addition to French nationals, approximately twenty-six hundred Francophone Acadians (’Cadians, later Cajuns) had migrated from Canada between 1765 and 1785. These impoverished refugees had been expelled from their homeland in Nova Scotia by the British in the brutal diaspora known as Le Grand Dérangement during the French and Indian War. They settled in the southwestern prairies of Louisiana (just west of New Orleans) and maintained a tight-knit culture that persists even today.6 Another large group of Francophones had fled to South Louisiana from Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti) during the black insurrection of 1809. More than ten thousand people escaped from SaintDomingue to New Orleans, doubling the city’s population in just three months.7 There were also the French and Spanish Creoles (Americanborn persons of French and Spanish descent), other Europeans, Creoles of color (persons of mixed European and African ancestry), and African slaves. After the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, the state experienced a massive influx of Américains (a derisive term used by the French Creoles for the English-speaking Anglos). Many were planters or laborers who came from the East Coast to take advantage of the rich riparian soil along the Mississippi River and the numerous bayous and inlets, planting cotton, indigo, and sugarcane. Despite the diverse population, the French nationals left the most enduring mark on the culture. In fact, not until after the Civil War did some intransigent French Creoles finally accept not only that Louisiana was a state in the Union but also that New Orleans was being ruled by Américains. In George Washington Cable’s novel of antebellum New Orleans, The Grandissimes, the patriarch of an old French Creole family who is described as “the aged high-priest of a doomed civilization” asserts, “The Cession is a mere temporary political manoeuvre! . . . Your Yankee Government is a failure . . . a driveling failure. It may live a year or two, or longer. Truth will triumph. The old Louisiana will rise again.” His dying words were “Louis—Louisian—a—for—ever!”8 He was partially correct. Even today, the French influence remains strong in South Louisiana. How had the French gained such a hold on New Orleans and South Louisiana even after the forty years of Spanish rule? As early as 1682, René-Robert de la Salle had claimed the territory for France, naming it after King Louis XIV. The Crescent City had been founded in 1718 and

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was named for Philippe II, duc d’Orléans, the future king of France who had lived there briefly. Still, by the late eighteenth century, only a small number of French immigrants had settled in the region—explorers, soldiers, missionaries, and current or retired military officers. But with the explosion of French immigration from 1775 to 1825, the state’s cultural destiny was forged. And so New Orleans remained a magnet for the French for more than a century, attracting at least one-third of all U.S. immigrants from France. Official documents show that more than eight thousand new arrivals from France entered the city between 1820 and 1839 alone. This influx had an enormous demographic impact, with French influence, in Brasseaux’s words, “seeping into the culture, economy, and politics of New Orleans and south Louisiana, establishing deep, enduring roots” and transforming the city into the Little Paris of America. In New Orleans as well as villages outside of the city, spoken French was reinforced by written French, which survived into the postbellum period in law, bilingual newspapers, personal letters, and journals. Once again, Cable’s legendary Creole patriarch had strong opinions on the subject, declaring, “English is not a language, sir; it is a jargon! . . . I know men in this city who would rather eat a dog than speak English!” For almost two centuries, South Louisiana Francophones have held on tenaciously to their native tongue despite the many decades of American acculturation.9 The burgeoning French immigrant populations in New Orleans brought a variety of skills, education, and trades, generating robust wholesale and retail economies. French merchants, Eugène and Denis among them, came in large numbers to support the growing demands of the Creoles who sought to re-create the Old World aristocracy in their new home across the ocean. Since New Orleans was the American outpost of French/European culture, there was a constant demand for the comforts and luxuries many had left behind in France. Thus, stylish clothing, continental cuisine, perfume, and the latest novels and magazines were just a few of the accoutrements the increasingly cosmopolitan city provided. European antiques furnished the palatial manors and plantation homes; Limoges china and Sèvres crystal graced the tables. Along with the thriving retail trade, New Orleans catered to its diverse population and visitors by nurturing the hospitality industry. Restaurants, theaters, operas, bars, gambling houses, and red-light establishments prospered.10

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By the time Eugène and Denis reached Louisiana, a class system had been entrenched for years. Sharing the apex of the social hierarchy were the French and Spanish Creoles, extolled as the descendants of “the best families of France and Spain . . . with the blood of kings coursing through their veins,” who had fled for political reasons. In The Memories of Fifty Years, William H. Sparks was outspoken in his conviction of the superiority of French Creoles: Their “chivalry of character” and “nobility of soul and mind” were the “heritage from their ancestors.” This, he wrote, was what the Creoles had “planted along the Mississippi.”11 Also high on the social ladder were wealthy Anglos, who brought capital and experience to the plantation system. Though scorned at first by the French and Spanish Creoles, Anglos who succeeded in commerce and agriculture saw their social status grow along with their bank accounts. When that happened, something even more important than blood emerged as a determinant of class. Money opened the doors of the formerly French enclaves to the nouveau riche Américains who were now building lavish mansions in the Garden District of New Orleans and Greek Revival plantation homes along the Mississippi River and bayous. More and more, the Anglos and the French began to do business with one another, to socialize, and finally to intermarry. But most of the poor and uneducated Acadians had been relegated to the western prairies and remained subordinate in the social hierarchy. The free persons of color (gens de couleur libre) were granted many rights; however, they existed in limbo, accepted by neither white culture nor black. Finally, of course, the slaves held up the social ladder. This hierarchy was upended only after the Civil War, which toppled the South’s entire social and economic system. Eugène and Denis Move On

Despite the business and social opportunities in New Orleans, the two adventurers decided against building their future in the Little Paris of America. Notwithstanding its advantages, the city had a dark side. Like Paris, New Orleans was the perfect breeding ground for disease and epidemics. Until the Civil War, the Lower Mississippi Valley was considered one of the unhealthiest places in the world to live, and the likelihood of an untimely death was frighteningly high. French officers regarded the city as the worst posting they could get. This perception

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was not unfounded. Between 1817 and 1905, more than forty-one thousand people died of yellow fever. In 1832, the year Eugène moved to rural Terrebonne Parish, yellow fever and cholera killed more than five thousand people in the city. For many settlers, this was reason enough to move to the outlying areas of South Louisiana.12 The rural communities attracted many French-immigrant merchants eager to provide food and supplies for the growing agricultural populations, fueling the development of towns and cities in the region. Furthermore, these nascent towns required not only businessmen (like Eugène and Denis) but physicians, lawyers, artisans, law-enforcement personnel, government workers, clergy, teachers, field laborers, and construction workers.13 The freedom to create their own future was the most powerful force that drew immigrants to America; a major attraction of the outlying villages was the opportunity to become property owners. Eugène had certainly arrived at an exciting time. Lyle Saxon captured the character of the period and images of the South Louisiana countryside: “The alluvial lands along the waterways of Louisiana were as rich as any lands in America. Fortunes were made in three or four years; . . . tracts of land changed hands overnight. Men grew rich through speculation. . . . Slaves were put to work clearing the land. . . . Great trees came crashing down. . . . Levees were thrown up to prevent overflows. Plows turned the dark soil into furrows; cotton and sugar-cane fields were planted. . . . It was as though the very land itself stirred from its sleep and stretched its strong black body.”14 In The Birth of the Modern, Paul John writes that this was a “unique moment, which could never conceivably occur again,” when land “was cheaper than any time in history, before or since.” A Louisiana settler from Maryland reported, “Many small fortunes have been made here the past three years and money can be made buying these wild lands, clearing them, and selling them. Land can be bought for $2.50 an acre, cleared and resold for $20 or $30.”15 Attracted by these stories, Eugène and Denis left New Orleans and set out on a steamboat for the wide-open prairies in Assumption Parish, traveling more than sixty miles northwest on the Mississippi River to Donaldsonville, where the bayou joins the river. There they transferred to another steamer going down Bayou Lafourche until they reached Plattenville, north of Napoleonville, a region already settled by the French, Acadians, and Spanish.16

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Origins: From France to the New World, 1660s–1831

Lalande decided that this was the end of his travels and the beginning of the new life he had been seeking. On April 11, 1836, he married an Acadian, Marie Anne Clémence “Azélie” Bourg (1817–44), with his cousin Eugène as his witness. The Lalandes and Bourgs were among Plattenville’s earliest settlers. But life on the South Louisiana frontier was hard. After eight years of marriage, Azélie died, leaving behind four small children. Less than a month later, her son, Adolphe Eugène Denis (1838–44), died, and Denis Lalande soon followed. The surviving children—Josephine Emélie (b. 1837), Camille Léon (1840–91), and Clémence Aglaé (1843–84)—were placed in three different nearby Bourg family households.17 Eugène Burguières traveled even farther into the South Louisiana hinterlands, where he and his descendants became an integral part of Louisiana’s French societies. They built their dynasty through a network of other Foreign French families until after the Civil War, when the French Burguières began to marry Acadians and the two Francophone cultures united with Anglo-Americans. Just as diverse cultural influences had enriched nineteenth-century Louisiana, its intermingling of blood and cultures strengthened the Louisiana House of Burguières. Vast tracts of land, surpassing Eugène’s original dreams, became its foundation, and the Burguières have remained a cohesive clan for almost two centuries. The French Roots of the House of Burguières If you would find yourself, look to the land from which you came and to which you go. —Stuart Udall

The Burguières family can be traced back to the 1660s in Montauban, a commune along the Tarn River in the Midi-Pyrénées region in the south of France.18 Just north of Toulouse, Montauban is one of the oldest bastides (fortified medieval towns) in France, founded in 1144. Like New Orleans, the ancestral home of the Burguières lies along the banks of a river that often floods. This rich alluvial soil has made Montauban a center of both agriculture and commerce for almost a thousand years. But there comparisons must rest. While Louisiana’s identity shifted from French to Spanish back to French and finally to American, Montauban’s history was far more complicated and brutal.

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Montauban was the site of bloody conflicts during the Albigensian Crusades, the Inquisition, and the wars between the Huguenots (Protestants) and Catholics that raged for centuries throughout the Midi-Pyrénées region.19 Eugène’s earliest known ancestor, his greatgreat-grandfather, Jean Burguières (mid-1660s–ca. 1710–14), was a huissier au bureau d’élection (the equivalent of a bailiff ). Several of his descendants worked in the French government, including Antoine Burguières (1754–ca. 1813), a celebrated soldier who served more than thirty years in the French military. One of Jean’s sons, François Burguières (ca. 1684–1739), inherited his father’s position as huissier, and another, Joseph Antoine Burguières (ca. 1679–1750), was a priest with a doctorate from the Faculté de Theology, Université de Paris. Eugène’s grandfather, also named Joseph Antoine Burguières (1716–83), was a merchant and landowner. They, like their descendants in America, were well-heeled and well educated. Eugène’s father, Jean Louis Burguières (1763–1844), was the first of the family to leave Montauban. He became a citizen of pre-Haussmann Paris, then still a city of winding medieval alleys and surviving Roman roads, at a time of famine, high taxation, and political upheaval. Jean Louis’s residence was at 165 Rue Montmartre, at the top of a hill where one of the oldest churches in Paris, St. Pierre de Montmartre, has been standing since the twelfth century. On the eve of the French Revolution, Jean Louis was twenty-five years old and working at the Bureau des Nourrices (Department of Wet Nurses), where peasant women suckled the children of aristocrats. Seven years later, he married Pauline Catherine Michelle Lallemand (1785–1842), the daughter of the Bureau’s director, Pierre Jean Lallemand (1750–1824), and Lucie Cauchois Lallemand (1762–1832). Like the Burguières, most of the Lallemands had been senior government administrators before, during, and after the revolution, surviving under both the monarchy and Napoleon Bonaparte. According to French historian Jordan Kellman, “Many of the same families [that supported the monarchy] cropped up as a new elite in Napoleonic France. In fact Napoleon made deals with many of the most powerful families to include them in the new prosperity if they would go along with his plans. . . . These patterns would hold even over the very long term.”20 Whatever in his restless nature had originally caused Jean Louis to leave Montauban for the greater challenges and opportunities of Paris was passed on to his four sons. Perhaps the revolution had imparted a

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1.2 Dr. Edouard Edmond Burguières, ca. 1881. Burguières Family Collection, Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Louisiana at Lafayette

sense of human fragility and the need for security; the realities of postrevolutionary economics may well have demonstrated that interesting challenges and opportunities for a better, more stable life could now be found beyond the City of Light. Either way, even though Jean Louis and Pauline Catherine remained in Paris until the end of their lives, all of their children moved on. The era’s fast-changing events certainly shaped Eugène Denis Burguières, the only one of Jean Louis and Pauline’s children who emigrated to America. He was born in Paris in 1804, the same year Napoleon crowned himself emperor. Eugène and his younger brothers, Edouard Edmond (1814–83) and Philippe Julien (1816–97), shared an adventurous spirit that compelled them to seek success abroad in the wake of the revolution. The oldest brother, Pierre Guillaume Edouard Burguières (1803–91), moved to Beaucourt in Franche-Comté, in northeastern France. He became a merchant and later served as first adjunct to the Officier d’État Civil (Office of Civil Registrations). He and his wife, Charlotte Barbier Burguières (1803–75), had no children. The youngest brother, Philippe Julien Burguières, sailed across the Channel to England when he was twenty-two. He was a dancing master and later a professor of French

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literature, choosing to live most of his low-key life at St.-Leonards-onSea, one of England’s loveliest coastal resorts. And although he married three times, he, like his oldest brother, had no descendants. Edouard Edmond Burguières (1814–83) became a world-renowned physician. At twenty-seven, he received a doctorate from the Faculté de Médecine de Paris, and he later was inducted as an officer in the Ordre National de la Légion d’Honneur in recognition of his groundbreaking research on cholera. He shared Eugène’s taste for high adventure, accompanying Ferdinand de Lesseps and the French army to Egypt, where Edouard provided skilled care for the builders of the Suez Canal during a cholera epidemic and became a confidante to Egypt’s ruler, Khedive Ismail. He also received medals and citations of honor from the governments of the Ottoman Empire, Tunis, Italy, Austria, Sweden and Norway, and Germany. He and his wife, Marie Mathilde Onésime Bourdin Burguières (1818–88), had two sons.21 This was the stuff of which Eugène was made. These were his roots, his influences—the births, deaths, loves, and stories he carried deep within himself when he boarded La Glaneuse in Le Havre in 1830. He could not have known the consequences of his decisions to leave Paris and Mexico and to remain in Louisiana instead of returning to France. Not yet married, he could not have foreseen that one of his sons, Jules Martial Burguières, would become a Louisiana sugar baron whose tons of sweet white crystals would be heaped into barges at the same site where Eugène had stepped into his new life. He could not have imagined that in sixty-two years, this son and his large family would reside in one of the grandest manors in New Orleans or that the city would remain a central backdrop for the Louisiana House of Burguières.

2 A New Beginning

Eugène Denis Burguières in Southwest Louisiana, 1831–1850

One must visit the deep, silent bayous, overhung with moss-covered cypress, willows and live-oaks; he must ramble along the clear, quiet lakes, whose polished surfaces reflect with perfect fidelity everything above and around them. . . . He must penetrate the tangled swamps, with their primeval forests standing as the representatives of past ages, with their dense jungles of luxuriant cane, with their ponds, sloughs and marais, where the wild fowl rustles among the water-lilies; and if he has anything of an artist’s eye, he will everywhere see new and peculiar beauties. —Daniel Dennett, 1890

Perhaps it was a harbinger of things to come. Eugène’s long journey from his homeland finally ended in Terrebonne, French for “good earth.” This good earth, west of the Mississippi River and southwest of New Orleans, provided for the Louisiana Burguières well into the twenty-first century. Terrebonne Parish (county) is situated deep in Louisiana bayou country, an “intricate riverine complex, a labyrinthine latticework of interconnected waterways” that makes up the largest distributary of the Mississippi River.1 Water is virtually a character in the Burguières’ story. Even before humans changed the landscape with canals and levees, water covered nearly 40 percent of the parish—rivers, bayous, marshes, cypress swamps, lakes, marais, coulees, and bays that open to the Gulf of Mexico. Beyond and between the watery landscapes are broad prairies, with barely a tree to obstruct the view of the endless horizon. These sluggish bayous and waterways acquired French names such as Bayou Lafourche (fork), Bayou Salé (salty), Bayou Cypremort (dead 14

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cypress), and Bayou Petite Caillou (small pebble). Starting at the coastal wetlands and traveling northwest through the prairies is the Atchafalaya Basin, the largest overflow swamp in the United States. Comprised of more than eight hundred thousand acres, the basin is considered an ecological wonder, with sixty-five species of reptiles, ninety species of fish, and forty-six species of mammals. In the myriad waterways of South Louisiana, fishermen filled their nets with crabs, trout, redfish, oysters, and other delicacies in demand in New Orleans and beyond. Here also roamed Louisiana black bears, panthers, and bobcats and an abundance of wild game and migratory birds. Trappers poled silently through the swamps and narrow canals, looking for alligators, muskrats, and mink. The region was a paradise for hunters and fishermen. Nature was bountiful. Eugène Denis Burguières’s new home in bayou country was intensely hot and humid. Because the extreme summer temperatures and mild winters encouraged wild vegetation, dense virgin forests of bald cypress, live oak, gum, and ash trees lined the waterways. Cypress knees, wild roseau, and velvet cattails grew profusely in the brown muck of the swamps. In the woodlands, thick underbrush of blackberry, muscadine, and dewberry vines choked lesser vegetation. Wild indigo, passionflowers, and morning glory wove their tendrils through vines that enshrouded abandoned barns, cabins, and fences. Fruit trees, especially orange and fig, flourished in the soil and climate. The tropical palmetto rose from the swamps and bayous, marking the invisible boundary that divides the prairie and the lush wetlands. The most hardened traveler was mesmerized by the countryside’s exotic beauty and romantic nature. But before long, Eugène and other newcomers would have discovered the perils lurking just beneath the beauty—unexpected encounters with a hungry alligator sunning along a bayou bank, a chance meeting with an elusive cottonmouth hiding under the wild iris, or the lowly Culex salinarius, otherwise known as the brackish-water mosquito, swarming during the long season of sweltering heat and humidity. It was the ruin of many a pastoral picnic or lazy afternoon nap under the giant magnolias. Mark Twain was impressed with the Louisiana mosquito, which, he claimed, “could whip a dog” and “four could hold down a man.” Thomas Bangs Thorpe, a northern transplant to Louisiana and master of the tall tale, was no less amazed, swearing that the Louisiana mosquito could “torment an alligator to death, and sting mules right through their hooves.”2

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A New Beginning: Eugène Denis Burguières, 1831–1850

2.1 Map of Louisiana Sugar Bowl Parishes. Courtesy of the American Sugar Cane League.

The sons of two employees of the Southern Pacific Railroad at the Burguières’ Cypremort Plantation, Sam Walker and Wes David, vividly remember living in railroad boxcars as children. The stifling dwellings had no windows or fans, only a screened-in entry to keep out the mosquitoes. “So great was the menace, only great necessity justified exit from indoors at night.”3 But mosquitoes were more than a nuisance. They carried yellow fever, malaria, and other virulent diseases that killed untold numbers in Louisiana and around the world. Agriculture reigned supreme in Louisiana for more than a century. Though indigo had been successfully grown in the region in the eighteenth century, a blight caused by a worm cast planters into deep poverty in 1792. Then cotton became king. Because of South Louisiana’s wet climate, the crop never met planters’ expectations, and they dubbed it “le maudit [damned] coton.” When worms and rot eradicated the crop in the 1820s, planters realized that they needed a more reliable crop to survive. In 1795, Etienne de Boré had developed a process for making sugar from Louisiana cane, and planters turned to that enterprise. Then in 1813, a few planters in South Louisiana made attempts at sugar production, but the yield was a mere one hundred hogsheads. One of the most significant problems was that sugar was a tropical plant but Louisiana was a subtropical region. Even just one night of frost could wipe out

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an entire crop. When ribbon cane (a more frost-resistant variety) was introduced in 1817, cotton planters increasingly turned to sugar as their salvation. By the mid-1820s, the capricious King Cotton had been duly deposed and in its place rose the Empire of Sugar.4 South Louisiana’s sugar country (also known as the Sugar Bowl) includes three regions. The oldest and most established area extends nearly 130 miles north of New Orleans, along the banks of the Mississippi River, and approximately 60 miles downriver into St. Bernard and Plaquemines Parishes; the second area was developed along the banks of Bayou Lafourche, southwest of New Orleans in Lafourche and Assumption Parishes; and the third region grew around the towns of New Iberia and Franklin, along the banks of Bayou Teche, Bayou Salé, Bayou Cypremort, and others as well as in the prairies of St. Mary, Iberia, St. Martin, and Lafayette Parishes.5 This is where the Burguières’ sugar empire developed and prospered. As sugar production grew, a reliable and efficient means of transportation was crucial. In April 1825, the Louisville, a lightweight steamer, proved that such transportation was feasible between Bayou Teche and New Orleans even during the low-water season, which lasted from January through mid-May. South Louisiana was poised to become one of America’s largest sugar producers. By the 1826–27 season, the Sugar Bowl parishes along South Louisiana’s major waterways produced more than 71,000 hogsheads; the next year, production rose to almost 88,000. The flourishing sugarcane industry continued to develop, and the 1844– 45 Louisiana crop filled almost 204,000 hogsheads with a value of sixty million dollars.6 The abundance of timber in the region created another major industry. The large cypress and tupelo swamps became more valuable as the population grew. Timber was needed to build houses, barns, pirogues, and entire villages. It was needed to fuel the early steam engines in the sugar mills and steamships and for countless other uses. After the end of slavery, several large sawmills provided employment for the region and made wealthy men of the timber mill owners. Eugène Sets Down Roots

In 1831, Eugène Burguières adopted this land and these people. Terrebonne Parish had been carved out of Lafourche Parish in 1822. Houma,

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A New Beginning: Eugène Denis Burguières, 1831–1850

the parish seat, situated on the banks of Bayou Terrebonne, was not founded until three years after Eugène’s arrival. The village had two main avenues of transportation: a dirt road along Bayou Terrebonne, and the bayou itself, flanked with native trees and wildflowers along its sixty-mile length. Transportation by boat on the bayou was often more reliable and comfortable than on the muddy or rutted roads that ran beside it. Early residents recalled many years later that “Main Street flowed through the city. Mail was delivered by boat . . . and children went to school in pirogues in some areas. The mailman would cook and serve oyster jambalaya to his passengers who rode his boat. Even funeral boats passed up and down on Houma’s water Main Street. . . . It was an old bayou custom to have boat funeral cortèges. The deceased was borne to the church in a pirogue hearse, and the mourners followed in their own pirogues.”7 The village was “alive with sound and color—the sound of the conch shell horns on boats and the varied hues of their multi-colored sails.” But the idyllic life in this bayou settlement was occasionally spoiled when stray bobcats appeared in the center of town. In 1825, the police jury paid a bounty of five dollars a head for every panther or bobcat killed in the area. Though Eugène’s new home was a recognized town with its own local government and commerce, it remained an outpost of civilization, a frontier yet to be developed.8 Like many of his ancestors in France, Eugène began working for the local government as a recorder and notary public. In the new courthouse in Houma, he was surrounded by French-speaking attorneys, recorders, parish clerks, and other local officials. He became fluent in English, learned the laws and customs of his new Louisiana home, and associated himself with the most influential people in the parish. In addition to his local government employment, he worked at various times as a private tutor, a teacher at a local college, the proprietor of the E. D. General Store, and an attorney.9 Having established himself in his new home, Eugène turned his thoughts to marriage and a family. But not just any woman would have suited the young Frenchman and his native country’s worldview, culture, and traditions. Marriage was more than a personal relationship; it was a business contract that affected not only his future but also his family’s. The many French families in South Louisiana had formed a tight, insular fiefdom and were adamant that their children marry among their own kind for many reasons. The relative isolation and the difficulty of

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transportation in the outlying areas made it a challenge for young men and women to find friends and marriage partners outside their own circle. Language was also a determinant, as was the Catholic religion, its traditions and celebrations. Basic French values and worldview were considered to lie at the core of happy marriages, and a good education facilitated advantageous business and social connections. In addition, Louisiana’s inheritance laws required equitable division of estates among all the children. In large French families, each child would get only a small share. But a good marriage could advance the overall position of both families. Finally, the greatest imperative for marrying within the French culture was the issue of blood and its purity, a paramount concern that persisted from centuries of living under the French monarchy. When the nuptials upheld traditional French values and maintained or elevated the bride’s and groom’s financial and social standing, both they and their families had made un bon mariage (a good/advantageous marriage). The Burguières made many such bons mariages. On July 25, 1837, Houma was abuzz with excitement as Eugène Burguières wedded a twenty-four-year-old “auburn-haired, green-eyed beauty.” His marriage to Marie Marianne Verret Delaporte (1812–83), the widow of Joseph Delaporte, united the newly transplanted French Burguières with the venerable French Verret clan, one of the pioneer first families of Louisiana for more than a hundred years. Eugène, like Joseph Delaporte, had gained entrée into the Verret family as the tutor of the Verret children.10 At the time of their marriage, Eugène had assets of forty-two hundred piasters. Marianne brought a sizable dowry from the Verret family as well as assets from her brief first marriage to Delaporte. She owned a house and valuable land along Bayou Terrebonne. In addition, her two young children from her first marriage, Alfred Joseph Delaporte (b. 1833) and Marie Elvire Delaporte (1834–1903), had inherited ninety-five hundred piasters from their father, a meager amount when compared to the thirty-four thousand francs they stood to inherit from their paternal grandparents, the Delaportes living in France.11 Eugène had indeed made un bon mariage. Soon after their wedding, the couple moved into a cypress cottage on property owned by Marianne and her brother, Auguste Verret, who sold his one-third share to the newlyweds for twelve hundred piasters. This was a prime location on the right side of Bayou Terrebonne, on high ground,

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A New Beginning: Eugène Denis Burguières, 1831–1850

facing the bridge and the town of Houma. From this ideal location (now East Park Street), Marianne and Eugène could sit on their gallery and observe the goings-on in the growing community. Eugène continued to acquire valuable land along Bayou Terrebonne throughout his life.12 He and Marianne had nine children: Ernest Denis (1838–78), Lucien Auguste (b. and d. 1838), Camilla Pauline (1840–96), Jacqueline (b. 1842), Marguerite Nadege (1845–1936), Marie Annette (1847–1932), Jules Martial (1850–99), and Leufroy (1852–92). Eugène also became stepfather to Marie Elvire Delaporte and Alfred Delaporte. Such a large family meant that each child would receive only a small inheritance, so it was important that they marry well. The Burguières did, and they, too, had large families, resulting in an enormous extended family in only two generations. The Burguières thus had all the advantages of being well connected but faced the growing problem of further division of their resources. The Burgeoning Clan

With few surviving personal letters, diaries, or portraits, little is known about Eugène and Marianne beyond official documents. Yet an examination of their extended family—the families into which their children married—unearths clues not available in written history or official documents. The identity, values, and worldviews of grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, and godparents were often reflections of and reflections on the immediate family. Their social status, occupations, political views, and scandals reflected on everyone within the clan; their accomplishments created a sense of competition with each other. Thus, success literally bred success. The Burguières’ extended family serves as a paradigm of Louisiana French marriage traditions—marrying within the French culture, keeping the French blood pure, preserving French culture and values, and maintaining or improving socioeconomic status. Eugène and Marianne’s children married landed gentry of French descent—distinguished old-guard planters, powerful political leaders, and renowned military men—creating a merger, an intermingling of businesses, finances, and social relationships that strengthened the bonds among the clan members. They were French-speaking Catholics, well educated and cultured. They attended the French Opera, collected French art, enjoyed musical performances in their homes and in public venues, owned extensive

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2.2 Marie Marianne Verret Burguières, ca. 1870. Burguières Family Collection, Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Louisiana at Lafayette

libraries (belles lettres as well as medical, historical, and rare books), and read French newspapers. Marianne descended from a long line of military men, government leaders in the territory of Louisiana, and landed gentry. Her greatgrandfather, Jacques Cantrelle (1697–1778), was born in Picardie, France, and was an important member of the Louisiana Legislative Council that governed the territory. He was the owner of Cabahonoce (Choctaw for “mallard’s roost”) Plantation. Marianne’s grandfather, Nicolas Verret (1725–75), served as lieutenant governor of the Louisiana Territory as the first Spanish commandant and as a judge on the Acadian Coast in St. James Parish. Her father, Jacques Verret (1752–1834), fought in the American Revolution at the Battle of Baton Rouge. Like his father and grandfather before him, Jacques owned vast real estate holdings, including an eight-thousand-acre indigo plantation. He had been educated in Europe and is believed to have been the first engineer to build sluice gates along the Mississippi.13

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A New Beginning: Eugène Denis Burguières, 1831–1850

Marianne’s family immediately linked Eugène with South Louisiana’s elite plantocracy. He also developed a close personal and business relationship with her six brothers and her son from her first marriage. At one time or other, most of them served as recorders, appraisers, tax collectors, and sheriffs in Terrebonne Parish.14 The tradition of marrying well (and marrying French) continued with the union of Eugène’s stepdaughter, Marie Elvire Delaporte, and the venerable Viguerie family, whose members played an instrumental role in the development of Terrebonne Parish. Jean-Pierre Viguerie (1828–88) was a native of Heches, Hautes-Pyrénées, in the high mountains of southwestern France, not far from the homeland of the Burguières. He and his two brothers immigrated to America in 1849 to avoid conscription into the military. The family had already lost several sons in the various Napoleonic campaigns.15 In South Louisiana, Jean-Pierre and his brother, François, prospered and became business tycoons, acquiring thousands of acres in St. Mary, Terrebonne, Vermilion, and Lafourche Parishes, including Orange Grove, Point Farm, and Evergreen Plantations. Jean-Pierre operated his own sawmill at Ardoyne Plantation near Houma, milling the virgin cypress timber on his huge estates. The Vigueries were also sugar planters, merchants, cattlemen, and owners of a large hotel on their four-thousand-acre property on Bayou Caillou Island. Like Eugène and other Burguières family members, Jean-Pierre was employed by the Terrebonne Parish government, serving as tax collector and recorder.16 Beyond their business and political acumen, Jean-Pierre and François were “fantastically interesting and vibrant men,” filled with “panache and joie de vivre.” They regularly attended the French Opera in New Orleans, returning home with whole scores and librettos, which they performed for family and friends at the many social gatherings in their home in Houma. Though they spoke fluent English, tradition demanded that only French be spoken at meals, ensuring that the language survived many generations in these families.17 Both a son and a daughter of Eugène and Marianne married into the Bonvillain family, another French pioneering clan whose ancestors had been sugar planters in Terrebonne Parish long before Eugène arrived. As a result, noted the Houma Courier in 1974, “The Bonvillain and Burguières families are so closely connected you cannot separate them.” The article featured interviews with sisters Marie Elise “Elsie” Bonvillain (1900–1984) and Marie Louise “Fannie” Bonvillain (1899–1990), who

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were descended from Bonvillains and Burguières on both their paternal and maternal sides.18 In 1873, the Burguières became allied with another prominent dynasty, the Patouts, when Eugène and Marianne’s son, Jules Martial, married Marie Corinne Patout (1852–90), granddaughter of the first Patout in America, Pierre Siméon Patout (1791–1847), who had immigrated from the tiny settlement of Molien in north-central France.19 In years to come, the Burguières united with yet another esteemed Terrebonne family, the Duponts, whose patriarch, Jean Marie Dupont (1835–1904), immigrated from Benac, France, to New Orleans in 1854. Two years after his arrival, Jean Marie established a general store on the corner of Main and Barrow Streets, selling dry goods, groceries, wines, liquors, cigars, plantation supplies, and hardware. After his death, his sons, Albert M. Dupont (1861–1943) and Joseph Cyrille Dupont (1863– 1929), inherited the A. M. and J. C. Dupont Store, which grew to be the largest department store in Terrebonne Parish. In 1889, Eugène and Marianne’s granddaughter, Alice Burguières (1871–1941), the daughter of E. D. Burguières (1838–78) and Aglaé Bonvillain Burguières (1836–1904), married J. Cyrille Dupont, who became one of Terrebonne’s great political leaders. Cyrille served in the Louisiana House of Representatives, as Houma’s mayor, and as an assistant in the writing of the state constitution. He was acclaimed as “a man of vision who foresaw that the development of natural waterways and the building of roads would lead to the advancement of his town and parish.” His political power lay behind the construction of the road connecting Houma and New Orleans and later the building of the Intracoastal Canal, which linked Houma with points east and west. No less formidable was his wife, a “grande dame, elegant in appearance and gracious in manner,” a woman in the vanguard of every civic movement and organization, including the Terrebonne Chapter of the American Red Cross, which she founded and headquartered in her home.20 The Burguières’ connections to these French families as well as the Bonins and Caillouets created a powerful personal and financial alliance. Not until the end of the Civil War did one of Eugène and Marianne’s children, Marguerite, marry an Acadian, Augustave Theriot (Terraiu) (1839–1923). His ancestors had found refuge in South Louisiana after their expulsion from Halifax in November 1765. Augustave was a Confederate soldier and a member of the Lafourche Creoles, who fought

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A New Beginning: Eugène Denis Burguières, 1831–1850

in the Battle of Shiloh in Company G of the 18th Louisiana Infantry Regiment. Marguerite and Augustave had thirteen children.21 Another union with an Acadian family occurred with the second marriage of Eugène and Marianne’s son, Jules Martial Burguières Sr., to Ida Laperle Broussard (1868–1948) in 1891. Ida was descended from the line of Alexandre Broussard dit Beausoleil, who, along with his legendary brother, Joseph Broussard dit Beausoleil, had dared to take on the British in Nova Scotia before being exiled during Le Grand Dérangement. The Broussards were among the first Acadian families to settle in Louisiana.22 The Burguières and Their Anglo-American Neighbors

Between the 1830s and 1840s, scores of Anglo-Americans moved south to Louisiana. Two prominent families that settled in nearby Iberia Parish became important in the lives of the Burguières. Anglo-American William F. Weeks came to the area in the early 1800s, years before Eugène or many of the Foreign French, and purchased 1,664 fertile acres on Grand Côte Island (now Weeks Island). As early as 1820, his son, David Weeks, was planting sugarcane rather than indigo and cotton. About the time that Eugène arrived, David Weeks built Shadows-onthe-Teche, a Greek Revival manor in nearby New Iberia. By 1850, the Weekses owned two hundred slaves, two thousand acres, and a modernized sugar mill. But by 1877, the family’s prized Cypremort Plantation in St. Mary Parish was in the hands of the Burguières. Business and personal relationships apparently were kept separate, because the two families remained close. When one of the Burguières mothers was ill, one of the mothers from the Weeks family nursed her child, and women of the two families shared wedding veils.23 Other Anglo-American neighbors in this remote region were the McIlhennys, future Tabasco magnates. Their Scots-Irish progenitor, Ezekiel McIlhenny, had come to America in the 1740s. In 1841, Edmund McIlhenny moved to Louisiana and married Mary Eliza Avery, who inherited Île Petite Anse (now Avery Island) from her father, Judge D. D. Avery. Fiery Tabasco sauce was made on the island from the peppers that grew there, and during the Civil War, the McIlhennys discovered vast quantities of rock salt lying in a giant dome deep beneath the island’s surface. Many years later, the Burguières and the Cafferys,

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another Anglo sugarcane family in St. Mary Parish, partnered in the acquisition of Côte Blanche Island, and its salt mines ultimately saved the J. M. Burguières Company in the twentieth century. Maintaining Family Bonds

Having formed advantageous marriages, the Burguières needed to maintain and strengthen those family bonds beyond the intermingling of businesses and finances. Common cultural and family traditions, celebrations, religion, and interests fortified their network. Food lay at the heart of most social interactions. The Louisiana French confirmed the adage, “The French don’t eat to live, they live to eat.” A sumptuous meal provided much more than sustenance. It was a multivalent symbol, an art, a deeply meaningful ritual that created and affirmed special relationships among those who took part in it. Le diner was as personal as anything could be—an embrace, an enfolding within the circle of la famille, connecting generations and genders. It expressed identity and aptitude. It was a performance, personal and communal, that was not to be taken lightly by either the performer or the audience. The unwritten rules called for proper dress, fastidious table etiquette, and pleasant conversation—in French. Food and its preparation were “the great business of the day.”24 When Eugène and other French immigrants came to Louisiana, they brought the distinctive palate of their mother country. French cooking was a fundamental component of his cultural memory, which interacted with the diverse cultures and unique environment of South Louisiana to evolve into a distinct cuisine. In urban and aristocratic New Orleans, the mixing of French, Spanish, African, Caribbean, Native American, and other ethnic food traditions resulted in Creole cuisine; in rural South Louisiana, the peasant/country cooking of Acadian subsistence farmers blended with influences of the other cultures in the area to evolve into Cajun cuisine.25 In the early nineteenth century, the members of the French planter class remained very much influenced by the food of their homeland. French recipes were adapted to the natural resources of South Louisiana’s wetlands and prairies. Stews, soups, and bouillabaisses were made with the wealth of readily available seafood: shrimp, crabs, oysters, and freshand saltwater fish. French dishes such as cuisses de grenouilles provençale

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(frogs’ legs) were served, as was boeuf à la bourguignonne, prepared with local meat raised on the open prairies. Canard à l’orange was prepared with ducks brought in from a morning hunt and oranges picked from the families’ orchards. Coq au vin was no challenge, since chickens were raised in family barnyards. And French wine was as important in Louisiana as it was in France. Sunday was a special day for French Catholics, no matter the season. High Mass and Sunday dinners, as regular as the sun and the moon, kept kinship ties strong. The hearth beckoned la famille home again. Cousins, uncles, and aunts gathered at Grandma and Grandpa’s house—the home place, the center—and reaffirmed their connection to a group larger than themselves. E. D. and Aglaé Burguières’ great-granddaughters recalled the Sunday feasts at Alice B. Plantation, particularly the traditional groaning boards (buffets) in the large dining room, “roomy enough for the big crowd that usually answered the dinner bell.”26 La veillée was another social interaction that strengthened ties. Family and friends gathered at each other’s homes for visits (usually after supper), with dessert, café noir, and café au lait served in a ritualistic fashion—what historian Carl A. Brasseaux refers to as “high coffee.” The Burguières probably served their guests using their best porcelain demitasse cups, saucers, sugar bowl, and cream pitcher and sterling coffee spoons.27 Later, perhaps in the parlor or on the front gallery, numerous têteà-têtes might have taken place: women chatting about their children, cooking, sewing, servants, or books and sometimes enjoying idle gossip; planters smoking fine cigars and sipping old brandy as they discussed the sugar crop, weather conditions, finances, and hunting or engaging in friendly banter or perhaps idle gossip of their own. The group might have played cards, chess, or backgammon. Storytelling from the traditional French repertoire of folktales would have been a favorite among the children, as would rounds of pétanque (a French ball game) under the shade of the oaks. Perhaps couples promenaded along the shaded bayous to watch the sun set—the perfect way to end la veillée. And on special occasions, the adults enjoyed bals de maisons (house dances), with music and dancing in the home. Summer vacations were a high point in the children’s lives, anticipated for much of the year. Cousins spent a week or more together at their grandparents’ houses, deepening connections with their relatives by playing along the bayous, hunting and fishing, dressing paper dolls,

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or just lazing away a summer afternoon under the trees. It was a time for seeking clues about grandparents’ past and present lives, digging in drawers, armoires, barns, and sheds—nothing was unimportant. Even the space under the house had a trove of artifacts that revealed secrets from another age. In the early 1970s, Fannie and Elsie Bonvillain, the by-then-elderly granddaughters of E. D. and Aglaé Burguières, told the Houma Courier that every day was a holiday at Alice B. Plantation. There they gathered eggs from the henhouse, picked fresh fruits and vegetables from the orchard and garden, and enjoyed afternoon parties under the oaks, eating sweet homegrown melons cooled overnight in a deep well. In the morning at Grand-Mère Burguières’s house, there was a big breakfast—bacon, sausage, chicken, hot biscuits, grits, cream cheese, milk, coffee, cornbread, and more. She served them a snack at noon since her “big meal” was at three o’clock in the afternoon and her supper at eight o’clock in the evening.28 Life for the French in Louisiana revolved around the rituals and holy days of the Catholic Church, the foundation of most other social interactions that reinforced la famille. Attending Mass was not only a spiritual occasion but also a social event. Visiting with the clan and friends from around the countryside at church was an important way of reinforcing relationships and French identity. One of Eugène and Marianne’s granddaughters recalled that before a church building was constructed, “The priest used to celebrate Mass in Grandma Burguières’s parlor. She made the beeswax candles used on the altar. People from all around used to come to the house to go to Confession, to get married, to be christened.”29 Sacraments of the Catholic Church merited celebrations. First Communions, confirmations, weddings, and funerals reunited the extended family either to celebrate or to mourn, reminding people of the value of familial support in good times and in bad. The Catholic liturgical calendar was a social calendar as well. Noël was one of the major religious holidays. On Christmas Eve, Père Noël was a welcome guest in the homes. Then families gathered to attend La Messe de Minuit (Midnight Mass), immediately followed by Le Réveillon (Waking), a traditional feast following a day of fasting. But the grandest French celebration was on Jour de l’An (New Year’s Day), with more feasting and gift-giving. Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday) marked the day before Lenten season. Rooted in ancient spring fertility rites and rituals, it later became a

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medieval European celebration. In 1703, French settlers in Mobile, Alabama, brought the first Mardi Gras celebration to the New World. In the nineteenth century, French immigrants transplanted their favorite holiday to New Orleans and rural South Louisiana. By the time of Eugène’s arrival in the early 1830s, Mardi Gras was firmly entrenched. It was a day of traditional play and general merriment enhanced by what Louisiana folklorist Barry Ancelet calls “a ritual altering of consciousness”—that is, the consumption of alcohol. Masking allowed revelers an opportunity “to play beyond themselves” and to “shed inhibitions” while maintaining anonymity as they acted out their roles for the day.30 But as the midnight bell tolled, all play ended. Ash Wednesday marked the beginning of Lent. Priests marked the foreheads of the former revelers with black ashes while incanting, “Remember thou art dust, and unto dust thou shalt returneth.” The transition from feast to famine, sin to sacrifice, play to prayer was in progress. During Lent, devout Catholics abstained from meat on Fridays as well as from large meals and celebrations. In 1910, E. D. Burguières reminded his daughter, Alice, in a postcard from Mexico, “Don’t eat too much—Remember it’s Lent.”31 Abstaining from meat was not much of a sacrifice for the French living along the Gulf Coast and the bayous of South Louisiana because of the abundance of fresh seafood used in cooking delicious stews, bouillabaisse, or gumbos. However, many of the French fasted on Fridays during Lent. During this season, the family attended Mass and gathered at members’ homes for a recitation of the Rosary. Then came Pâque (Easter), celebrated with a High Mass, a feast of gigot d’agneau (leg of lamb) and spring vegetables, and the quintessential symbol of birth and springtime, the Easter egg.32 Each fall, churches in the agricultural parishes held a Blessing of the Crops to ensure a bountiful harvest, with shrimp boats receiving similar blessings along the bays and the Gulf Coast. On La Toussaint (All Saints’ Day), November 1, Catholics gathered at the cemeteries to clean and decorate the tombs of their ancestors. These solemn events were followed by a celebration of the principal local industry that is known today as the Sugarcane Festival. When Eugène Burguières left the Old World in the early 1830s, he forged a new life in a frontier region of a country still in its infancy. Terrebonne Parish was the “good earth,” where he put down deep roots. In this foreign landscape, he laid the foundation for a family dynasty, the

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J. M. Burguières Company, that would be ruled by his descendants for more than 136 years. The family company would survive countless disasters—wars, economic depressions, hurricanes, floods, droughts, freezes, diseases, family feuds, and family tragedies—with the Burguières rising from the ashes again and again, regenerating themselves for their descendants.

3 Ernest D. Burguières

A Witness to the Rise and Fall of the Louisiana Sugar Bowl, 1850–1878

Louisiana reached its most prosperous period in the twenty years prior to the Civil War. These in truth were “the good old times.” Plantation-owners reaped fortunes from the fertile soil; and the current of the Mississippi carried the commerce of mid-America to the levee at New Orleans. . . . Everything was done on a large scale; there were thousands of acres planted in sugar-cane; hundreds of slaves were necessary to cultivate the fields; thousands of cords of wood had to be cut to operate the sugar-house during grinding season. The planters thought in large figures; they produced large families and large fortunes; they worked hard; they were strong mentally and physically. And it is natural enough to find them generous and hospitable. —Lyle Saxon, Old Louisiana, 1929

New Orleans writer and journalist Lyle Saxon waxed nostalgic about the Old South, the “good old times” before the war, those glorious days when ladies wore hoops beneath their lace-and-silk dresses and men were honorable gentlemen with all the graces that good blood, good training, and good education could provide. But this idyllic image of halcyon days of yore does not reflect the reality of most planters in the Old South; in fact, only a small minority of French, Creole, and AngloAmerican planters lived such lives. The overwhelming majority of the agricultural population in South Louisiana were Acadian petit paysans (peasant farmers), working-class European immigrants, gens de couleur libres (free persons of color), and African- and Caribbean-born slaves. The story of most of the rural plantations differs from the romantic tales of the Mississippi River Road and Cane River plantations. Many of the planters along the smaller bayous and inlets of South Louisiana 30

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came to the region without the capital necessary to invest in land, equipment, and labor. They often began working as overseers of plantations, while others began farming sugarcane on smaller plots of land, eventually building up their assets to purchase more land. Their work required long hours clearing forests and draining the marshlands before plowing, planting, and harvesting could begin. These were true adventurers— gamblers taking risks they could not afford to take, experimenting with a new crop in a new place, living from one crop to another, woefully dependent on capricious nature, politics, and the market. By 1850, two decades after Eugène Burguières’s arrival in America, the wetland and prairie landscape of South Louisiana had changed. William H. Sparks described the countryside as a vista of “immense fields . . . all greened with the luxuriant sugar-cane, and other crops, growing so vigorously as at once to satisfy the mind that the richness of the soil is supreme—and this scene extending for one hundred and fifty miles, makes it unapproachable by any other cultivated region on the face of the globe.”1 The population of St. Mary and Terrebonne Parishes had almost doubled from 1840 to 1850. Similarly, the total population of the United States had grown to 23.1 million, including 3.2 million slaves and 1.7 million immigrants. In South Louisiana, this remarkable growth resulted directly from the development of the sugar industry.2 Though Eugène had arrived in Louisiana in 1831, the Burguières name does not appear in a federal census of Terrebonne Parish until 1850, when forty-seven-year-old Eugène, a “merchant from France,” was counted along with his wife, thirty-eight-year-old Marie Marianne, and their five children—Ernest Denis (E. D.) (age twelve), Camilla (ten), Marguerite (five), Annette (three), and Jules Martial (six months), as well as Marie Marianne’s daughter, Marie Elvire Delaporte (fifteen).3 Because of the region’s growth during those two decades, Houma was no longer the frontier village it had been when Eugène arrived there from New Orleans. The town now had five stores, eleven dwellings, the St. Francis de Sales Catholic Church, a Methodist church, a blacksmith shop, a schoolhouse, a hotel, a grogshop, and a billiard room. The community also had the “paraphernalia of justice,” which included the courthouse, the clerk’s office, the sheriff ’s office, the recorder’s office, and a jail. Though court officials were elected, the positions traditionally were passed from father to son or to collateral relations. In fact, the Burguières and members of their extended family held these positions

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for many years, with the Verrets’ names appearing in Terrebonne Parish court records from as early as 1832 until 1867. At one time, Eugène Burguières served as a recorder, and his son, Jules Martial, also was a recorder and tax collector. Two of Eugène’s brothers-in-law were in parish government. In 1850, Martial Verret was an official census taker; in 1852, he served as sheriff. His brother, Adolphe Verret, was for many years a recorder. Eugène’s son-in-law, Jean Pierre Viguerie, was a tax collector, and Eugène’s stepson, Alfred J. Delaporte, was both a recorder and an appraiser for Terrebonne Parish.4 Antebellum Sugarcane

While Eugène was occupied with parish government, his general store, and his law practice, an agricultural revolution was taking place. King Cotton had been deposed, and sugar now reigned supreme. By this time, 95 percent of the South’s raw sugar was produced in Louisiana. Between 1837 and 1854, sugar consumption in the United States rose to almost nine hundred million pounds, increasing from thirteen to thirty pounds per capita between 1831 and the 1850s. People craved sugar more than ever.5 St. Mary Parish farmers in particular were noted for their skill in cane cultivation, ranking first in state sugar production for eight years between the 1850s and 1860s. As early as the 1840s, a significant number of sugar magnates operated there and in neighboring Terrebonne: Mary Porter, for example, owned 5,364 acres of land with a cash value of twelve thousand dollars and farm machinery valued at twenty thousand dollars. By the 1850s, Porter was worth almost half a million dollars. Martial Sorrel owned forty-two hundred acres, and Charles Grevemberg had an estate valued at two hundred thousand dollars.6 In spite of the number of planter barons in the area, most sugar planters did not establish themselves until the mid-nineteenth century. The early part of the century had been a time of experimentation with cane varieties, planting schedules, and techniques for producing more profitable crops. Technological innovations such as steam-powered mills, hardier cane varieties, bagasse burners, and steam vacuum pans increased profits and attracted more planters to the industry. By the 1850s, steam engines were operating on more than nine hundred plantations, grinding mostly commercially produced cane.7

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Though sugar superseded cotton, sugarcane planters faced fundamental problems. First, it was a tropical crop, while South Louisiana has a subtropical climate. Though the region is hot and humid and shares many of the same flora as tropical regions, it is subject to freezing temperatures that can ruin a crop overnight. The changeability of the South Louisiana weather is legendary. In 1861, at the start of the Civil War in Louisiana, sugar planter Theodore Packwood wrote in his diary, “There was ice and frost on the 4th and 5th of January, 1861, and mosquitoes on the 8th.” One of the worst freezes on record in South Louisiana occurred in February 1899, when New Orleans reported a temperature of seven degrees Fahrenheit. Steam-powered sugarhouses accelerated the processing of cane so that more of the crop could be harvested and processed before the first hard freeze.8 Water and wind haunted planters’ dreams. Hurricanes had besieged South Louisiana since the beginning of recorded time. At other times, the area was plagued by drought, and the scorching August sun would wither green stalks in the fields. And if freezes, drought, high winds, or water did not ruin the cane, crop disease often did. Such losses were more than financial. Planting a new crop and watching it thrive until harvest time provided planters and laborers with an enormous feeling of accomplishment and pride, and witnessing the destruction of the fruits of their labor could be crushing. Many planters quit rather than start over. Since sugar was the most capital-intensive staple crop of the Old South, only those farmers who qualified for large loans from New Orleans banks could hope to enter the commercial sugar business. Planter Moses Liddell attempted to discourage his son from following in his footsteps: “If you go at sugar,” he warned, “it will take you three years before you can procure seed or plant cane to make a full crop. . . . [Y]ou must have a steam engine and mill, $4500 expenses for putting it up and keeping it in order.” There was also the “risk of crops, and continuous unforeseen . . . expenses that will eat up the profits.” Liddell concluded, “I am rather sick of sugar growing, there is such a succession of labor to perform the whole season round and so much anxiety prevails. . . . [E]very year improvements are to be made, repairs to be done, new fixtures to be added—there is never an end of these things as it is with cotton.”9 Another successful sugar planter who had invested $150,000 warned of the risks involved in the endeavor: buying a plantation, he said, was “essentially a gambling operation,” with success as dependent on luck as

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“betting on a throw of a dice.” If a planter’s first crop failed, “he must borrow money of the Jews in New Orleans to pay his first note; they will sell him this on the best terms they can, and often at not less than 25 percent per annum. If three or four bad crops follow one another, he is ruined.” Moreover, not only was sugar production a financial risk, but clearing and draining the area for planting was nothing short of “sheer drudgery which could leave an individual physically crippled or psychologically defeated.” Even with the high expenses and risks, many small planters farmed sugarcane by forming partnerships with others, combining their assets, borrowing power, and knowledge of the various aspects of the industry, including production, harvesting, manufacturing, and marketing. They also combined their labor forces, farm animals, and machinery.10 In addition to threatening the crop, diseases could also imperil the lives of the planters, their families, their hired laborers, and their slaves. Epidemics of yellow fever, cholera, and malaria left behind death and grief for those who survived. A yellow fever epidemic in the fall of 1853 sent many people fleeing from Southwest Louisiana, and between 1853 and 1856, that disease killed thirteen thousand people in New Orleans alone. Steamboats plying the rivers and bayous ignored the quarantine regulations, causing residents of towns along the waterways to fear the vessels’ arrivals. In 1853, the Pitsey Miller, a New Orleans steamer, defied quarantine regulations as it traveled toward Franklin in St. Mary Parish, the largest port in the Attakapas region. Franklin officials rang the sentinel bell and even fired a cannon to warn off the belligerent captain. Citizens took to the streets armed with rifles, muskets, and pitchforks to prevent the potentially infectious boat from entering their community.11 Even though the costs were steep and the risks great, many planters remained loyal to the industry because sugarcane yielded much greater profits than cotton ever had. As a popular saying went, “It takes a rich cotton planter to make a poor sugar planter.” In antebellum Louisiana, the average sugar plantation had a value of two hundred thousand dollars, whereas even the largest cotton plantations were worth only half that.12 Sugar plantations sprang up across southern Louisiana, not just along the Mississippi River but also along the numerous meandering bayous and waterways as well as the adjoining prairies. By 1851, Terrebonne Parish had 110 planters and 80 sugarhouses (43 steam-powered, 37 driven by horses).13 Since most of the richest soil along the Mississippi River had been claimed by the time the Burguières began planting, they moved

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3.1 Ernest Denis (E. D.) Burguières, ca. 1878. Burguières Family Collection, Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Louisiana at Lafayette

farther south and west, where they planted the literal and figurative seeds of success for themselves and their descendants. Because these outlying areas had few refineries, raw sugar had to be packed in barrels and shipped to New Orleans, where it was sold on the levees by commission merchants or factors, who were often financial backers as well. Eugène and Son Join the Sugar Industry

Eugène became part of the regional industry in October 1851, when he leased a sugar plantation along both sides of Bayou Black in Chacahoula (Choctaw for “beloved home”), Terrebonne Parish. Two years later, he and Marianne purchased the plantation and the sugar mill. His son, E. D., began his career in the sugar industry as the overseer on his father’s plantation. His uncle, Adolphe Verret, was also farming along the left bank of Bayou Black, Terrebonne Parish. A few years later, E. D.’s younger brother, Jules Martial, partnered with E. D., staking all he had on sugar. Who could resist the lure of the tropical plant that transformed into white gold, creating sugar masters across the South? After all, in 1853, Louisiana planters produced a quarter of the world’s exportable sugar.14

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Ernest D. Burguières: Rise and Fall of the Louisiana Sugar Bowl, 1850–1878

But these were difficult years. In 1853–54, Eugène and E. D. produced 115 hogsheads of sugar, a small but decent start. The following year, however, they learned just how defenseless planters were against weather conditions. First a spring drought killed the plant cane, then heavy rains and the resulting deep mud caused great difficulty at harvest season, and the Burguières’ crop filled only 92 hogsheads, a reduction in keeping with the 22 percent drop experienced by the parish as a whole between the two years.15 E. D.’s third year was yet another bad time for Louisiana sugar. From the end of December 1855 through February 1856, ice, frost, and rain prostrated the cane. A second crop had to be planted using cane tops. Even with these problems, E. D.’s yield was 114 hogsheads. But large quantities of Caribbean sugar were imported into the United States to make up for the crop failure, thereby exposing the state’s vulnerability in the domestic marketplace. Climate and foreign imports would always be the industry’s Achilles’ heel.16 Nature continued its assault on South Louisiana on August 10, 1856, when a hurricane decimated Isle Dernière (Last Island), a tiny resort just off the coast of Terrebonne Parish. The storm swept away three hundred vacationers, locals, and fishermen as the floodwaters surged across the island, taking with it hotels, vacation homes, fishing camps, boats, and even the land on which they rested. Then it headed onshore, creating “great havoc” in the fields. The storm destroyed dwellings and sugarhouses and wiped out both the sugar and corn crops. The eye of the storm first leveled the cane in one direction, then changed course, lifting the fallen stalks and blowing them down in the other direction. Martial Sorrel, who usually produced between six hundred and eight hundred hogsheads every year, ended the 1856–57 season with only twenty-two. E. D. finished with a mere sixteen hogsheads.17 The Peculiar Institution

Though capital, inclement weather, and disease caused countless difficulties for cane planters, slave labor poisoned the South’s entire social, political, and economic system. Even Thomas Jefferson, whose livelihood depended on slave labor, recognized the moral ambiguity of his situation yet felt helpless to find a just resolution to the “peculiar institution.” In an 1820 letter to John Holmes, the former president wrote,

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“As it is, we have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.”18 In the decades after Jefferson wrote this, slave labor made the prodigious sugar industry possible. Because the crop was so labor-intensive, large plantations required hundreds of slaves in the fields and mills. South Louisiana’s largest slaveholders in 1860 included Martial Sorrel (364 slaves), Mrs. Jas. Porter (297 slaves), A. Bateman (254 slaves), W. J. Minor (229 slaves), Mrs. Charles Grevemberg (210 slaves), William Weeks (214 slaves), Appoline Patout (widow of Pierre Siméon Patout) (107 slaves), and Adolphe Verret (brother of Marianne Burguières) (107 slaves).19 When Eugène and Marianne acquired the sugar plantation in 1853, the purchase included seven slaves: Paige (age thirty-four), William (thirty-six), Eugène (twenty), and Fanny (twenty-five) and her three children, Mathilde (ten), Margaret (two), and an eight-month-old baby, all of whom were “fully guaranteed” under the contract. Three years later, Marianne purchased two more slaves, John Darnel (twenty-five) and his wife (twenty), valued at $1,450 each. All slaveholders had the right to return unsatisfactory slaves within sixty days and “receive Negroes of equal value.”20 In 1858, the State of Louisiana convicted one of Marianne’s male slaves (approximately thirty years old) of a felony and sentenced him to death by hanging. The parish then filed a suit against Marianne for the costs incurred in the trial. The next year, she purchased a female named Zoé and her two young children, Louis and Corrinne. According to the contract, they were “slaves for life and fully guaranteed against all the vices and maladies.”21 By the time the 1860 U.S. Census was conducted, Eugène had increased his holdings to fourteen slaves: six females between seventeen and sixty-five years old; six males under the age of fifty-five (including a one-year-old boy listed as a fugitive from the state); and two mulatto females. E. D. owned two slaves: a twenty-five-year-old woman and a five-month-old baby, also identified as a fugitive from the state.22 By midcentury, the number of slaves in South Louisiana had almost quadrupled over the preceding twenty years, not only increasing the general population but also radically changing its demographics. Between 1850 and 1860, the number of slaves in Terrebonne Parish had grown to 56 percent of the total population; in neighboring St. Mary Parish, that number was 77.7 percent. In sugarcane country, slaves became the

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majority population. Slaveholders consequently were vigilant about potential uprisings. On November 11, 1840, for example, rumors swirled that a slave revolt was taking place on William Weeks’s Grand Côte Plantation. Overseer John Merriman believed that some of Weeks’s slaves were hiding in the Cypremort woods, so he sent a letter in a waxsealed envelope to planter F. D. Richardson: Linzie has taken to the woods with his wife and child. He is well armed. He has the little double barreled gun and his butcher knife. So much for letting the most trusty have fire arms. . . . I have no doubt but this same fellow is working his best amongst the Negroes on the Island as I have observed a great difference in the behaviour of several of the Blacks. . . . I think that this Fellow is in the Sipimort woods. . . . I think that there is some clandestine corespondance between them and the plantation—it would be well if you could arouse the neighborhood. . . . [I]t may be the means of saving of a lot of miseries that these beings is capable of bringing down on the heads of our sleeping neighborhoods. But the neighborhood may feel a severe shock. . . . My opinion is that quick and prompt steps is necessary as I suppose the thing to be uprising fast.23

As the risk of slave revolts increased, the St. Mary Parish Police Jury organized slave patrols that included all white males between the ages of eighteen and forty. In addition, the Franklin Planters’ Banner warned, “Persons traveling through our parish should go armed. Our neighborhood is now infested with a gang of midnight marauders, composed of runaway slaves, and all of them desperate characters.” As in many other outlying parishes, vigilante committees were formed to control not only the runaway slaves but the growing black-market commerce in liquor and stolen goods.24 Louisiana’s antebellum sugar industry reached its pinnacle in 1861, when the state produced a bumper crop of almost 460,000 hogsheads. The number of sugarhouses peaked at 1,291, with 80 percent using steam power.25 Now planters were reaping the benefits of experienced overseers, slaves, and white laborers as well as decades of innovations in production and sugar-processing technology. On the eve of the Civil War, fifty-six-year-old Eugène and fortyyear-old Marianne were still living in Houma with their four youngest children, who ranged in age from eight to fourteen. The 1860 U.S. Census classified Eugène as a planter rather than a merchant, the description

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that had appeared a decade earlier. E. D., listed as an overseer; his wife, Aglaé; and their one-year-old daughter were still living in Terrebonne Parish, and their future, like that of most of the area’s other planters, looked bright.26 But this was the end of an era, the last year the sugar industry could rely on slave labor. Rumblings of war had been audible in the background for years, but most planters chose to believe that any war would be short-lived. The planters had no idea of the bloodshed to come, nor did they know that life in the South would never again be the same. “A House Divided against Itself Cannot Stand”

The increasing tensions from decades of conflict finally erupted in early 1861: South Louisiana sugar planter Theodore Packwood wrote in his diary, “Secession! 12 o’clock Saturday, 26th of January, 1861.” The members of the planter aristocracy had certainly dreaded the war, but they could not have anticipated how deep their losses would be. From nearby Île Petite Anse in 1862, Judge Daniel Avery wrote to his son, who was serving in the Confederacy’s Delta Rifles Brigade, that he “hoped and believed” that the war would be short and that they “would not be affected by it very greatly.” But before long, he had lost his optimism, writing in another letter to his son of his “deep foreboding . . . that we may have met a turning point from which there is no coming back to what was before.”27 The outbreak of the war caused many slaves to flee their plantations, but they often found their freedom short-lived, as the first army they encountered offered them a choice between conscription or hanging. By the spring of 1863, with Union troops under the command of General Nathaniel P. Banks conducting an overland expedition in Southwest Louisiana, many sugar planters fled to Texas with their families, their slaves, and whatever possessions they could carry. Other planters remained on their plantations, hoping to protect their property and to continue to produce sugar even without a full crew of slaves.28 Banks’s men went on “foraging expeditions,” hacking down fences, barns, sheds, and houses for fuel, beds, and supplies. They plundered stores and warehouses and confiscated mules, horses, and livestock. Much of what they did not seize was pillaged by both Union and Confederate stragglers and marauding vigilante groups. Noted Alfred A. Weeks,

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“Many of those who were left in charge of property I fear have been greater thieves than the Yankees.”29 In 1862, the bodies of two Union soldiers who had been ambushed and beaten to death were brought to the Houma city square, where they were buried in a shallow grave. In response, Union soldiers “plunged their way into the hostile depths of one of those infested parishes,” Terrebonne, and into the “heathen town,” where they held hostage various officials, including the mayor, the board of aldermen, and the sheriff. As the Terrebonne Parish recorder, justice of the peace, and captain of the local militia, Eugène Burguières’s stepson, Alfred Delaporte, was one of those held.30 General Benjamin Butler ordered Lieutenant Colonel John Keith to arrest and to punish those responsible for the desecration of the soldiers’ bodies. Unable to obtain the names of the perpetrators from the community, Lieutenant Keith forced the hostages to dig up the decomposing bodies with their hands. According to legend, one of the locals screamed out, “Courage, mes camarades!” (Courage, my comrades!) to buoy the hostages in their gruesome task.31 Howard Bond, a wealthy planter from the Houma area, was implicated in the killings. In June 1862, his wife, Priscilla, wrote in her diary that Union troops had burned the parish jail, the Ceres newspaper office, and the Bonds’ sugar plantation, Crescent Place. The Yankees also burned the Bond family’s sugarhouse, filled with sugar; between fifty and one hundred slave dwellings; a steam saw; a corn mill; stables; a cooper and blacksmith shop; tools; and a storehouse filled with molasses. All of the Bonds’ livestock, wagons, and equipment were confiscated.32 In another incident on November 18, 1863, Union troops entered Appoline Patout’s home, where she was alone with her daughters and their children. She “was forced to let everything be done, to endure all outrage, to open her apartments, her wardrobes, her drawers from the smallest to the largest, since the soldiers were intent on seeing everything and appropriating all that they fancied. . . . [H]aving tried to complain, the petitioner was rudely addressed. . . .[S]ince she does not understand the English language, she cannot repeat the soldiers’ answers, but . . . these answers must have been insulting, considering the animation of the soldiers and the refusals of the petitioner’s daughters to translate what they were saying.” Eleven-year-old Marie Corinne Patout, who later married Jules Martial Burguières, was likely present in her step-grandmother’s home when it was ransacked. Unwilling to

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accept the abuses of the Union troops, Appoline Patout went to General William Buel Franklin’s headquarters in New Iberia, “intending to submit a complaint to him for all the thefts and violence . . . and to ask him for protection as a citizen of the French Empire.” In addition, after the war, she filed a claim with the U.S. government seeking $56,234 in restitution; after her death, her heirs took over, pursuing the case unsuccessfully until 1918.33 Sugarcane and the Civil War

Throughout the cataclysmic war, sugarcane was still being produced in the Sugar Bowl. In fact, E. D. Burguières’s largest crop was grown during the 1861–62 season, when he produced 148 hogsheads, part of a record-breaking year in which the state produced almost 460,000 hogsheads valued at more than twenty-five million dollars. By 1864, however, production had plummeted to a mere 10,000 hogsheads worth less than two million dollars.34 Since the crop required huge capital advances, planters had to make large payments on their debts, war notwithstanding. In 1862, planters owed an estimated twenty million dollars to their factors. By 1864, only six or seven of the more than five hundred antebellum factors that had operated in New Orleans were still in business. The number of working plantations plunged from 1,200 to 175 over that period, and the one hundred million dollars in total capital that had been invested in slaves vanished entirely: as Packwood noted in his diary, “On the 9th of February, 1865, the negroes refused to work, and on the 12th they commenced to leave for the land of promise—forty acres and a mule.” A formerly vibrant agricultural region was in tatters. The Louisiana Planter and Sugar Manufacturer, the leading industry periodical, described the condition of the Sugar Bowl: “The destruction of slavery, the dispersal of the laborers, the burning of the buildings and the conversion of hundreds of sugar plantations into semi-tropical wildernesses, where an occasional chimney or brick wall discovered among the enormous growth of weeds, willows and cottonwood, would be all that could suggest to an uninformed traveler the existence there of former civilization and activity.”35 The area’s remaining planters attempted to carry on business as usual, but they encountered high expenses and credit problems at every turn.

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Even four years after the war, a Terrebonne Parish planter wrote, “We have failed to make expenses on this place. . . . I tell you it is disheartening work to see around me daily the absolute signs of decay which the planting interests exhibit—Everyone is terribly blue. The condition of affairs in Louisiana is positively terrible.”36 Rebuilding took years, complicated by military occupation and political chaos. Houma, like many other places, was occupied by U.S. troops and patrolled by armed militia. Local legend has it that a “hostile mob of several hundred . . . marched into Houma on foot armed with pitch forks, rakes, hoes, and any farm implement that could serve as a weapon.” When the news reached a U.S. commander in the area, he led his troops to Houma to regain control.37 Another crippling problem during and after the war was the severe labor shortage, particularly in St. Mary Parish. The transition from slave labor to wage labor was long and difficult; it did not begin to ease until 1889 and ultimately continued for almost seventy years after the war. Both black and white laborers refused to do the work at the wages offered. Black strikes and clashes between blacks and whites that ended in killings led to a rumor that the freed slaves would kill anyone who had been hired to replace them. Two companies of artillery and two of cavalry were deployed to establish order.38 To remedy the labor shortage, planters experimented with workers brought from China before sending an immigration agent to Europe. Spanish, Portuguese, German, Dutch, and particularly Italian nationals subsequently came to Louisiana. By 1888, the Louisiana Planter and Sugar Manufacturer reported, “Italian emigrants to this country are not, as some have supposed, the loafers and beggars of Naples, Rome and other cities. . . . [A]s a rule they are illiterate, still they are honest, hard-working people, [the] most effective laborers ever brought here.” According to the sugar industry publication, many of the Italians had made fortunes or gone into business for themselves.39 Planters by the hundreds were forced to make changes. Some diversified, growing subsistence crops until they could recover. Some planters either leased their land or formed profit-sharing agreements, often with their overseers. Others had their land farmed on shares. Still others saw their land and property auctioned. Terrebonne’s Taylor Beattie, Eugène Burguières’s partner in the Houma law firm of Burguières and Beattie, voiced the planter mind-set when he wrote in his diary shortly after Lee’s surrender, “Henceforth I have nothing to look forward to but a

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life of drudgery—as an alien in the land of my birth.” Sugar planter A. F. Pugh felt similarly: “I can find no object with which to divert my thoughts from the deep gloom which depresses me. All is darkness with hardly a ray of hope in the future.”40 In the midst of this turbulent period of slow recovery and rebuilding, another diabolical force struck New Orleans. An 1867 yellow fever epidemic left more than three thousand dead in the city before spreading into several South Louisiana parishes, killing twenty-five more in St. Mary alone. The fear of “Yellow Jack,” combined with the stress of Reconstruction for both blacks and whites, was overwhelming.41 One bright spot in that dark time was the discovery of salt. In 1862, the first find in the Western Hemisphere was made at Île Petite Anse (now Avery Island) in Iberia Parish, three miles inland from Vermilion Bay in a salt dome deeper in the Gulf than Mount Everest is high. Judge Daniel Dudley Avery invited Confederate soldiers to dig for salt, a valuable natural resource used to make gunpowder and to preserve meat. In 1863, Union troops under Banks’s command forced a retreat of the Confederate soldiers working at the salt mine. Avery’s attempt to assist the Confederacy resulted in the destruction of his plantation and provided the enemy with a precious commodity.42 Though the Old South had been toppled and the sugarcane industry was on the verge of extinction, the land endured—at least for those who could afford to pay the taxes on it. South Louisiana’s surviving planters demonstrated an incredible adaptability. For the Burguières and others who had little agricultural property to lose and whose occupations did not depend solely on the devastated land, this was the time to act. E. D. Acquires Land

E. D. Burguières had been the overseer of his parents’ plantation in Chacahoula for many years when he partnered with his brother-in-law, Alphonse Bonvillain (1834–90), in a sugar venture in February 1868. The two men acquired 1,000 arpents (approximately 850 acres) at a sheriff ’s sale in St. Mary Parish. Two months later, Burguières bought out Bonvillain and became the plantation’s sole proprietor. To solve his labor problems, E. D. donated approximately 50 acres to former slaves and loaned them money to build cabins in a community that came to be known as Freetown, located between two other Burguières properties,

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Inez and Crawford Plantations. Many years later, more houses from Alice B. Plantation would be moved to Freetown for Burguières laborers. Fellow planter William Patout noted that this approach “proved to be wise, as the Burguières were able to retain their workforce.”43 E. D. continued his quest for cane land, purchasing property in Terrebonne Parish on July 8, 1869. Seventeen months later, he sold some of his land to his father for three thousand dollars, adding to the property Eugène already owned along Bayou Terrebonne. Another family land transaction occurred in April 1871, when Eugène bought property about sixteen miles south of Houma from his daughter, Marguerite Burguières Theriot, for one thousand dollars. A year later, sixty-eight-year-old Eugène came to the aid of his brothers-in-law, Adolphe and Auguste Verret, when their property went on the auction block. One of the lots had originally belonged to Eugène’s stepson, Alfred Delaporte.44 On June 2, 1875, E. D. and his younger brother, Jules, became partners in a St. Mary Parish plantation originally owned by their great-uncle, Philippe Patout. The plantation included five hundred acres of valuable land lying along Bayou Cypremort as well as two hundred acres farther south, with all the buildings and improvements, including fifteen “choice” mules, one horse, twenty-two oxen, horned cattle, and all the tools needed for the cultivation of sugar. The purchase also included one hundred acres of cypress swampland, extremely valuable for the timber. The two men paid twenty thousand dollars for the transaction; a year later, Jules sold his share to E. D. for twenty-seven thousand dollars, making E. D. the sole proprietor of Alice B. Plantation, named for his five-year-old daughter.45 It subsequently became the home for generations of the E. D. Burguières family. The Burguières were employing two strategies to increase their landholdings: partnering with extended family members long enough to be able to afford their own plantation, and going to great lengths to keep family land within the clan. In this way, the Burguières were establishing themselves as landowners and sugar planters in both Terrebonne and St. Mary Parishes. On October 20, 1878, however, in the midst of the roulaison (grinding season), forty-year-old E. D. Burguières was thrown from his horse and died as a result of his injuries. But work at Alice B. Plantation went on. The 1878–79 cane crop was harvested as always, the cane shipped to New Orleans as always, the fields burned as always. But in this year and

Ernest D. Burguières: Rise and Fall of the Louisiana Sugar Bowl, 1850–1878

3.2 Five of the six daughters of Ernest Denis and Aglaé Burguières, ca. 1891: (l to r) Alice, Ernestine, Marie, Annette, Margaret. Burguières Family Collection, Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Louisiana at Lafayette

3.3 Aglaé Bonvillain Burguières, ca. 1891. Burguières Family Collection, Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Louisiana at Lafayette

45

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all the years to come, the work at Alice B. would go on without him. E. D. was buried in the Burguières family tomb at St. Helen’s Cemetery on Florence Plantation, surrounded on three sides by dense, sweet cane ripe for harvest. Forty-two-year-old Aglaé Burguières was now a widow with three young children still living at home and three thousand acres of sugarcane and woodland to manage. She supervised the harvest of 335 hogsheads shortly after her husband’s death. She headed the family company, incorporated in 1910 as the Mrs. E. D. Burguières Planting Company, for thirty years and was the first woman elected a member of the Louisiana Planters’ Association. Together with her son-in-law, James B. Brown (1857–1938), the company acquired seven thousand more acres, three more sugar plantations (Ivanhoe, Richland, and Crawford), and another sugar mill. By the turn of the century, the Mrs. E. D. Burguières Planting Company produced 3.7 million pounds of sugar at Alice B. Plantation and 2.9 million at Crawford.46 Always a devout Catholic, Aglaé gave generously to church causes. She donated the building and presbytery for St. Helen’s Church on Florence Plantation and a bell to Our Lady of Prompt Succor Chapel in the small wetland community of Little Caillou, south of Houma. It still bears the inscription: “Given by Mrs. E. D. Burguières April, 1891.” Like the Burguières, the bell has borne the vicissitudes of time and has survived. In 1909, hurricane winds sent Aglaé’s bell crashing through the church roof. Six years later, another hurricane hurled it to the ground. Today, it stands at ground level. For over one hundred years, the bell has remained a clarion call to the community for Sunday Mass, baptisms, weddings, and funerals. Aglaé passed away at Alice B. Plantation in 1904 and was buried alongside her husband in the Burguières family tomb at St. Helen’s Cemetery.47

4 Founding a Sugar Empire Jules Martial Burguières Sr., 1877–1893

Trust thyself; every heart vibrates to that iron string. . . . To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men—that is genius. —Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1841

Once in a great while, there appears a figure whose character is larger than life, whose presence affects generations to come. Jules Martial Burguières Sr. was such a person—fiercely independent, ambitious, intelligent, well educated, intrepid, a mastermind in business, a formidable force in the world of sugarcane. Born at the exact midpoint of the nineteenth century, Jules lived during one of the most transformative yet tragic eras in American history. He took advantage of the good times and survived the bad. In the final decade of the century, he launched his sons into twentieth-century New Orleans, where they became savvy businessmen, impassioned advocates for the Louisiana and Florida sugar industry, and card-carrying members of the New Orleans aristocracy. But before then, Jules lived through the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the near annihilation of the sugar industry in rural Southwest Louisiana and New Orleans. Jules had to adapt to a changing cultural climate, as the French were acceding to the forces of acculturation engendered by les Américains. Finally, he had to discover how to achieve his own American Dream. Progress was the all-powerful mantra of the nineteenth century. Indeed, America changed drastically during the first twenty years of his life. The 1870 U.S. Census reported that the country’s population had risen to 39.8 million, including 4.9 million freed slaves and 2.3 47

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4.1 Jules Martial Burguières Sr., ca. 1897. Burguières Family Collection, Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Louisiana at Lafayette

million immigrants who had arrived after 1860. During the preceding two decades, the U.S. population had doubled, and the national income had quadrupled.1 The Industrial Revolution was beginning to take hold, and technology in its many manifestations played a fundamental role in the making of more than four thousand millionaires and captains of industry, including Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and J. Pierpont Morgan. Agriculture, too, had been transformed. The nascent Louisiana sugarcane industry that Eugène Burguières had entered in the 1830s differed dramatically from the one Jules entered in 1877. Science, technology, and industrialization had combined to make sugar the largest and most powerful industry in the state prior to the Civil War. Science had developed better cane varieties, substantially increasing yields. Animal power was being replaced by steam power, revolutionizing both the mills and field operations. Advances in sugar manufacturing were converting the mills into efficient factories capable of huge output.2 Transportation innovations also revolutionized the sugar industry, which had been crippled by its reliance on grossly inefficient keelboats

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and unreliable steamboats in snag-ridden bayous and canals. The coming of the railroad meant that cane could quickly be shipped to market; relieved of the danger of spoilage, planters could plant more acreage and process more cane. While progress was being made in the factories and fields, the global demand for sugar was increasing at an astounding rate. By 1900, the world consumed eight times as much sugar as it had in 1840, when the Burguières entered production, even though the global population had no more than doubled.3 And Jules entered the industry right in the middle of this explosion in demand for the refined delicacy that satisfied the world’s sweet tooth. Jules Martial Burguières Sr. was born on April 17, 1850, in Houma, Louisiana. He grew up surrounded by erudite and cultured family and friends. Jules received an excellent private and public education. Though religion was highest on the list of core values for the French, education was a close second. Part of that education included knowledge of the world through books and travel. Education was no mere necessity; rather, it was a planned endeavor that would ensure future success. Attending the best schools positioned young men for the best careers and brought them into contact with the sons and daughters of other prominent families, providing distinct advantages when they entered the business and social world of New Orleans and cities beyond. Each generation was expected to surpass the previous generation in knowledge, experience, and prosperity. Jules was only three years old when his oldest brother, E. D., began working as an overseer. A decade later, E. D. was an established planter, and Jules began assisting him. By sixteen, he was working as a recorder in the Terrebonne Parish Clerk of Court’s office alongside his father; promotions to appraiser, deputy sheriff, and tax collector soon followed. Working in the sheriff ’s office, Jules learned how government worked and how land was bought and sold, and he made many connections that would be future assets. The Daily States also claimed that his positions at the courthouse and sheriff ’s office offered him an opportunity to get a good start in life by “purchasing, at a discount, warrants with which payments were often made in those days.”4 As early as 1870, while Jules was still employed by the Terrebonne Parish government, the twenty-year-old also became the protégé of his half-brother, Alfred Delaporte, who had acquired several contracts to

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manage plantations in Terrebonne Parish, including Honduras Plantation, from R. R. Barrow in 1871. There, Jules learned the production and management aspects of the industry and gained administrative skills that provided valuable lessons in marketing sugarcane and lumber. When Alfred became seriously ill, he put Jules in charge of his holdings and contracts, offering the young man a rare opportunity to plunge headlong into sugarcane production. In the Land of Sugar Buy land, they’re not making it anymore. —Mark Twain

Jules had a vision for his future with land at its core. His father, Eugène, had perhaps come to America precisely for this reason—to own land, to develop it in ways of his own choosing, and to build a home for his family. In such precarious times, the extended family provided the best insurance against financial disasters. By 1870, the sugar industry was making a slow postwar recovery. Louisiana’s sugar yields had rebounded to 145,000 hogsheads, an improvement but still meager compared to the pre–Civil War high of 460,000 hogsheads.5 The crop was clearly on its way back, and the Burguières were ready and willing to take the risks of involvement. Like his father and brother before him, Jules eagerly pursued land. Even though the Louisiana sugar industry had been virtually destroyed by the war, Jules was convinced that sugar would again be king. He saw his future in thousands of acres of what Daniel Dennett described as “some of the finest sugar lands” in Louisiana, “rich as mother earth.”6 Jules was confident that the land would sprout bright green rows of cane that would ultimately yield white gold. He made his first land purchase when he was only twenty-one years old. He was still working for the Terrebonne Parish government on December 5, 1871, when he bought six hundred acres in Chacahoula, in Terrebonne Parish. The land lay along the banks of Bayou Black, approximately twenty-two miles northwest of his home. Since the property was purchased at a tax sale, Jules paid only $285 (approximately 47.5 cents an acre) for the land plus all its buildings and improvements.7

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His first year of planting was a disaster, as widespread flooding caused him to lose three thousand dollars. Undeterred, Jules began buying property in neighboring St. Mary Parish. Historian Peter Ripley contends that because Confederate and Union forces alternated control of St. Mary Parish during the Civil War, it suffered more destruction than most of the rest of South Louisiana.8 Consequently, more sugar acreage was available in St. Mary than in Jules’s native Terrebonne or other parishes. Certainly, with Jules and his family working at the courthouse and sheriff ’s office, the Burguières had a distinct advantage, with firsthand knowledge of property that was slated for auction. But once they acquired land, they faced the same problems as the previous owner-planters. Jules M. Burguières and Marie Corinne Patout

Around 1872, a nineteen-year-old woman from Iberia Parish, about seventy-five miles from Houma, caught Jules’s eye. Marie Corinne Patout was the granddaughter of Pierre Siméon Patout, one of the first settlers on Isle Piquant Prairie (now Patoutville), and his first wife, Marie Louise Morel Bordier Patout (1782–1823). In 1926, Siméon married his second wife, Pauline Napoléone “Appoline” Fournier (1805–79), and three years later, he, Appoline, and the rest of their family emigrated from Molien, France: he was planting sugarcane in Louisiana as early as the 1830s. Marie Corinne’s father, Isidore Patout (1823–57), died when she was only four years old, and her uncle, Armand Philippe Patout (1821– 96), who had no children of his own, became the surrogate father to her six-month-old brother, Leufroy Pierre (1856–91). Marie Corinne’s mother, Alida Bonvillain Patout (1832–1911), subsequently married Leon Junca, who lived on an adjoining plantation.9 This close proximity was beneficial to all, promoting and maintaining a cohesive family, which was crucial to survival and success. In the year before their marriage, Jules penned numerous love letters to Marie Corinne, expressing his fears of losing her. On October 4, 1872, for example, he wrote in his elegant French script, Having not heard a word from you . . . for such a good while causes me to fear that my last letter to you was not received. . . . Corinne how cruel

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4.2 Marie Corinne Patout, ca. 1872. Burguières Family Collection, Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Louisiana at Lafayette

would it be in you not to excuse and pardon me if I have wronged you. I implore you & demand of you in the name [of ] affection & equity to excuse and pardon me and to retract that opinion of yours which seemed to be well settled in your mind and appears from the note . . . for such an opinion on your part is undeserved by me. . . . I can never love any other but you. . . . My friend and your Uncle N[orbert] Bodin was in town last evening and . . . he said I had better be careful & not so neglectful as I had been, for he feared that Schwing [a romantic rival] would forever take [my] place.

Four months later, Jules was still worried but was planning to come and ask Marie Corinne’s stepfather for permission to marry her: I love you and you know it too. . . . Why don’t you be merciful. Have you a heart and what is it made of—rock, it must be. No Darling I think that it is all put on. I believe you have a tender heart & feelings as well as any other person. I have always found you to act kindly with me when together. . . . But I find . . . that you [h]esitate so much before you can make up your mind to write to me. It looks as if you were afraid to commit. You need not fear. I will visit you in about 18 or 19 days, about the 22[nd]. You

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know for which purpose. I hope you will be at home as will the other parties I shall have to see to obtain their consent to the union. I expect you to do as you have partly consented to, in case there should be any obnoxious objections.10

Although Marie Corinne had accepted his proposal of marriage, two obstacles stood in his way—her mother and stepfather. As he prepared to ask for her hand, he wrote again, wondering whether “anything has been said by your parents in regard to my visit. I never was placed in such a position before, all depends upon you now as aforesaid. Perhaps you had better speak to your parents about my intentions—you may speak in such a manner that is not point blank; you might hint it to them so as to find out their opinion as aforesaid.” He continued, I will be faithful to the Last. I cannot accomplish my wishes as soon as I may expect, I will do as I have already said to you. I will wait 10 years or more if necessary & with time I know we can accomplish all our bright hopes. Never be discouraged & you will see that things will turn out right. It is wrong for me to write to you Corinne without the consent of your parents. But under the circumstances, I don’t think I can be blamed. However, I will do whatever you say & what you think best. I do not insist in you writing once. But if you see fit to do so, my word as that of a Gentleman, no one shall ever hear of it.

Finally, he added, “Pray excuse me if I write in English. I write English much faster than French, consequently I prefer it.” That postscript indicates that Marie Corinne’s first language was French and that as late as 1873, she was more comfortable in that language than in English.11 Jules’s visit was a success, and he and his beloved Corinne married on April 21, 1873, in the little white clapboard chapel that her step-grandmother, Appoline Patout, and another sugar planter, Charles Olivier, had built on the Isle Piquant plantation. The chapel sat under a cluster of large oak trees that had been planted many years earlier on the otherwise barren prairie. Buggy after buggy, some elaborate, some only functional, delivered well-dressed guests to the event of the season—not just the Burguières and the Patouts but also the Bonvillains, the Duponts, the Vigueries, the Verrets, and members of other distinguished South Louisiana planter and business families. The women wore dresses with bustles and trains and hats and carried colorful umbrellas, while the

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4.3 (a) St. Nicholas Catholic Church interior, ca. 1910; (b) St. Nicholas Catholic Church exterior, ca. 1910. Peter Patout Collection, New Orleans.

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men were in frock coats and slim cravats, wearing hats, carrying walking sticks, and bearing pocket watches and full moustaches. The marriage was the second between a French-American Burguières and another French-American family. According to Michael Wade, Jules, a relative newcomer to Iberia and St. Mary parishes, surely must have benefited from the Patouts’ long experience in sugar and their intimate knowledge of the region. . . . In turn, the Patouts might have benefited from Burguières’ extensive business knowledge, the product of a keen intellect and systematic business research. . . . While it is hard to know exactly how much each family learned from the other, it seems reasonable to assume that regular, close, and even intimate contact was mutually beneficial. . . . [F]amily and other social ties remained a significant source of support and business information for them as planters tried to make money in a rapidly changing industry.12

Jules and Marie Corinne had indeed made un bon mariage. The couple were living in Houma when their first child, Denis Philip Joseph Burguières, was born on July 3, 1874. Less than three weeks later, Jules left for Cypremort to attend to the business of sugar production, though he missed his new family: on July 23, he wrote, We are pretty well advanced in the working of our crop. We have half of our wood already cut. We are having a little too much rain that is not too much for the cane crop but enough to prevent us from working fodder— but if the rain will secure in a day or two it will still be in time to make a good deal as our cane is young, yet as it was planted late, We will make fully as much cane as we anticipated. . . . . . . I have been lonesome of you both since my arrival here . . . though I should be separated so often and so long from those I so fondly love—I would give plenty to see my dear or our dear little boy—I hope and recommend you particularly to be careful with the little fellow—for you know that he is dear to us.

Jules closed his letter “with many kisses.”13 The following year, Jules and Marie Corinne left Houma and moved to Cypremort Prairie, where they raised their eight children and established themselves as St. Mary sugar planters. With this move, they

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became neighbors of Marie Corinne’s family at Isle Piquant. Jules’s sister, Camilla Pauline, and her husband, Alphonse Bonvillain, lived in the area, as did Jules’s niece, Cecile (1859–84), and her husband, Leufroy Patout, Marie Corinne’s younger brother.14 Though these early times were hard in many ways, families shared in each other’s lives. When one family celebrated a joyous occasion, the extended family joined in. When a crisis developed in one family, other relatives suffered and offered support. In 1876, the family patriarch, Eugène Denis Burguières, passed away at age seventy-two, nearly half a century after he had left Paris in search of a new life. For the rest of the century, his sons proved able guardians of Eugène’s many descendants. They had already made their first major move in 1875, when E. D., Jules, and their younger brother, Leufroy, formed the Burguières and Brothers Company, a partnership that further entwined the personal and business lives of the Burguières and their extended families.15 Cherry Grove, Inez, and Cypremort Plantations

Later that year, Burguières and Brothers expanded to neighboring Iberia Parish when it partnered with Alphonse Bonvillain to purchase the 1,413-acre Cherry Grove Plantation, another property previously owned by the Burguières’ great-uncle, Philippe Patout, and his brotherin-law, Robert Bonvillain, who had acquired it and the rest of Gregoire Bodin’s estate for twenty-two thousand dollars. Cherry Grove included a house, a sugarhouse and fixtures, a blacksmith’s shop, a cooper’s shed, a corn mill shed, chicken houses, hog pens, and “negro cabins.” The plantation was located at Isle Piquant, the home place of E. D., Jules, and Leufroy’s mother and their immigrant great-grandfather, Pierre Siméon Patout.16 Jules continued his steady climb toward a sugar empire with his September 20, 1876, purchase of the 370-acre Inez Plantation from the partition sale of Treville and Numa Sigur near the Glencoe Plantation in St. Mary Parish. The following year, Jules made a major move when he established his own business, the J. M. Burguières Company. His timing was excellent: according to historian J. Carlyle Sitterson, “Not since the war had the prospects [for sugarcane planters] appeared so promising as in 1877.”17

Founding a Sugar Empire: Jules Martial Burguières Sr., 1877–1893

4.4 Map of Cypremort, Florence, and Inez Plantations and Côte Blanche Island, 1904. Burguières Family Collection, Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Louisiana at Lafayette

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The first order of business for Jules’s company was the purchase of Cypremort Plantation, the estate that eventually became synonymous with the name Burguières and where billions of pounds of sugar were subsequently manufactured. The purchase included 2,465 acres, a store, and a sugar mill. Cypremort Plantation is a gem, with rich and fertile land. Unlike other property the Burguières had purchased at sheriff ’s sales, Jules and his brother E. D. did not acquire Cypremort cheaply, paying ninety thousand dollars (an enormous amount at the time) for the property. Jules was taking a calculated risk. A year earlier, local newspaper editor Daniel Dennett had raved about the exotic beauty of the bayou that ran through the plantation: “The Bayou Cypremort is lined with beautiful forests, of which the stately magnolia predominates. Many of them are over fifty feet high. Their foliage and magnificent white blossoms are excelled by few forest trees to be found anywhere in the world. The magnolia well merits the title that has been given it of the ‘queen of the forest.’ But mingled with the magnolia along Cypremort are oak, ash, black walnut, hickory, sweet gum, pecan, elm, etc. with a rank growth of underbrush and grape vines.”18 Cypremort had value not only for its beauty and its sugarcane-producing potential but also for its marshland, virgin cypress forests, alligators, fur-bearing animals, and location along the flyway for millions of ducks and geese migrating south for the winter. The word cypremort is derived from the French cyprés (cypress) and mort (dead). There are at least two explanations for this name, one scientific, the other legend. The scientific explanation is now an alltoo-familiar story. Before the days of large-scale bald cypress timbering, Vermilion Bay (the coastal area of the Burguières’ property) was a swampy marsh, dense with cypress trees. But saltwater incursion from the Gulf of Mexico and large-scale logging killed the primeval giants that protected the fragile coast and ecosystem, and today, cypress knees and stumps protrude from the banks of the bayou and the marshlands. Local legend holds that the name originated when area residents used a giant cypress tree that had fallen across the bayou as a makeshift bridge. The name is also used for Cypremort Prairie, flatlands (roughly along what is now Louisiana Highway 83 from the Intracoastal Canal to Vermilion Bay) that give way to the marsh and bayou. Many locals refer to Cypremort Plantation as Louisa Plantation or just Louisa, the name of the community that grew up around the property. Several other factors made Cypremort Plantation extremely valuable. First, it was adjacent to E. D. Burguières’s Alice B. Plantation, allowing

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the brothers to assist one another in the cane fields and to share equipment, mules, and other resources. In addition, the two families would be close to one another, sharing their everyday lives and providing a secure social environment. In addition, Cypremort was one of only three portages in the district of Attakapas where travelers and goods could be loaded on barges to begin the arduous trip to New Orleans or points beyond. Passengers making that journey had to bring their food, water, tent, bedding, and other provisions. Travel was slow, as the barges meandered through the narrow bayous, sometimes clogged with timber or weeds and grasses. When the current was strong, the barges were pulled with ropes, requiring “hours of tedious work to advance a few miles.” The trip was a luxury available only to members of the area’s “wealthy class,” which certainly included Jules.19 Cypremort Plantation originally was owned by the Weeks family, Anglo-Americans who had purchased more than two thousand acres on Grand Côte Island (now Weeks Island) in 1818. As early as the 1820s, David Weeks had begun planting sugar. In 1834, the plantation was valued at seventy-five thousand dollars in Weeks’s estate. By 1858, his grandson, William F. Weeks, wrote, “I am very much gratified at my crop on C Mort, which, taken in connection with the building of the sugar house and other improvements, is extraordinary—and what is more remarkable—I shall beat all my neighbors with superior forces.” As major planters and slave owners, however, the Weekses suffered great losses during the Civil War, and on October 11, 1866, John Moore, who had married David Weeks’s widow, Mary, wrote, “I am almost totally ruined. I had previously a revenue of from 12 to 20,000 per annum from two plantations and money loaned at interest. I am reduced to a mere pittance and have not been able to collect enough from money loaned to buy me a Suit of Clothes and have as yet no other revenue.” The Weekses struggled for more than a decade before giving up and surrendering the plantation to the Burguières.20 In 1877, the first year Jules planted at Cypremort, the worst hurricane since the 1856 Isle Dernière storm hit. Thirty hours of rain turned the prairie into an ocean despite the fact that the plantation was on relatively high ground. The storm and flooding wiped out the cotton crop, knocked the cane to its knees, and destroyed fences, buildings, and homes. Yet nature granted the sugar farmers a reprieve when the cane grew tall and strong again within a few weeks. Then, just as the planters were enjoying this respite at the end of November, the Great Freeze

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descended, turning the newly recovered cane into icicles and doing particularly severe damage at Cypremort. The year’s crop was one of the worst “in the history of the Louisiana sugar industry,” with yields 25 percent short of what had been anticipated. On the plus side, however, with sugar so scarce, the price rose. In spite of the catastrophic weather, Jules’s first crop at Cypremort yielded 370 hogsheads of sugar, while Alice B. Plantation produced 335 hogsheads.21 On November 19, 1881, four years after purchasing Cypremort Plantation, Jules bought more of the Weekses’ estate from the succession sale of Alfred C. Weeks. In addition to the 1,200 acres adjacent to his Cypremort Plantation and the 1,305 acres adjacent to that land, Jules purchased a portion of the Grand Côte Plantation in Iberia Parish, paying $12,350 total. Two days later, he sold 1,200 acres back to William F. Weeks for $6,000 cash.22 “For All Things There Is a Season . . .”

Between 1876 and 1882, Jules and Marie Corinne added another branch to their family tree every two years, with Joseph Eugène (1876–1911), Marie Louise (1878–1972), Florence Clothilde (1880–1936), and Jules Martial Jr. (1882–1960). Less than a year after the birth of Jules Jr., however, Jules Sr.’s mother, Marie Marianne, died at her home on East Park Avenue in Houma. She was buried alongside her husband, Eugène, in St. Francis De Sales Cemetery in Houma. Jean-Pierre Viguerie, the husband of Marianne’s daughter, Marie Elvire, served as executor of Marianne’s estate. He was also the tax collector, recorder, and appraiser for the parish, and he had loaned his in-laws money to pay property taxes from 1874 to 1881. Eugène and Marianne’s entire estate, including their house along the bayou in the center of Houma, was valued at fifteen hundred dollars, and at a public auction on July 14, 1883, Jules M. Burguières Sr., purchased his parents’ estate for the appraised amount.23 On May 19, 1884, Jules Sr. and Marie Corinne suffered a devastating loss when their sixth child, thirteen-month-old Ernest Felix Burguières, died. The child was buried in the family cemetery on Florence Plantation. The next year, Jules presented his wife with a copy of Haydock’s The Catholic Bible and Commentary, with beautiful colored illustrations and information on family members dating back to the nineteenth century.

Founding a Sugar Empire: Jules Martial Burguières Sr., 1877–1893

4.5 Jules M. Burguières Jr. (l) and Ernest A. Burguières Sr., ca. 1888. Burguières Family Collection, Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Louisiana at Lafayette

4.6 Henry I. Burguières (l) and Ernest A. Burguières Sr., ca. 1897. Burguières Family Collection, Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Louisiana at Lafayette

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Between 1885 and 1888, the Burguières had three more sons: Ernest Aloysius (1885–1959), Henri Isidore (1887–1938), and Charles Patout Burguières (1888–1985). Florence Plantation

In June 1889, Jules Sr. purchased the property adjacent to Cypremort Plantation and renamed it Florence Plantation after his nine-year-old daughter. He believed that spending $80,900 for these 777.3 acres would finally secure him a permanent position in the upper echelon of sugar planters, and he was right. According to Louisiana historian William Perrin, Florence Plantation was one of the “finest” in the state, with soil of “inexhaustible fertility” that made “Mr. Burguières the possessor of a comfortable fortune, which he has amassed by his own unaided efforts, not having inherited a dollar of property.” The Louisiana Planter and Sugar Manufacturer reported in November 1899 “that at Mr. J. M. Burguières’ Florence plantation they are getting twelve tons of cane to the acre, and that they are getting 200 pounds of dry sugar to the ton of cane! This seems almost incredible, but the information came directly from the sugar house, by telephone, at 2 p.m. today, and was confirmed by telephone tonight. That’s the place that Mr. Scally sold to Mr. Burguières for $80,000 and then nearly lost his wits because Mr. Burguières refused to sell it back to him.”24 A week later, a reporter for the Louisiana Planter and Sugar Manufacturer received a package from Minnie Brown, the daughter of the overseer at Florence, Robert Brown, who was also E. D. Burguières’s grandson. The package contained “four canes, taken at random from a field of first year stubble. These canes, topped as if for the mills, weigh twenty-seven pounds, an average of six and three-quarter pounds each; and Miss Brown assures me that Mr. Burguières is getting thirty tons of this cane to the acre on his new land. Other places may take the cake for some things, but [Florence Plantation] will be likely to take the sugar loaf for largest tonnage this year.” By 1891, Cypremort and Florence Plantations were producing more than 3.3 million pounds of sugar each year.25 The Florence Plantation house was located on what is now Louisiana Highway 83 in Louisa. The Greek Revival–style home was a two-story, three-thousand-square-foot structure built between 1830 and 1840 and

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was typical of pre–Civil War houses on working plantations on the prairie and bayous. It was probably built by John Gordy in the 1850s and was later sold to Patrick Scally, from whom Jules purchased the plantation. Robert Brown and his family lived in this house.26 The year after Jules purchased Florence Plantation, the Louisiana Planter and Sugar Manufacturer reprinted a piece from the New Iberia Enterprise that offered glowing praise for Jules’s plantations and business acumen: One of the shining examples of how intelligence, energy, and foresight can make the sugar industry yield a fortune is with that estimable gentleman, Mr. Jules Burguières. . . . A decade ago Mr. Burguières purchased the Cypremort place—large, but principally timberland—cleared it and, year by year, advanced the sugar culture there—improved the method of manufacturing sugar and gaining yields, etc., and today takes a foremost seat with the most advanced sugar planters and successful sugar manufacturers of the age. . . . Corn and hay is made to repletion—rotation of crops preserved—pea vines plowed under in fall, Hall plows used—labor ample, tenants up to the scratch and happy, and mules in perfect condition. . . . At the sugar refinery at Cypremort, every adjunct of sugar machinery is on hand. Filter presses are used and in 1890 grinding will glory in the machinery which will effect almost a diffusion effect.27

Jules Experiments

Aware of the havoc that the weather could wreak on plantation schedules and crop yields, Jules turned proactively to technology. In 1890, he had an artesian well sunk on Cypremort Plantation for irrigation in times of drought, and he installed a drainage pump in a large canal that ran through one of his fields, an innovation the Louisiana Planter and Sugar Manufacturer praised as “a wonderful advancement made in modern drainage and culture.” Many other planters also purchased these pumps, but sometimes they were simply not enough. During the extended 1893 rainy season, “the draining pumps on Cypremort [were] working night and day to dissipate the volumes of water which accumulate in the rear of the fields after each one of the floods. . . . The water is barely out of the fields before down pours another soaker, and the work

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Founding a Sugar Empire: Jules Martial Burguières Sr., 1877–1893 Table 1. Sugarcane Yields for the J. M. Burguières Company, 1877–1890 Season

Hogsheads

Pounds

1877–78

370

1878–79

N/A

1879–80

490

1880–81

590

1882–83

615

1883–84

750

1,050,000

1884–85

597

800,000

1885–86

597

800,000

1886–87

597

800,000

1887–88

708

1,050,000

1888–89

1,824

2,300,000

1889–90

1,726

2,175,000

Source: Follett, Documenting Louisiana Sugar. Table 2. Sugarcane Yields for the J. M. Burguières Company, 1892–1899 Year

Yield (in pounds)

1892–93

3,007,957

1893–94

4,127,446

1894–95

5,017,803

1895–96

3,467,542

1896–97

3,760,400

1897–98

6,012,125

1898–99

6,085,730

Source: Alcée Bouchereau, Statements, 1893–99.

has to be done over again.” Two months later, the weather remained “entirely too unsteady for the nerves of the agriculturist,” and the draining pumps at Cypremort and neighboring plantations had “been put to the test of their capacities.”28 But Jules persisted. From 1877, when his crop yielded 370 hogsheads, through 1891, when he produced more than three million pounds of sugarcane, Jules learned a lot about growing and making sugar. Through trial and error, assistance and advice from extended family, and

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experimentation, Jules had become one of the wealthiest sugar planters in South Louisiana. The End of an Era

The New Year celebration ushering in the Gay Nineties must have been a happy time for the Burguières at Cypremort Plantation. Jules and Marie Corinne had eight living children and another on the way. Over the preceding year, the Cypremort mill had ground an impressive 12,251 tons of Jules’s and his neighbors’ sugar, producing more than 2,000,000 pounds of yellow clarified sugar—nearly 173.5 pounds of sugar per ton of cane. The Cypremort mill was considered one of the best in the state. In January 1890, both the stubble and the fall plant were doing so well that the rows were covered with a good stand of green, healthy plants.29 But on January 29, Marie Corinne gave birth to a daughter and then experienced complications. On February 28, she died of blood poisoning. As news of her death spread, family, friends, planters, business associates, and workers gathered at the house to mourn. The funeral was a grand if somber affair, with a procession of seventy carriages escorting her to the Patout family cemetery at nearby Enterprise Plantation. On March 14, her namesake, six-week-old Marie Corinne Burguières, followed her mother to the grave.30 Jules was now a widower with eight children between ages two and sixteen. In the spring of that year, South Louisiana experienced a hard freeze for three days, as if to mirror the Burguières’ grief. In the fall, Jules’s two oldest sons, Denis P. J. and Joseph, left their younger brothers and sisters at Cypremort Plantation to attend Spring Hill College in Mobile, Alabama. And the sweet, green cane continued to grow tall and dense, and life went on.

5 The Sugar Baron in New Orleans, 1893–1899

Dum Vivimus, Vivamus! (While we live, let us live!) —Louisiana Club Motto

The year 1893 marked a turning point in the history of the Burguières. It was then that Jules and his family left the endless expanse of cane fields on the Cypremort Prairie and moved to New Orleans, one of America’s most important commercial cities, offering business, social, and political opportunities for Jules. The Gilded Age was defining New Orleans. Streetcars rumbled up and down St. Charles Avenue, Mardi Gras had been celebrated for more than a century, and jazz was emerging from this mélange of cultures. Located at the mouth of the Mississippi River, New Orleans was a major intersection in the trade network that connected America to the rest of the world. In 1894, the city leaders declared that the grain trade was growing faster at New Orleans than at any other port, so they committed to making it the best port in the United States.1 Always ahead of the curve, Jules had already sensed the city’s destiny. In fact, his move to New Orleans had been prompted by the opportunities he perceived in the trading segment of the sugar industry. Unlike many of his planter peers, Jules’s plans for the future of his family and business extended beyond St. Mary Parish, beyond sugar production. He had learned to take risks, and he had been enormously successful. Jules had confidence that his venture into sugar marketing would be just as fruitful. 66

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In 1893, the United States and many other countries were locked in the grip of an economic depression. Locally, planters had suffered through several years of hurricanes, freezes, and floods that had brought the sugar industry to its knees. Then, in October, a category 4 hurricane swallowed up the small resort island of Chenière Caminada, taking approximately two thousand unsuspecting vacationers with it and sending a fifteenfoot surge onto the coastal areas of Terrebonne and St. Mary Parishes that decimated the cane. Local troubles merged with national problems. Both sugar prices and the stock market reached record lows. In the next two years, nearly sixteen thousand U.S. businesses failed, and almost three million workers lost their jobs. Jules’s half-sister, Elvire, and her wealthy and cultured husband, Jean-Pierre Viguerie, were among the victims. After Jean-Pierre died in 1888, his Terrebonne Parish Orange Grove Plantation and its grand Greek Revival home, sugarhouse, store, school, workers’ dwellings, and equipment were all sold for well below their worth.2 In the 1893–94 season, Jules produced more than four million pounds of sugar at Cypremort and Florence Plantations, though the low price of sugar limited his profits. To have greater control of his profits and his destiny, Jules diversified, going into partnership with J. B. Levert, a prominent New Orleans sugar planter, businessman, and experienced market commissioner.3 Now Jules had his hands in marketing as well as in production. Diversification proved to be a key strategy for the Burguières. Jules Martial Burguières and Ida Laperle Broussard

New Orleans may also have appealed to Jules as a consequence of his 1891 marriage to twenty-one-year-old Ida Laperle Broussard (1877–1948), Marie Corinne’s first cousin. This was the first union between the FrenchAmerican Burguières and an Acadian family. Ida came from “one of the oldest and highest esteemed” Acadian families of St. Martin Parish, the descendants of Alexandre Broussard. The marriage further tied together the Burguières and the Patouts, Vigueries, Bonvillains, and Broussards, and those connections became even tighter seven years later when Ida’s sister, Marie Alice, married Jules’s oldest son, Denis P. J., creating a convoluted genealogy in which Ida became her sister’s mother-in-law.4

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5.1 Inez Burguières and Ida L. Broussard Burguières, ca. 1912. Burguières Family Collection, Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Louisiana at Lafayette

Ida had had a difficult childhood. Her father, Pierre Felix Broussard, died when she was very young. Then, when Ida was nine, her mother, Ernestine, was killed by a train as she walked along the tracks at three o’clock in the morning, still in her nightclothes, apparently sleepwalking as she had in the past. Ida and her three siblings—Marie Alice Broussard, Lelia Appoline Broussard, and Frank Broussard—were taken in by their mother’s sister, Flora Patout Schwing, who lived in New Orleans.5 With her marriage, Ida became the stepmother to Jules’s eight children, the oldest of whom was less than six years her junior. Two years later, Ida bore a child of her own, Inez Ernestine Burguières (1893–1965). In 1892, Jules’s two oldest sons, Denis P. J. and Joseph, had graduated with bachelor of science degrees from Spring Hill College in Mobile, Alabama, a Jesuit institution established in 1830. Spring Hill was the school of choice for the sons of New Orleans’s leading families. Based on Aristotle’s “Ethics,” Spring Hill’s educational philosophy was that the proper “quest” in life was to work for the common good, and the school challenged its students to be “leaders in the service of others” and “to appreciate the humanity of others.” After graduating, Joseph went to

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New Orleans to work with his father, while Denis P. J. moved back to Cypremort, where he directed plantation operations.6 The Battle for New Orleans: French versus Anglos

If Jules had moved to New Orleans in the first half of the century, he would have chosen to live in the Vieux Carré because of his French roots and the dominance of the French language in that section of the city. Since the late seventeenth century, the French had inhabited the region, establishing deep roots in New Orleans. When Jules’s father, Eugène, arrived in Louisiana in the early 1830s, the French were already settled comfortably in the Vieux Carré, content in their self-imposed insularity. However, by the nineteenth century, the economic, political, and class system in old New Orleans was beginning to collapse under the forces of Anglo-Americans, who brought not only population growth but economic development as well. The French referred to these English-speakers as les Américains, an epithet expressing their disdain for les étrangers, outsiders who dared invade their comfortable existence and endanger their economic, political, social, and cultural system. As late as 1870, William Sparks published The Memories of Fifty Years, in which he voiced the aristocratic French Creoles’ opinion of les Américains. Sparks granted that the Anglos were “enterprising,” “energetic,” and “progressive” and conceded that they sought out dangers just “to overcome them”; thus, they “subdue[d] the world to [their] will.” However, Sparks continued, the Anglo-American “will not scruple at the means: he uses any and all within his power” to win. “Moral considerations are a slight obstacle. . . . [A]ctions are governed only by the law—not by a high moral sense of right.” The French Creole, in contrast, was “more honest and less speculative; more honorable and less litigious; more sincere with less pretension; superior to trickery or low intrigue . . . of nobler motives and less hypocrisy; more refined and less presumptuous, and altogether a man of more chivalrous spirit and purer aspirations.”7 Sparks explained that the antagonism between the Anglos and the French Creoles resulted from cultural differences such as language, religion, laws, and worldview. He concluded that in Louisiana, conciliation had “proved impossible. Although the French have been American subjects for more than sixty years . . . they remain to a very great extent a distinct people. Even in New Orleans they have the French part and the

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American part of the city, and do not, to any very great degree, extend their union by living among each other.”8 Perhaps the cultural marker that most clearly delineated one culture from another was language. When Louisiana entered the Union in 1812, it was the first and only state where English was not the dominant language. Throughout America, most immigrants willingly relinquished their native languages and cultures; the French, however, tenaciously guarded this powerful tie to their mother country. Well into the twentieth century, the Catholic Church and its French clergy in the United States served as keepers of the language.9 But over time, the Anglos chipped away at the old-line French Creoles until they could no longer resist. The final coup to the French came when the Louisiana Constitution of 1921 denied schools the option of using the French language in the classrooms. Meant to bring an end to illiteracy, this mandate dealt a devastating blow to the French and Acadians in Louisiana and ultimately unlocked the doors for American cultural hegemony in New Orleans and South Louisiana. French-speaking Creoles became English-speaking Americans. Despite the loss of the language in government, newspapers, schools, and society, French survived in families for a few generations longer. But French-speaking parents gradually became reluctant to teach their children the language, which now served as a marker of déclassé status and a badge of ignorance in an otherwise enlightened society. Americanization sought cultural homogeneity.10 In 1873, the Paris-born Louisiana Burguières were speaking both French and English. They, the Patouts, and the other French and Acadian families living on the prairies of South Louisiana maintained the French language longer, in part because they did not experience as much pressure to assimilate as their confreres living in the city of New Orleans. Also, the St. Mary and Terrebonne Parish Burguières lived among French-speaking Acadians. When they began intermarrying, French had a greater chance of survival because the Acadians had defiantly clung to their language. One of Jules’s sisters, Marguerite Burguières Theriot, remained bilingual and insisted that her grandson, Edward Dennis Theriot (1911–97), learn to speak the language of his ancestors. According to his son, Dennis Theriot (1938–2010), Edward grew up speaking three languages: English, because the establishment (schools, government) demanded it; Cajun, because his schoolmates spoke it; and French, at

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his grandmother’s insistence. Similarly, even though the French language became all but lost in official New Orleans, the city’s French culture persisted in the areas of religion, food, ritual, celebration, and, most important, worldview. New Orleans author George Washington Cable summed up the French attitude when he wrote in his 1880 novel, The Grandissimes, that the Protestant Américains had “poisoned the community” and that French Creoles who were beginning to assimilate into this new culture had “gone over to the enemy.”11 The French living in nineteenth-century New Orleans defended their territory much as they had defended their language. Ensconced in the Vieux Carré since the eighteenth century, the French protected the neighborhood from Anglos, and the two groups remained geographically, culturally, and socially separate. Anglos built their homes across Canal Street from the Vieux Carré in an area that had been the Livaudais Plantation and that came to be known as the Garden District. This property was divided into approximately eighty residential city blocks bordered by Carondelet Street, Jackson Avenue, Magazine Street, and Louisiana Avenue. Wealthy Anglo planters and merchants built grand residences demonstrating their new wealth and influence on New Orleans’s economy and politics. This new and sometimes ostentatious show of wealth and success was not lost on the otherwise insular and indifferent French.12 As early as 1847, a writer for the Daily Delta noted that the AngloAmerican residents of the Garden District were “princes of luck and happiness.” They lived on high ground, where “vegetation flourishes . . . in amazing luxuriance.” The wealthy had beautiful villas, surrounded by exotic gardens of brilliantly colored flowers and plants and with spacious yards large enough for “the little ones to scamper and roll upon.” In contrast, the author and the other residents of the Vieux Carré were “crowded denizens of New Orleans, emerging from our little narrow, damp yards.”13 When the French defended their geographical territory, they were also defending their position as keepers of high culture. According to historian Richard Bienvenu, French Creoles had “an intense and perdurable love of opera.” Like the Catholic Church, French opera dramatically reinforced the French language and culture in early nineteenth-century New Orleans. In the face of a growing Anglo population, the French perceived themselves as engaged in a “mortal battle” to defend their opera against yet another threat to their cultural hegemony.

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The Sugar Baron in New Orleans, 1893–1899

5.2 Jules M. Burguières Sr. residence, 2606 Prytania Street, New Orleans, ca. 1897. Courtesy of the Historic New Orleans Collection, Acc. 1984.115.17i.

When Anglos established their own operas, they did not do so on French turf. Moreover, French Creoles would not cross Canal Street to attend the English operas, where they might “rub shoulders with American frontiersmen in coonskin caps.” This operatic rivalry became the impetus for French cultural identification in New Orleans. Eventually, both the French and the English opera lost out to Italian opera, but when French musicians performed Italian opera, they did so in French. In the end, the same Anglo-American hegemony that led to the decline of French opera sounded the death knell for French Creole control of New Orleans’s economy.14 Jules and Ida in the Garden District

By the time Jules M. Burguières Sr. moved to New Orleans in 1893, the Anglo-Americans were the powerful elite of the “new” New Orleans, and the Garden District was the fashionable residential district. It was there that Jules purchased his home. He and his family relocated to a mansion at 2606 Prytania Street, “one of the most palatial establishments” on the street “of choice for grand residences.”15

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The move to New Orleans was much more than geographical. It marked Jules as part of the plantocracy of the Louisiana sugar industry. He certainly was not unfamiliar with the city, having traveled there many times to sell crops, do banking, and take care of plantation business. He and other prosperous sugar producers, leading businessmen, city officials, bankers, and scions of old-guard New Orleans would have known each other. But the move tied the Burguières more strongly into the city’s social/business/political web. New Orleans offered Jules and his family a plethora of social, cultural, and educational opportunities not available in the remote Cypremort area. The city was the hub of social life for wealthy planters, who enjoyed “Old friends, old wine, old books,” according to a popular saying. In addition to the opera, the city offered theatrical productions such as Lilly Langtry in A Wife’s Peril, Edwin Booth as Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, and Joseph Jefferson playing Rip Van Winkle.16 Even though the Garden District had appropriated some of the Vieux Carré’s prestige, French culture remained strong in the Quarter. Jules and Ida had an opportunity to enjoy the French Creole cuisine that had been established long before their arrival. The Burguières likely were patrons of Antoine’s restaurant, which had been established more than fifty years earlier. Founder Antoine Alciatore created culinary classics, including Eggs Sardou (after Victorien Sardou, a famous French dramatist), escargots à la bourguignonne (snails cooked as in the mother country), and huitres en coquille à la Rockefeller (a dish featuring fresh, plump Gulf oysters). The couple also likely frequented Galatoire’s, famous for the family recipes Jean Galatoire brought from the small village of Pardies, France. Today in its fourth generation of family ownership, Galatoire’s French Creole cuisine remains both an art form and true to its roots. And Jules and Ida and their friends and business associates undoubtedly spent time at the iconic Café du Monde, sipping café au lait and nibbling on beignets. Jules became a member of the exclusive Boston Club, a men’s social establishment founded in 1841 by thirty “men of substance” as “a world within itself, in which it has perpetuated the finer tradition of the social charm of New Orleans and the spirit of the fraternal privileges of a convivial gentlemen’s club.” Membership was reserved for the city’s leading planters, merchants, and professionals, the pillars of society, and was much sought-after by both old-line French New Orleanian families and nouveau riche Americans. After a man was nominated for

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membership, there was a ten-year waiting period. Once admitted, the members enjoyed a lifetime of fraternal friendship in the club’s palatial three-story mansion at 824 Canal Street, which featured an Old English staircase, marble hallway, billiard room, large dining room, card room, kitchen, and servants’ quarters.17 The Burguières of course participated in Mardi Gras festivities. Jules and later his two oldest sons, Denis and Joseph, were members of the “most discriminatory” of the old-line groups, the Mystic Krewe of Comus (the god of revelry). The krewe was founded in the 1850s by six white Protestant Americans who had moved to New Orleans from Mobile, Alabama, and was the Crescent City’s oldest Mardi Gras organization. With some Masonic-like traditions of secrecy, the members were masked for Comus’s ball and parade, and tradition forbade the revelers from revealing the name of their king. In 1857, Comus had hosted the first tableau ball, attended by three thousand guests at the Gaiety Theatre on Gravier Street.18 The Krewe of Comus organized the elite Pickwick Club (named after Charles Dickens’s first novel, The Pickwick Papers) so that the “amiable association of men” would have an opportunity to meet year-round. The association was self-described as a society “deeply rooted in creole tradition in a city at the peak of its affluence and wealth for that century. In it one can trace the rapid growth of the city prior to the Civil War, the economic stagnation during the civil strife, and the city’s gradual rehabilitation and subsequent development. . . . The Club has survived wars, floods, epidemics, economic panics, and financial crises.” Like the Boston Club, membership in the Pickwick Club was limited to “gentlemen of culture and refinement and acquainted with the belles lettres,” discerning men of good taste and “social standing, genial disposition and good-fellowship.” The Pickwick Club headquarters, an extravagant four-story residence built in 1884 at the corner of Canal and Carondolet Streets, featured “proper rooms for literary and reading purposes, for the collection of valuable works of art, books, charts, maps, painting, statuary, coins, etc., for the use of its members and the cultivation and improvement of a scientific and literary taste, and for the promotion of social intercourse, enjoyment, comfort, harmony, refinement of manners and intellectual improvement.” The Queen Anne manor itself was a work of art, with stained-glass windows and a sumptuous interior decorated with dark mahogany and marble, leather furniture and crystal chandeliers. As a member, Jules would have enjoyed the ambiance, perhaps

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savoring a fine cigar and a goblet of vintage cognac or absinthe in this haven for the cultured and privileged, who at various times included a chief justice of the United States (Edward Douglass White from Lafourche Parish), governors, ambassadors, legislators, judges, mayors, U.S. president Chester A. Arthur, distinguished soldiers, and other civic and business leaders.19 Even before Jules joined the venerable New Orleans social clubs, he was selected to join the Louisiana Club, which was organized in 1877 for business and professional men under age twenty-five, the city’s jeunesses dorées, “licentiates of the learned professions or apprentices to the business of their fathers, some already embarked for themselves on the sea of commercial life.” The Louisiana Club was located at 144 Canal Street, between the Pickwick and Boston Clubs, in a three-and-a-half story former residence with spacious rooms and towering ceilings.20 In addition to his social and business activities, Jules also found time to take extended vacations. In the summer of 1893, the Louisiana Planter and Sugar Manufacturer reported that Jules Burguières, “the large Cypremort planter, and president of the First National Bank of Franklin, is summering with his family in California and will take in the World’s Fair before returning to Louisiana.” In May 1895, the New York Times wrote that Jules and Ida Burguières, along with seventeen-year-old Louise, fifteen-year-old Florence, and thirteenyear-old Jules Jr., were departing for a four-month trip to Europe that included stops in Germany, Italy, and England. The following year, Jules Jr. enrolled at Spring Hill College, with his brother, Ernest Aloysius, joining him in 1898.21 Jules Diversifies

In spite of the abundance of social events and the demands of high society, Jules Sr. remained determined, ambitious, and fearless. He had come to New Orleans with a plan that extended beyond sugar production. In conjunction with his move to the city, he had sold his parents’ home and property on Bayou Terrebonne and bought out Louis Bush’s share of his partnership with J. B. Levert in a sugar marketing firm. Jules was now both a sugar planter and a commission merchant. The new firm, Levert, Burguières, and Company, had offices at 802 Perdido Street in New Orleans.22

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Levert was a highly regarded businessman with an impressive list of accomplishments. Educated at the University of Louisiana (now Tulane University) and at Mount Saint Mary’s College in Emmitsburg, Maryland, Levert volunteered to serve in the 1st Louisiana Cavalry in the Civil War and was captured by Union troops in July 1863, remaining a prisoner until the end of the war. After returning home at the end of the war, he “assumed his share in re-building the devastated commerce of the South.” Levert owned extensive sugar lands in South Louisiana as well as the St. John Sugar House in St. Martin Parish. He was a state senator, the vice president of the Canal Bank and Trust Company, a member of the Tulane Board of Administrators, curator of the Louisiana State Museum, and a member of the Pickwick Club.23 Jules’s decision to enter the field of sugar marketing afforded him many new advantages. Producers had limited options for selling their crop. They could ship the product to New Orleans or to an Atlantic market, where a merchant would sell it to the highest bidder. This approach meant that planters did not know the price until after the sugar left the plantation and did not have fixed costs for drayage, freight, and commissions. Planters also could sell their sugar from their own wharves to merchants, who would sell it on northern markets. Or planters could sell sugar to speculators, who would market it at their own risk and expense. When Jules became a marketer, he cut out the middleman and had more control of the price.24 Planters were skeptical about buyers’ objectivity (or lack thereof ) in grading sugar. In 1885, one planter expressed the frustration that he and others felt about the process: “Doubtless, fault will be found with it. ‘Rather off color’—‘Grain too small (or too large)’—as the day’s fashion may be—Maybe ‘Specky’—or ‘Damp’—or, (They will have some fault to find, you know) ‘Off smell’! that’s it! That’s the newest objection out!” Antagonism between the planters and the buyers continued until the polariscope was introduced beginning in 1888. This instrument determined sucrose content, which in turn determined the grade, providing an objective means of pricing sugar.25 Most planters who sold their sugar and molasses in New Orleans hired factors who would sell products on consignment and receive a commission on each transaction. Factors were the middlemen between the producers and the buyers on the levee. Buyers knew which producers had reputations for turning out quality sugar and cultivated business relationships with the factors who worked with those planters.

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Likewise, factors cultivated relations with buyers who had reputations for paying fair prices. As a factor, Jules kept abreast of market conditions and advised his planter clients about when and how much to ship to New Orleans. He decided what price to pay for the sugar and molasses based on his knowledge and experience.26 In addition to producing and marketing sugar, Jules expanded his professional horizons by serving as president of the Louisiana Tobacco Manufacturing Company and of the Sugar Planters’ Mutual Insurance Company, established in 1895. This company gave him additional control of his fate in the sugarcane industry and provided another lucrative source of income. The office was at the same address as Levert, Burguières, and Company, and the company’s advertisement proclaimed that it was not “a member of the South-Eastern Tariff Association, [so] its Policies are not Controlled by Compact regulations.” F. G. Freret was the insurance company’s secretary, while John N. Pharr served as vice president. Pharr was the pilot of the Rusk, a steamboat that operated in the Atchafalaya Basin during the Civil War. By the 1870s, he had risen to eminence as the “dominant force in the Teche Valley steamboat business,” creating a near monopoly on the steamboat trade in Southwest Louisiana. In addition, Pharr owned extensive swamplands and plantations and was active in Louisiana politics. The directors of the Sugar Planters’ Mutual Insurance Company included Levert and Monte Lemann, the legal counsel for the Southern States Land and Timber Company, a Florida landholding company, as well as Joseph Birg, a Bayou Teche sugar planter, and Charles Godchaux, president of Godchaux Sugars, director of Leon Godchaux’s Clothing Company, and president of the Whitney National Bank.27 Meanwhile, Back on the Plantations . . .

When Jules moved to New Orleans, he placed the management of his three plantations in St. Mary Parish in the capable hands of his oldest son, Denis P. J., and two brothers-in-law. Cypremort Plantation was managed by Augustave Theriot (husband of Jules’s sister, Marguerite), assisted by his son, Alfred. Florence Plantation was managed by Abraham Brown (husband of Jules’s sister, Marie Annette) and Tommy Johnson. Denis P. J. managed Inez Plantation. All three plantations

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prospered under management that consisted primarily of family members, whether close or extended.28 Between 1892 and 1896, Jules was president of the First National Bank of Franklin, “one of the most prosperous banks of the country”; a member of the St. Mary Parish Police Jury; and a stockholder in various sugar companies and refineries, including the Caffery Central Refinery in St. Mary Parish and the Ferris Sugar Factory at Barbreck in St. Landry Parish. He served as the secretary-treasurer of the Oaklawn Sugar Company and treasurer of the Franklin Sugar Manufacturing Company, which had a daily capacity of 2.5 million pounds.29 Though social life in Franklin paled in comparison to New Orleans, it was not without its charms. In the late 1890s, Jules was on the board of directors of the Franklin Opera House Company, a nine-hundredseat theater with incandescent lighting, frescoes, and a Venetian scene painted on the stage curtain. The parish seat, Franklin, located about fifteen miles west of Cypremort Plantation, also had the St. Mary Club, which had been organized by businessmen and planters. Like the New Orleans clubs albeit on a much smaller scale, the St. Mary Club was housed in an elegant manor that featured a library and reading room, reception room, parlor, billiard hall, and a bar. Every year, the club’s anniversary celebration attracted governors, senators, and debutantes dressed for the occasion.30 The Modernization of an Industry

One of the most significant factors in the post–Civil War revival and modernization of Louisiana’s sugar industry was the establishment of the Louisiana Planters and Sugar Manufacturers Association (LSPA) in 1877, the same year Jules bought Cypremort Plantation. The association sought to organize the sugar industry into a cohesive unit to lobby for protective tariffs against the mounting foreign competition; to establish the Louisiana Sugar Exchange; and to foster scientific research and technological innovation. The organization also published a weekly newspaper, the Louisiana Planter and Sugar Manufacturer, and by the 1890s, the LSPA had become a powerful force in the state.31 Since Jules had entered the field, problems beyond nature and war had begun to threaten profits. Cuba, Hawaii, and the Philippines became formidable foes of the previously insular Louisiana industry.

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The J. M. Burguières Company, like all other sugarcane operations, lived or died by government tariffs on imported sugar. The need to unite was obvious. The leaders of the LSPA, the state’s wealthiest landowners and sugar manufacturers, felt obliged to “foster the interests of the class they represent.” They asked, “Shall we, as a class, remain idle and indifferent, totally unorganized, trusting only to individual effort to protect our interest, or shall we, by united and concentrated association, give greater force and efficiency to our action?” The answer was obvious.32 The LSPA believed that the way to fight foreign competition was through scientific research and technological innovation. In 1890, with this objective in mind, the organization established the Sugar Experiment Station at Audubon Park in New Orleans, the world’s first research station for experts in the industry. There they conducted experiments on new types of cane, the width of cane rows, fertilizer, seed cane, and new agricultural implements. The station became the national and international leader in sugarcane research, resulting in scientific and technological achievements in the industry.33 The LSPA initially was composed of both Republicans and Democrats, who united in a common economic goal. As pressure from foreign competition mounted, however, the group began to fracture along party lines. In 1896, Republican industry leaders broke away from the LSPA and established the American Cane Growers’ Association (ACGA). The ACGA maintained that it represented all American sugar planters, both cane and beet producers. Unlike the LSPA, the ACGA lobbied politicians for a higher sugar tariff. The leaders were influential men who were also interested in building a strong Republican Party in Louisiana. The group included Henry McCall, a large Ascension sugar producer; B. A. Oxnard, the owner of Savannah Refining Company (later the Imperial Sugar Company); Walter J. Sutton, a sugar producer and commission merchant; H. C. Warmoth, owner of Magnolia Plantation and a Republican governor of Louisiana during Reconstruction; Pharr; H. C. Minor, owner of the grand Southdown Plantation in Terrebonne Parish; and William J. Behan. They attempted to establish the New Orleans Republican Printing Company, which was to publish a daily Republican newspaper, but the effort failed because of a lack of funding. Jules Burguières, who had been a Democrat, left both the party and the LSPA.34 Another innovation during this era was the introduction of the central factory system as a result of shortages in capital and labor. The central factory system separated the industry into two distinct entities,

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cultivation and sugar manufacturing, with technology developing in both areas. St. Mary Parish led the way in making the central factory a reality. According to the LSPA, “The [central] factory system is destined to develop a class of farmers large and small. Small farmers by combination will have a chance to buy the large estates, cut them up, and raise cane for sale.” Smaller sugar planters could process their cane without the tremendous expense of owning factories by selling crops to the large plantation owners with factories.35 In August 1896, Jules and Levert met with Iberia Parish businessmen and agreed to establish the Segura Sugar Company, the first refinery in the parish. The group authorized Dr. Stephen R. Gay to pay one thousand dollars to purchase Jules’s Iberia Parish land, which was located one mile west of New Iberia. Jules was elected the company’s secretarytreasurer; Levert, J. H. Murphy, and John Barkley were the directors. The J. M. Burguières Company owned 90 percent of Segura. Optimistic about the future, Jules spent a considerable amount of money the next year modernizing the outdated mill at the Cypremort Plantation, since he believed that a central factory was essential to his company’s growth.36 But the manufacture of sugar was a great risk for many reasons, not the least of which was money. “Turpin Tyne,” a pseudonym for a Louisiana Planter and Sugar Manufacturer writer, voiced the industry’s frustration: “Sugar manufacture seems a duel to the death. It is only those who make sugar cheapest who succeed; all others kick awhile and then are still forever. The success of one implies the ruin of another; misfortune to one is a blessing to another. . . . Sooner or later the American sugar grower, in spite of all his overwork, will be sold out, unless he can make more sugar for less money. . . . It is fatiguing to make more sugar and sell it for less money. It makes one tired.”37 The sugar industry was also affected by the creation of drainage canals in coastal marshes and swamplands. For the Burguières and others in South Louisiana with substantial wetland property, canals meant more arable soil for planting sugarcane. In 1899, the Louisiana Planter and Sugar Manufacturer reported that “the most extensive drainage enterprise ever to commence in this portion of the sugar district” was under way. A dredge boat was “destined to reclaim thousands of acres of sugar land within the district. . . . The canal will be three miles long . . . and will empty into a large marsh bayou which connects with the high seas.” Canals in St. Mary and Iberia Parishes would be eighteen

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miles long. Sections of these parishes “where drainage in the past had been practically impossible” would now be transformed into a “splendid sugar-producing soil” and would be the means by which several hundred thousand acres of swamp- and marshland would be reclaimed. It was estimated that the cultivatable land in the sugar district would increase by more than 50 percent. Jules participated in and benefited from these extensive water-control projects, not just riding the postwar wave of innovation but also driving it.38 Fin de Siècle

On a beautiful June day in 1898, Jules’s oldest son, Denis P. J. Burguières, married Alice Broussard at New Orleans’s Church of the Immaculate Conception. Denis’s brother, Joseph, served as the groom’s attendant. According to the newspaper account, Alice wore a “handsome traveling dress of tan peau de soie, trimmed in turquoise blue satin,” and a “corsage made with a yoke of lace.” After the ceremony, Alice and Denis left for New York, where they were to spend a few days before departing for their honeymoon in Paris. According to family lore, however, after Denis dreamed that their ship would sink at sea, they changed their plans and honeymooned in Atlantic City. And, indeed, on July 4, 1898, the French ocean liner La Bourgogne collided with a British ship off the coast of Canada, leading to the deaths of more than 725 passengers.39 The following year began badly for sugar planters when a recordbreaking freeze descended on South Louisiana in February. Other weather-related problems followed, including a forty-day drought in late August and September. Nevertheless, Jules produced six million pounds of sugarcane on his three plantations.40 It seemed like luck was on his side. But only a few months later, in the summer of 1899, an outbreak of anthrax broke out among his cattle at Cypremort Plantation. By late summer, Jules had contracted the infectious disease. On September 2, the Louisiana Planter and Sugar Manufacturer reported that he was “almost entirely recovered from his recent severe spell of illness.” But on October 1, as grinding season was just beginning, the forty-nine-yearold father of nine, husband, and sugar baron succumbed to the same disease that was killing his cattle. The next day, Jules’s body was borne on a special train from his home in New Orleans to his beloved plantations in St. Mary Parish. Another train carried mourners from Franklin and

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surrounding areas. Jules was laid to rest in St. Helen’s Cemetery, a small plot of land carved from acres and acres of brilliant green cane on his Florence Plantation.41 Contemporaries offered effusive praise for one of the pivotal figures in the development of the Louisiana sugarcane industry. Historian Alcée Fortier extolled Jules as “worthy of the highest emulation,” having won, through “the exercise of his good judgment and industry, a place among the foremost business men of his state.” The New Orleans TimesDemocrat depicted Jules as man whose “stock in trade at the outset was brains and industry.” The city’s Daily States hailed his “brilliant career” and his “seldom . . . matched” rise to power. In just thirty years, Jules had “lifted himself to a position of eminence, whose worth was almost a million dollars when he died, still a gentleman generous to a fault.” In The Story of Louisiana (1904), E. A. Davis wrote of Jules, “Year by year his sugar estate grew in importance as he cleared the forest and brought new lands under cultivation. . . . Progressive and public spirited, he stood at all times ready to aid any movement for the uplifting of humanity. . . . He lies buried in his family tomb in the midst of his property at Cypremort, where before his coming was a wilderness.”42

6 Brothers in Business, 1900–1912

Use every effort . . . to maintain & keep the family together . . . to continue all the business as it stands for the mutual interest of all of said children. —Jules Martial Burguières Sr., Last Will and Testament As a bow stretches to shoot an arrow towards one goal, so did all the Burguières bend their concerted efforts toward keeping intact—even enlarging—Jules M.’s companies. Their teamwork was remarkable. —C. Mildred Smith and G. Portré-Bobinski, A Southern Neo-Colonial Home

If the nineteenth century had ushered in unparalleled change, the twentieth would have astounded even the most visionary science fiction writers. The transformation from an agricultural economy and society to an industrial world altered the identity and landscape of nations. The beginning of the century was the age of Einstein, Freud, Ezra Pound, Frank Lloyd Wright, Picasso, jazz and blues, the Wright Brothers, skyscrapers, Model Ts, assembly lines, and the return of Halley’s Comet. By 1910, William Gorgas had discovered that the Aedes aegypti, the lowly mosquito, was not only a nuisance but also the carrier of malaria and yellow fever, two of the most virulent diseases that thrived in South Louisiana’s subtropical climate. But science remained helpless against one of nature’s fiercest manifestations, the hurricane. In 1906, 120-mileper-hour winds crushed Galveston, Texas, killing more than four thousand people and sending a storm surge into coastal South Louisiana. Three years later, a tropical storm slammed directly into Terrebonne Parish, destroying Sea Breeze, a popular Gulf Coast resort; drowning 83

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6.1 Marie Louise Burguières, ca. 1898. Burguières Family Collection, Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Louisiana at Lafayette

350 people; destroying cattle, crops, and wetlands; and ravaging everything in its path.1 In the new century, Theodore Roosevelt and then William H. Taft waged war against giant corporations, monopolistic trusts, and ruthless political machines. Taft in particular relentlessly pursued oil, railroad, tobacco, sugar, and other conglomerates. Among Roosevelt’s targets was the American Refining Company (the Sugar Trust), which had had a stranglehold on the sugar producers and refiners in Louisiana and other southern states.2 The early years of the century were relatively good times for sugarcane producers and refiners. Louisiana had 312 sugar mills, and in 1904, the industry produced almost four hundred thousand tons of sugar, a new record. Production remained around three hundred thousand tons for the next several years. The 1897 Dingley Tariff protected sugar

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6.2 Florence Clothilde Burguières, 1895. Portrait taken in Paris while traveling with her her father, Jules M. Burguières, Sr., stepmother, Ida Broussard Burguières, and her older sister, Louise Burguières.

interests until 1914 by imposing duties on foreign sugar. Domestic raw sugar prices consistently remained between 3.5 and 4.5 cents per pound during that period.3 With the death of their father, the Burguières brothers faced a real test of their ability to fulfill the wishes expressed in his will—the preservation of the close bonds of family and the maintenance of the family business. Though a consummate businessman, Jules had not planned for the J. M. Burguières Company’s transition to the next generation. His oldest sons, twenty-five-year-old Denis P. J. and twenty-threeyear-old Joseph, suddenly found themselves leaders not only of the million-dollar company but also of the Burguières family—Jules Sr.’s thirty-one-year-old widow, Ida, and his nine children, the youngest of whom was just six. Seven months after Jules’s death, eighteen-year-old

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Jules Jr. graduated from Spring Hill College and moved on to participate in a special course on sugar chemistry at Tulane University and in a commercial studies program at Smith College in Lexington, Kentucky. Twelve-year-old Henry soon joined his fourteen-year-old brother, Ernest, at Spring Hill; the youngest brother, eleven-year-old C. Patout, followed in 1903. Jules also left behind three daughters: Marie Louise, twenty-one; Florence Clothilde, nineteen; and Inez, six.4 An Unsettling Settlement

Jules wrote his Last Will and Testament on May 10, 1899, less than five months before his death. The document was more than a statement of how his estate would be divided; it carried great emotional weight and changed the course of familial relations for generations, connecting the past, the present, and the future. He had appointed Denis and Joseph as executors of his estate, “leaving everything to their entire Judgment” and “having full confidence in their Judgment” but insisting that his wishes be “strictly complied with.” He instructed the executors “to be kind to their Brothers & Sisters all and each of which I am so fond of. May God bless them all, the dear children.”5 Jules bequeathed to Ida, with whom he had a prenuptial agreement, seventy-five thousand dollars plus a fifteen-thousand-dollar life insurance policy. Their only child, Inez, was to receive one-ninth of his half of the community property of the Jules and Marie Corinne Burguières Estate. Jules’s eight children by Marie Corinne would receive one-ninth of his half of the estate plus one-eighth of their mother’s half of the estate.6 Despite Jules’s best efforts to specify his intentions, conflict arose. Ida contested the settlement, objecting to the valuations of community and separate property. She claimed that a month before she and Jules married, he had called a family meeting and had Marie Corinne’s half of the Jules and Marie Corinne Burguières Estate ceded to him. This maneuver would have combined the two halves of their community property into the Jules M. Burguières Estate and meant that Inez’s share would have been equal to that received by her half-brothers and -sisters.7 Though no judgment or formal act recorded the family meeting, when the case went to trial, Ida won. The decision was subsequently reversed on appeal to the Louisiana Supreme Court, and Inez inherited

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6.3 Denis P. J. Burguières Sr., ca. 1935.

6.4 Joseph E. Burguières, 1897. Burguières

Burguières Family Collection, Center for

Family Collection, Center for Louisiana

Louisiana Studies, University of Louisiana

Studies, University of Louisiana at Lafayette

at Lafayette

only from her father’s half of the estate. Nonetheless, Ida remained close to her stepchildren, and family harmony was restored.8 The J. M. Burguières Company

Those who knew Denis and Joseph had confidence in and great expectations of the brothers. Not only were they well educated, but they had learned from their father, and they could rely on their father’s partner, J. B. Levert, for guidance and assistance. Denis and Joseph soon proved that this confidence was not unfounded. Instead of focusing on the end of an era, they envisioned this period as a bridge to their future and that of their younger siblings. Jules Sr.’s sons wasted no time. On March 5, 1901, Denis, Joseph, and Jules Burguières incorporated their father’s company as the J. M. Burguières Company ( JMB Company) domiciled in New Orleans. The corporation’s purpose was “to do a general mercantile business, to operate stores, to own, purchase and lease lands, either for sale, investment or for the cultivation of sugarcane and other agricultural products; to acquire, purchase, construct and operate sugar factories or any

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other manufactory; to build, purchase and operate plantation tramways; to make advances for the cultivation of lands and generally to do and engage in such other business as may be necessary or incident to the purpose hereinabove set forth.” The capital stock was six hundred thousand dollars, consisting of six thousand shares valued at one hundred dollars each. The corporation’s affairs were to be conducted by a board of between three and seven directors.9 Ten days later, the three brothers convened the first meeting of the newly formed corporation at 802 Perdido Street, in the heart of the New Orleans business district. Denis, Jules Jr., and their sisters, Marie Louise and Florence, each purchased twenty shares; Joseph bought fifteen; and Judge E. D. Saunders had five shares. Their first order of business was the election of officers. Age and gender apparently determined rank, leaving little room for disagreement. Denis was elected president, Joseph became vice president, and Jules Jr. served as secretary. The company would do its banking with Levert, Burguières, and Company.10 The nascent company had pressing business. The next day in St. Mary Parish, their father’s plantations (Cypremort, Florence, and Inez), his mills (Segura Sugar Company and Cypremort Sugar Company), and the family mansion on Prytania Street in New Orleans were to be auctioned as part of the partition proceedings in the Succession of Jules M. Burguières. The Burguières brothers had no intention of losing the plantations and the Prytania Street home where they had lived since 1893. The company authorized Denis to pay $35,000 for their late father’s residence and $289,177 for the plantations and mills. On March 16, 1901, the family company purchased the plantations, the sugar mills, and their machinery, mules, and implements, but not the Garden District mansion, which remained in litigation until 1906.11 The creation of the J. M. Burguières Company ultimately created tremendous bad blood among the siblings and their descendants. Because three of Jules and Marie Corinne’s eight surviving children still had not reached the age of majority, they could not purchase stock in the company at its founding, and by the time they were old enough to do so, the price had risen considerably. Moreover, part of the younger siblings’ inheritances had been spent on their education and living expenses, meaning that they had less money than did their older brothers and sisters. Consequently, Henry and Pat ended up owning less stock in the family company than their older siblings. This sore grew and festered for decades.12

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6.5 Sugar Factory at North Bend, ca. 1904. Burguières Family Collection, Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Louisiana at Lafayette

The Business Expands: Land, Sugarcane, Refineries, and Timber

In April 1903, Levert, Burguières, and Company bought the Vida Sugar Company in Iberia Parish for ten thousand dollars. The same year, the brothers were listed as directors of the St. Mary Parish Oaklawn Sugar Company, for which Joseph served as treasurer. But the most far-reaching decision the brothers made was to turn their sights on the fertile region of St. Mary Parish known as Bayou Salé, which not only had the “best sugar lands in the parish” but also had vast acres of virgin bald cypress.13 Joseph Burguières and J. B. Levert jointly purchased prime sugarcane acreage in 1905 along Bayou Salé from the North Bend Sugar Refining and Manufacturing Company, a New Jersey corporation, for $130,000 cash. The Bayou Salé properties included the 2,000-acre Lone Magnolia Plantation, the 2,000-acre Midway Plantation, and the 1,644-arpent North Bend Plantation. With the plantations came sugarhouses, refineries, sugar and molasses, the stock of goods in two stores on those plantations, cabins, plantation residences, livestock, machinery, tools, and very valuable timberland. The two men purchased an additional 295 acres and the right-of-way to construct and operate a railroad connecting two plantations that lay on opposite sides of Bayou Salé.14 Among the charter members attending the first meeting of the North Bend Sugar Company on June 16, 1905, was Professor W. C. Stubbs,

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director of the Audubon Sugar School in New Orleans and former state chemist. Joseph Burguières was elected the new company’s president, while Stubbs became vice president, Levert became secretary, and Jules Burguières Jr. was elected treasurer. The board agreed that the financial affairs of the North Bend Sugar Company would be transacted with Levert, Burguières, and Company.15 The North Bend Sugar Company immediately invested $11,000 to upgrade the refinery. On September 1, 1906, the company approved spending $20,500 to purchase another Bayou Salé plantation, the sixteen-hundred-arpent St. Mary Plantation (formerly Daisy Plantation), located between North Bend and Lone Magnolia Plantations.16 The Burguières now owned 100 percent of the JMB Company, 50 percent of Levert, Burguières, and Company, 50 percent of the North Bend Company and its four plantations, and 50 percent of the Segura Sugar Company, which their father and Levert had purchased in 1896. Also in 1906, the Burguières brothers formed the Burguières Land and Investment Corporation to purchase real estate. Denis, Joseph, Jules Jr., and Ernest purchased thirty-seven shares each, while J. de Lassus and J. J. Nobles owned one share each. Joseph was elected president; Denis, vice president; Jules Jr., treasurer; and Ernest, secretary. Through this corporation, the brothers bought Jules M. Burguières Sr.’s Garden District mansion at Third and Prytania.17 Joseph and Laura Burguières

During this period, Joseph Burguières was making a name for himself in the Louisiana sugar industry. He represented the Louisiana Sugar and Rice Exchange at the National Rivers and Harbors Conference in Washington, D.C., where he and other Louisiana delegates met to secure larger appropriations for public waterways and harbors and deepening riverbeds. A year later, Joseph, along with John Dymond and other sugar industry leaders, was elected to the executive committee of the Louisiana Sugar Planters Association.18 His personal life was flourishing as well. On April 11, 1907, thirtyone-year-old Joseph married Laura Fauntleroy (ca. 1875–1908), daughter of General Charles M. Fauntleroy and granddaughter of General Josiah Chambers, both distinguished Civil War veterans. The couple wed at Oakland Plantation in Rapides Parish, the Fauntleroys’ home for more

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than a century. Oakland had been lavishly festooned with Easter lilies and “a profusion of roses gathered from the garden.” After their honeymoon to the East, the newlyweds settled in a house four blocks from the Burguières’ Garden District home. Her position as the wife of one of the state’s most promising businessmen helped Laura quickly make her way into New Orleans’s clannish society. According to the TimesPicayune, Laura was “one of the most popular and highly esteemed of the younger matrons of the city,” and her philanthropic contributions to the Little Sisters of the Poor were well known.19 Within a year of their marriage, Laura and Joseph were expecting a child. On August 25, 1908, however, both she and her son, Joseph, died in childbirth. According to the Times-Picayune, her death “came as a great shock to scores of the leading people” of New Orleans, where, through “her winning personality and accomplishments,” she had gained the respect of all who knew her. Both Laura and the baby were laid to rest alongside her mother, Mary Eliza Chambers Fauntleroy, in Mount Olivet Cemetery in Rapides Parish.20 Though the bereaved family did not know it, 1906 had been the beginning of twenty years of a steady decline for sugar planters and manufacturers. Early frosts, ten hurricanes (including one that hit twenty-five days after the Burguières’ purchase of St. Mary Plantation), crop diseases such as mosaic, competition from Cuba and other countries, the Sugar Trust’s control of sugar prices, the declining sugar tariff, labor shortages, and ever-increasing expenses again brought the industry to “virtual extinction.”21 In 1907, the North Bend Sugar Company, strapped for cash, defaulted on three notes to Levert, Burguières, and Company totaling more than $163,000 at 8 percent interest. The Bayou Salé properties were mortgaged, the North Bend Refinery was closed, and the plantation began shipping its cane to the Cypremort Refinery.22 By January 4, 1910, the North Bend Sugar Company was put on the auction block. The JMB Company and the Segura Sugar Company (of which the Burguières brothers now owned 90 percent) were the highest bidders at $169,050. A month later, the JMB Company and the Segura Sugar Company purchased the St. Mary Sugar Plantation from the North Bend Sugar Company, again at a sheriff ’s sale.23 That same year, the Segura Central Sugar Factory was upgraded to increase its capacity to 2,000 tons of sugarcane per twenty-four hours. As a result, in December 1910, the Louisiana Planter and Sugar

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Manufacturer predicted that in 1911, Segura would grind more than 100,000 tons of cane and produce more than 15 million pounds of sugar since it was now grinding additional cane from the destroyed Adeline factory. Segura did even better: when it finished grinding on January 28, 1911, it had processed more than 114,000 tons of cane and more than 18 million pounds of sugar.24 Nevertheless, 1911 proved to be one of the most difficult years for the Burguières. At the May meeting of the company directors, Denis announced that cash was low. To raise capital, the directors considered selling either half of the Oaklawn Sugar Company stock for at least $55,000 or all of it for $106,000. They also agreed to sell Denis’s two plantation stores located on 2.5 acres of Cypremort Plantation. Even more drastic, the directors considered selling their North Bend properties for at least $200,000 plus the 1911 crop expenses and the price of the mules and implements. For the North Bend factory, they would accept no less than $10,000.25 Until more cash could be raised, Denis warned the directors that capital was tight and that the Bayou Salé properties would require more attention. First, wages for labor would have to be reduced on those plantations. Second, twenty-four-year-old Henry Burguières was handed the responsibility of monitoring all purchases, invoices, payroll, and disbursements on the plantations. He was also placed in charge of the five plantation stores owned by the JMB Company, which meant taking inventories every three months. Finally, it was agreed that each of the directors would inspect the plantations’ operations at least once a month.26 Hard times were closing in. The 1912 crop was disastrous because of heavy flooding, causing the cost of production to rise from $3.43 per ton of cane in 1911 to $5.74 per ton in 1912. Segura Sugar was now in dire straits, and the board of directors of Levert, Burguières, and Company met to authorize the sale of the company’s half interest in Segura to the JMB Company, making JMB the sole owner of Segura as well as North Bend Sugar Company and Cypremort Sugar Company. In August 1912, Segura could no longer service its $125,000 debt to the JMB Company. Mortgages were placed on the Segura properties. Then, on the evening of August 11, 1912, the Segura sugar factory burned to the ground. According to the New Iberia Enterprise, “The flames first were discovered in the engine rooms, but it was impossible to learn what had started it. Several employees about the refinery discovered the blaze and gave the alarm, but nothing

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could check the flames, so rapidly did they spread over the big plant. The loss will fall quite heavily on the owners. But it is stated that they will rebuild next year a fire proof building more modern in its entire equipment. The loss will inconvenience many of our farmers this year and New Iberia will be deprived of a large payroll this season. The entire community sympathizes deeply with the stock holders.” Only half of the estimated three hundred thousand dollars in losses was covered by insurance. Cane that had been pledged to Segura had to be transported to the Cypremort sugar factory by Southern Pacific railroad.27 By the end of the year, only the J. M. Burguières Company (owners of the North Bend sugar factory and the Cypremort factory) and Levert, Burguières, and Company (50 percent owned by the Burguières) remained standing. Levert, Burguières, and Company was still in the marketing business and still the owner of Vida Sugar Company. In 1919, the Burguières sold out to J. B. Levert for thirty thousand dollars, ending the partnership.28 Though the JMB Company’s profitability in the sugar business had been subjected to crises beyond their control, another source of revenue was more predictable and consistent, at least for a while. Timber

Back in 1877, Jules Sr. had known that land bestowed riches in many forms. His sons also recognized its value, not just for sugar production but for the valuable cypress timber that grew prolifically in South Louisiana’s swamps and marshes. According to Daniel Dennett, in some places in St. Mary Parish, cypress timber stretched as far as a mile on either side of both Bayou Salé and Bayou Cypremort, and he estimated that timberland extended for 125 miles along the bayous.29 In 1907, the JMB Company added to its holdings 154 acres of cypress timber on the Cypremort Prairie as well as the Baldwin Timber Company to mill it. Four years later, in need of cash, the Burguières sold the timber mill and their stock in the Oaklawn Sugar Company. In 1913, the JMB Company sold the cypress and gum timber located on Cypremort Plantation.30 However, the company still owned about 150 million feet of cypress timber in Terrebonne and Lafourche Parishes. In May 1913, twenty-oneyear-old Patout Burguières, the youngest of the brothers and manager

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of Midway Plantation in St. Mary Parish, wrote to Jules Jr. to argue that the company would benefit from owning a timber mill: “By Jove, it certainly looks like our timber ought to be worth more. . . . [It] is worth only $8 to $10 in the woods and swamps, but after milling . . . it is worth twice that and more, $20–$30 per thousand. Supposing that our margin on a ton of cane was double what we paid for it . . . would we not make a killing? . . . In sugar we work on a margin of cents. In timber milling—on dollars. Jules, I am getting more convinced that we ought to mill under some arrangement or other. . . . All we have to do is study the situation and be of one mind, and act.”31 Pat suggested that an outside company be hired to operate the timber mill, warning, “We should not expect to get into a new business that we know nothing of.” He recommended a competent local family that knew the business well and whose members were “good Catholics.” Denis and Jules agreed with the proposal, and later in the year, the JMB Company and the Cypress and Shingle Company, represented by Jules and Denis Burguières, entered into a contract with the operating company represented by E. Sundbery and Lynn H. Dinkins. The agreement stated that at least twelve million feet per year would be harvested beginning in January 1914 and required that the operating company “handle the swamps with the same care as if the swamps were the property of the operating company.” By 1915, timber sales grossed more than eleven million dollars for the Burguières and netted them just over eighty thousand dollars.32 Joie de Vivre!

With so many social and business obligations, the Burguières often took refuge at their beach home in Pass Christian, Mississippi, where many members of New Orleans’s upper crust had second homes. It was the setting for many summer picnics and family gatherings, “a retreat from New Orleans, from the heat of the city.” Joseph in particular escaped to Pass Christian whenever he could free himself from his numerous obligations. The Burguières’ beach house was a large Victorian cottage surrounded by a wide porch covered with striped canvas awnings. Rockers and swings completed the idyllic scene.33 But when they were home, they partook in the festivities and events that would be expected of scions of New Orleans leading families. The

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6.6 Burguières Cottage, Pass Christian, Mississippi, ca. 1918. Burguières Family Collection, Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Louisiana at Lafayette

city that elevated celebrations and galas to the realm of art during Mardi Gras season outdid itself in 1903, during the centennial celebration of the Louisiana Purchase. The three-day extravaganza included a reenactment of Commissioner Pierre Clement de Laussat, first French colonial governor of Louisiana, handing over the keys of New Orleans, freeing the city of its allegiance to France. Twenty-one-year-old Jules Jr. was invited to participate in the ball held at the New Orleans French Opera House. Dressed in period costume, he escorted J. B. Levert’s daughter, Beatrice, and the couple danced the gavotte for the merry crowd.34 Mardi Gras was high season for New Orleanians of all socioeconomic classes and was a deeply rooted tradition for the Burguières. While Jules Sr. had been a member of the Mystick Krewe of Comus, his children joined a newer krewe that paid homage to Rex, the king of Carnival, and that had emerged from the Boston Club in 1872. In keeping with its motto, “Pro Bono Publico” (For the Public Good), the members prided themselves on service to their community.35 The Rex parades were well organized and centered on literary and mythological themes. The krewe sent out elaborate invitations all over the country to encourage guests to visit New Orleans. The unmasked Rex, king of Carnival, and his queen (usually a debutante), reigned briefly with their Carnival Court of dukes, maids, and pages for this time out of time fantastical day and night of revelry.36

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6.7 Henry I. Burguières and Sallie Trufant Burguières on honeymoon in Palm Beach, Florida, 1910. Burguières Family Collection, Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Louisiana at Lafayette

Many of the Burguières found spouses within this elite circle of New Orleans society. Henry’s future wife, Sarah “Sallie” Hyams Trufant (1890–1972), was a maid in the royal court of Rex in 1909. Inez Burguières’ future husband, Philip H. Williams (1877–1945), was a duke in 1909, 1910, 1911, and 1913, and Inez was a maid in 1915. Ernest’s future wife, Isabella Moore (1896–1979), served as a maid in the Mystick Krewe of Comus, and her mother, Leila Hardie Moore, was queen of that krewe. Ernest was a duke in 1914 and 1915, serving with his future brother-inlaw, L. Kemper Williams. And Jules, too, twice sat on royal courts.37

Brothers in Business, 1900–1912

6.8 Charles Patout Burguières, ca. 1932. Burguières Family Collection, Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Louisiana at Lafayette

6.9 Mary Elizabeth Lilla Withnell Burguières, ca. 1907. Burguières Family Collection, Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Louisiana at Lafayette

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New Orleans socials led to marriages uniting prominent New Orleans families. Henry met Sallie Trufant, a beautiful New Orleans debutante, while on one of his tours abroad. She was the only daughter of Bertha and Samuel Adams Trufant, a stock and bond broker, a banker, secretary/treasurer of New Orleans’s St. Charles Hotel, and like Henry and his brothers, a member of the Boston Club. Sallie was, according to New Orleans society pages, a “decided favorite.” Two days after Christmas in 1910, Henry and Sallie married at the Immaculate Conception Jesuit church in what the newspaper described as “the wedding of the season, a brilliant event of the year in the more exclusive circles of society.” When the celebrations ended, the newlyweds left for a few months travel, including a stopover in Palm Beach. Henry and Sallie had six children.38 Earlier in 1910, Pat Burguières met Mary Elizabeth Lilla Withnell, who was visiting New Orleans from her home in St. Louis, Missouri. According to their granddaughter, Michele Pollingue Reed, the two were introduced when Lilla was staying with the Levert family and Pat “would come to visit her at their house, bringing his own firewood to keep her warm in the parlor as they visited.” Though her family had emigrated from Ireland in the nineteenth century, her background was in many respects much like Pat’s. She had been educated at St. Louis’s Academy of the Sacred Heart before earning a bachelor of arts degree from Maryville College and a master’s degree from St. Louis University.39 On June 7, 1910, the Burguières and Withnell families gathered at St. Thomas Aquinas Church in St. Louis to witness Pat and Lilla’s marriage. The couple initially resided in New Orleans, where Lilla was welcomed into the fold. Pat and Lilla had eight children, most of them born on Midway Plantation, where Pat served as overseer from 1916 until 1931.40 In the wake of the death of his wife and son, Joseph returned to his work. Always striving, always motivated and involved, Joseph was associated with a long list of businesses in addition to the various Burguières companies, including Louisiana Sugar Company, Dulac Cypress and Shingle Company, the Sugar Planters’ Storage and Distributing Company of Louisiana, the Augusta Sugar Company, the Delta Land and Development Company, the New Orleans Land Company, and the Stafolife Feed Company. He also served as a director of the Louisiana Sugar and Rice Exchange, the New Orleans Board of Trade, the

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German-American National Bank, and the New Orleans, Texas, and Mexico Railroad.41 Furthermore, because Joseph had proven his worth as vice president of the Louisiana Sugar Planters’ Association, he represented the South during the congressional investigation of the American Sugar Refining Company, popularly known as the Sugar Trust. The Sugar Trust purchased approximately 80 percent of all raw sugar produced in Louisiana after 1900; by 1907, it had bought out most of its competition and directly or indirectly bought almost 98 percent of the nation’s raw sugar. In 1909, American Sugar was found guilty of fraudulent evasion of customs duties and fined two million dollars, but its dominance of the market continued. In 1911, Congress held hearings to determine whether the American Sugar Refining Company was monopolizing the industry and driving down the prices paid to sugar producers.42 The Louisiana Sugar Planters’ Association charged that the Trust had sought to destroy the state’s sugar industry through a variety of means, including threats against competing refineries, secret agreements, and boycotts. In addition, the Sugar Trust had lobbied Congress to reduce the raw sugar tariff (crippling American planters) and increase the refined sugar tariff (increasing the Trust’s profits) and paid between fifteen and fifty cents per hundred pounds less for Louisiana raw sugars than for sugars purchased in New York. According to the planters, the Sugar Trust had “the Louisiana seller of sugar with a rope around his neck, led to the slaughter like dumb driven cattle.”43 Joseph Burguières testified twice before the U.S. House of Representatives, touching on his experiences with the Sugar Trust, the effects of a tariff reduction for raw sugar on Louisiana planters, raw sugar versus refined sugar, water transportation versus railroad, land reclamation in South Louisiana, plantation labor, and foreign competition. Joseph told the congressmen that a few years earlier, he had organized a group of producers who persuaded eastern refiners to enter the Louisiana market, thereby decreasing the differential between New York and New Orleans prices and providing Louisiana planters with a significant boon. In response, American Sugar had boycotted Joseph. He testified that such instances were not common because “there has been that general fear on the part of the planters that they had better be very good, otherwise they might suffer in just that way.”44 When one committee member asked what prevented other refineries from coming south to buy sugar, Joseph answered, “It is my own

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opinion they feared it might precipitate a war between themselves. . . . I base that opinion upon my inability to get any of the independent refiners to come down there and bid upon our sugars.” Since Louisiana sugar was considered the best for refining purposes, Joseph said, “there could be no other reason why they should keep away from the New Orleans market than the fact they did not care to invade a territory that might have been considered territory of the American Sugar Refining Company.”45 Joseph also testified that the tariff on imported sugar was vital to the southern sugar industry: “If the sugar tariff was cut in two it would completely and immediately annihilate the sugar industry of Louisiana. . . . Wipe it off the face of the earth.” If the tariff were lowered, the sugar producer “who could scrape up a little money might go down somewhere in the Tropics.”46 The testimony attracted international interest. Joseph was referred to as “the champion of the Louisiana sugar market” whose testimony was a “brilliant presentation of the case of the Louisiana sugar planters.” He was recognized as an “uncommonly gifted man” with an “amazing capacity for picking up the details of a business and uniting them all into one successful whole.”47 But Joseph had not been feeling well. A month after testifying, he went to Pass Christian to relax; nonetheless, his condition worsened. He was rushed to Touro Infirmary in New Orleans, where he was diagnosed with appendicitis. Surgery was unsuccessful, and on August 23, 1911, thirty-five-year-old Joseph E. Burguières was dead.48 Joseph’s Last Will and Testament

One year earlier, in New York City, Joseph had written his will by hand on Fifth Avenue hotel stationery before departing on a trip to Europe. He appointed his brothers, Denis and Jules Jr., as his executors. Like his father and grandfather, Joseph was exceptionally generous to the Catholic Church, contributing ten thousand dollars to St. Helen’s Catholic Church at Cypremort, three thousand dollars each to the churches in Houma and Franklin, and one thousand dollars to St. Nicholas Catholic Church in Patoutville. Joseph also gave generously to his home city of New Orleans, bequeathing fifty thousand dollars so that the Sisters of Charity could look after and shelter “all poor unfortunate incurables”

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and one thousand dollars for the construction of Marquette Hall at the new Tulane University. Joseph also left ten thousand dollars to his fiancée, Ada Mistrot (a distant cousin of his mother, Marie Corinne Patout Burguières). The rest of his estate, he directed, would be “shared and shared alike with each of my brothers and sisters.”49 The inventory of Joseph’s estate reflects the discerning taste of a gentleman who moved in New Orleans’s best business and social circles. Among his household effects were fine and delicate tea sets, silver trays and candlesticks, oyster forks, and a silver card tray for visitors. But the estate inventory also noted that one Sheffield tray was “not to be found.” In response, Jules Jr. directed his younger brother, Ernest, to have Joseph’s silver and crockery “packed up and put under seal.”50 Distrust was beginning to set in among the members of the Burguières family. On a blistering August afternoon in New Orleans, almost three years to the day after the deaths of his wife and son, Joseph’s body was taken back to Cypremort Plantation. The last obsequies were held at St. Helen’s Church, and then Joseph joined his ancestors in the family cemetery. On the day he was laid to rest, the news at the New Orleans Sugar Exchange was brief: “The local market for sugar continued strong and with no specially new features.”51

7 Denis P. J. Burguières and Brothers, 1912–1936

Perseverance is not a long race; it is many short races one after another. —Walter Elliot

Deep in the Louisiana Sugar Bowl, away from the hustle and bustle of New Orleans business and society, Denis P. J. Burguières, his wife, Alice Broussard Burguières, and their eight children lived on Cypremort Plantation, where Denis had learned how to grow sugarcane from one of the best planters in Louisiana—his father, Jules M. Burguières Sr. As the oldest child, Denis succeeded his father as leader of the family company. In addition to his formal title, president, he played many other roles—planter, overseer, engineer, inventor. He knew the Burguières land better than anyone, knew what the dark, fertile soil felt like between his fingers, how it smelled after a summer afternoon shower, and how it looked under his boots at the end of a day. He understood what the rich brown earth meant to his family. Denis could read the sky and feel an approaching thunderstorm in his bones. He could read the fields—the shades of green, the height, the thickness, the condition of the stalks—and even predict the tonnage his crops would yield if nature cooperated. He prayed for dry weather during the harvest, a cooling breeze in the summertime, and a bright sun on cold December mornings. In his sleep, he worried about ditches and pumps, gears and wheels, mules and railroad ties. But that was only the beginning of what filled his mind in the late-night hours. He worried about the sugar mill, where men with specialized skills kept the machines running twenty-four hours a day during the three-month 102

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7.1 Denis P. J. and Alice Burguières and child, ca. 1910. Burguières Family Collection, Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Louisiana at Lafayette

grinding season. Long before the advent of electricity, he was on call to go off into the night to fix a problem in the mills or to deal with matters involving his workers or their families or with the mules. He had no office hours. He spent limited time at the Boston Club or at other sites that were part of the New Orleans social and business world. He held meetings on the plantation, in a small office next to the sugar mill or in the mill itself. He knew the names of his workers. He knew their families, saw them gathered at the plantation store, where he met with his storekeeper, who was also his bookkeeper. If necessary, he counted cash, updated charge accounts, or took inventory. All of those duties and more were part of his role as manager of the five plantations and three sugar mills of the J. M. Burguières Company ( JMB Company). Denis was interviewed on his farming methods at the 1903 annual meeting of the Louisiana Sugar Planters’ Association. Though he was not yet thirty, he spoke confidently about what he knew best: “[Ours] is a very light and sandy soil, different than any part in the state. . . . At the highest part of the plantation, we are only seven feet above sea-level, and about three feet down is a rock formation, or heavy gravel. That gives us fine drainage straight down. We plant very deep, but the soil is very light; we shave off fully two inches, and still we get a fine stand. We find we can cover with six inches of dirt, but we get it off as soon as the cold weather is over. . . . We let the sun strike it about the end of February. We usually get a heavy tonnage. We can’t cultivate at all like you do. We use pretty much our own methods and ways of doing things.

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We follow the ‘habit, or custom’ of our father’s way of doing things.”1 But even his father’s successes and Denis’s mastery of his craft were not enough to stem the tide of the economic forces exerting their pull on his family and its enterprises. Joseph’s death hit hard. He had shared with Denis the responsibilities of managing both the company and the lives of their younger brothers and sisters, who remained dependent in essential ways. Denis alone now would have to run the company’s five plantations (totaling fifteen thousand acres), its cypress timberland in Lafourche and Terrebonne Parishes, and its interests in five sugar mills. To make matters worse, just after Joseph’s death, payments were due on several large bank notes. The first task was the election of new officers for the J. M. Burguières Company. On December 18, 1911, Denis was elected president, Jules Jr. replaced Joseph as vice president, Ernest became treasurer, and Henry was elected secretary. Denis continued to run the plantations in St. Mary Parish, while Ernest remained in the Perdido Street office in New Orleans, maintaining the company finances with the assistance of Jules Jr., who had served as company treasurer since 1907. Henry and Patout were overseeing Midway and North Bend Plantations. Jules, now a thirty-year-old bachelor, decided to broaden his career beyond Louisiana, using his experience and education in sugar production, marketing, and chemistry to take advantage of an opportunity in Cuba. Yet as vice president of the family company, he remained in constant contact with his brothers in South Louisiana. For the Louisiana sugar industry, the year 1912 marked the beginning of the long slide downward. It was just beginning what historian J. Carlyle Sitterson refers to as the “Great Decline.” In all but four years between 1912 and 1926, sugar production costs rose and total sugar production, prices, and yields plunged. Foreign competition, the uncertainty of the tariff, hurricanes, freezes, droughts, mosaic disease, and anthrax took a heavy toll on sugar planters, and scores of sugar factories collapsed.2 Without Joseph’s experience and business finesse, it would be difficult for the Burguières to navigate all the exigencies of the period. The following year was nothing short of disastrous. In spite of the industry’s earlier success in defeating a free sugar bill, the UnderwoodSimmons Tariff Act was passed, gradually reducing the tariff until its elimination in 1916. President Woodrow Wilson, a strong supporter of the act, accused the American Cane Growers’ Association of being part of an “insidious lobby” to block the act, which he maintained was one

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of the keys to U.S. economic survival. The association flatly denied the charges, but the Louisiana Planters and Sugar Manufacturers Association responded bitterly, “Even a murderer who is about to be hanged is asked if he desires to say anything to the people. . . . To overthrow the chief industry of a State with a population of nearly a million and a half people and an industry in which directly or indirectly more than hundred millions of dollars are invested and in which half a million of our people are concerned, is one of the most violent intrusions of the general government that has ever occurred in this country.”3 To add to the problems, Louisiana’s planters were still fighting the mighty American Sugar Refining Company (the Sugar Trust), which had for years held the state’s industry in a death grip, artificially depressing the price of raw sugar on the New Orleans market. Beginning in 1911, the State of Louisiana and individual planters, including the JMB Company, had waged war on the Sugar Trust through the judicial system. In the summer of 1917, however, the state withdrew its suit, forcing the individual producers to compromise. The settlement netted the JMB Company a mere $5,450.34.4 The battle had ended, but the Louisiana sugar industry could hardly claim victory. The production and manufacturing of sugarcane required enormous injections of cash every year. Between 1910 and 1926, the number of sugar factories in Louisiana declined from two hundred to fifty-four, a trend that hit the Burguières hard. The North Bend factory at Bayou Salé, purchased in 1911, proved too expensive to operate, and it was shut down in 1913. The Burguières sold their shares in Oaklawn Sugar Company in 1916 and their interest in the Vida Sugar Company three years later. By 1920, all the cane from the Burguières’ Bayou Salé plantations had to be transported to Cypremort.5 As times grew leaner, acquiring cash to make the crop became difficult at best, even for a business with a sterling reputation like the JMB Company. Though the Whitney, German, Citizens, and Canal Banks financed the crops from year to year, considerable juggling and maneuvering were required to keep the company afloat. More than a good reputation was necessary. Someone who knew how to work the financial system was absolutely vital. That someone was Jules Jr., with his younger brother and protégé, Ernest, doing the legwork in New Orleans as the family company’s treasurer. Even though Jules was away, he still kept one foot firmly planted on the St. Mary plantations. In the fall of that year, Jules sent letters and telegrams nearly daily from Cuba to provide

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Ernest with explicit instructions for dealing with the bankers. The pressure was intense, particularly for a large plantation so dependent on a single crop. The JMB Company was shuffling cash around to pay huge notes: “Rush all your money in,” Jules instructed; “We must show the institutions that money is coming.” On another occasion, he cautioned Ernest, “Study your position. Don’t count on luck. . . . Be careful about talking sugar sales to any New York people. A burnt child should dread the fire!” Jules insisted that Ernest find a way to solve the company’s problems (“You must bring about a situation if none exists”) and provided his younger brother with a list of reasons why banks should lend them more money: We have reduced the German loan from $80,000 to $60,000. . . . Because of our deposits and support of the bank and because we expect to pay up the Syndicate loan, which will include about $100,000. . . . The Hibernia should carry us because we rent our office in their building and because of payment of molasses guarantee. . . . The Citizens owes it to us because of our deposits. . . . The old Canal [Bank] is under obligations to me for buying their stock, for carrying balances. . . . Because the sawmill will pay us from $60,000 to $75,000 per year. Then we have the Elm St. property [in New Orleans], Chicago Certificates of Deposits, various bank stocks. . . . We get $10,000 per month from our Cypremort timber. . . . Money talks these days. . . . Tell them that our money is all going into crops now and crop prospects are good. . . . Get [the bankers] to realize that better times will exist.6

In December 1913, in spite of the cash crunch, Jules assured Ernest that the company had assets of $1.7 million, “over four times the loan asked for.” He instructed Ernest to remind the bankers of the Burguières’ outside wealth, “that our boys are worth $400,000 extra.” He urged his brother to “accidentally point out our New Orleans residence, and let them know how well we have done. . . . Talk about how valuable cypress is, etc.” In one letter, Jules warned, “Be careful when dictating financial letters. Your stenographer may draw some peculiar conclusions and injure us.” He was worried not only about the company’s health but also its reputation.7 That year, the company secured loans totaling $400,000 to conduct business as usual on its Cypremort and Bayou Salé plantations, with

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mortgages placed on all company property, buildings, sugarhouses, stores and contents, cypress timber, machinery, feed, fertilizer, carts, mules, and everything else related to cane production and manufacturing.8 The JMB Company also sought to improve its financial situation by leasing cane land. The Burguières still owned considerable cypress and gum timber in Terrebonne and Lafourche Parishes as well as two lumber mills. In 1913, an operating company was hired to manage JMB’s timberland and to operate the Dulac Cypress and Shingle Company. Also that year, the company sold timber on Cypremort Prairie for $106,500. But the Burguières’ Baldwin Lumber Company was delinquent more than $100,000, dead weight that was finally removed when Interstate Bank and Trust of Franklin bought the note. “You may be sure I was glad to get your wires about a sawmill purchase and completion of timber contracts,” wrote Jules to Ernest. “Hope the paper had something to say about the timber deal & the part the Interstate played. If so send me clipping.” Jules occasionally praised his brother with a passing “Good work!”9 To generate more cash, the company also sold some of its stock in other companies as well as its Garden District property. In addition, JMB attempted to sell its valuable cane land at the North Bend and Lone Magnolia Plantations at Bayou Salé for seventy-five thousand dollars and considered dividing Midway Plantation into small farms if the whole property could not be sold. When those ideas failed to pan out, the North Bend plantations were leased to a local sugar planter, Joseph Junca, the half-brother of their mother, Marie Corinne Patout Burguières.10 Denis’s other strategies for trimming expenses included reducing workers’ wages and instituting a new policy that required each member of the company board to visit a plantation once a month to find ways to cut costs. Denis also held board meetings at the plantations, giving members the opportunity to observe firsthand plantation and sugar mill operations.11 One of the most important events in the history of the JMB Company was the birth of the Louisiana oil industry on September 21, 1902, when a gusher was struck near Jennings on the Southwest Louisiana prairie. Sixteen years later, the JMB Company signed the first lease to permit drilling for oil and gas on Côte Blanche Island. In 1920, the company signed another lease, this time for the prospecting and mining of salt on the island. These resources carried the Burguières through the

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7.2 Ernest A. Burguières Sr. and Isabella Moore Burguières, 1917. Burguières Family Collection, Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Louisiana at Lafayette

sugar industry’s problems in the 1910s and 1920. Moreover, the family began to retain mineral rights on all property sold, a strategy that subsequently provided enormous profits.12 In spite of the company’s travails, the family members maintained their social standing in New Orleans. Denis and Patout joined the Boston Club, and a new generation of Burguières—Denis’s sons, Denis Jr., Albert, Edward, and Jules—matriculated at Spring Hill College. Jules Sr.’s youngest daughter, Inez, traveled with her mother, Ida, on frequent and extended trips to Paris. In 1917, Ernest A. Burguières married Isabella Moore, once again allying the French-descended Burguières with powerful and wealthy Anglo-American families—in this case, the Hardies and the Moores, who had achieved great success in the service of King Cotton and

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investment banking, respectively. Both families epitomized the ascendancy of les Américains over the French in New Orleans. The Moores, like the Burguières, valued education and travel. Isabella graduated from Westover, an eastern finishing school, and regularly traveled to England and Europe. Her family took seriously the principle of noblesse oblige as well as their place in New Orleans society: Her sister, Leila Moore Williams, and her husband, L. Kemper Williams, founded the L. Kemper and Leila Williams Foundation, which in 1970 opened the Historic New Orleans Collection and the Williams Research Center. The Williamses donated one of their homes, the eighteenth-century Merieult House in the French Quarter, to house the Center. Ernest brought quite a bit to the marriage as well. He had studied engineering, agriculture, and production methodologies at Spring Hill College, Georgetown University, and Kentucky State University. By 1917, he was an experienced businessman who was making a name for himself beyond his family. Ernest and Isabella had five children.13 Sugar Highs and Lows

Just as the sugar industry was reaching its nadir, World War I saved American sugar interests. With the end of the tariff approaching, ailing planters faced a choice between cutting production or quitting. But among the many consequences of the war was a worldwide scarcity of sugar. One year after the war began, the demand for sugar rose drastically, and prices soared. Always alert to the market, the J. M. Burguières Company planted the largest crop in the company’s history.14 Though sugar prices were high, producers remained on guard, wondering whether the government would really allow free sugar in 1916 and thus open the door to waves of sugar imports, driving the production and price of domestic sugar downward. Writing to Jules and his business associate, Henry Pharr, at the end of 1915, Ernest predicted that the tariff would remain, though he was concerned about when Congress would vote on the issue. According to Ernest, the Sugar Trust was attempting to delay the vote so that it could buy duty-free Cuban raw sugar in the interim.15 For more than four decades, the Burguières had prospered not only by anticipating problems but by exploring ways to minimize the damage. In early 1916, Denis traveled to Havana to assess the opportunities for

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sugar manufacturing there, since Cuban sugar interests had expressed a desire to buy the salvaged Segura factory machinery. In April, however, Ernest’s prediction that the tariff would survive proved correct, as Congress passed an act maintaining the duties on imports at 1.25 cents per pound, sending production and prices to new highs. Louisiana and Texas produced bumper crops that year, with an average price of 5.54 cents per pound for raw sugar, the highest since 1889. “Factory profits reached new highs, cane growers made money, and all branches of the industry looked ahead to even greater wartime profits.” The Burguières produced 2,934,716 pounds in 1916 and 7,466,000 pounds in 1917.16 But these soaring profits did not last long. The federal government soon stepped in, bringing sugar under its control by forming the International Sugar Committee to supervise sugar markets. In 1918, the U.S. Sugar Equalization Board was formed, and it restricted sugar consumption and fixed prices. The raw sugar crop was sold at an average price of 7.28 cents per pound, and factories paid growers between $7.35 and $8.50 per ton for cane.17 Predictions that another worldwide sugar shortage would occur in 1919 caused prices to climb to the all-time high of an average of 24 cents per pound on the New Orleans market; when the scarcity failed to materialize, however, prices plunged to 5 cents per pound. The value of sugar properties imploded, resulting in thousands of acres of idle sugarcane land. “The price collapse of 1920–1921 hit growers and factories a staggering blow,” according to J. Carlyle Sitterson. “Only the forbearance of creditors prevented widespread failures throughout the sugar region in 1921.”18 Almost five and a half years before the 1929 stock market crash, the trying times for the sugar industry were steadily eating away at the J. M. Burguières Company’s profits. In the 1923–24 crop season, the company planted 2,498 acres of sugarcane and 1,093 acres of corn and hay for livestock at Cypremort, North Bend, and Midway Plantations. The JMB Company’s five St. Mary Parish plantations produced 19,146.53 tons of sugar, an average of 7.67 tons per acre. The Cypremort Sugar Company mill showed a profit of $84,732, but the Cypremort agricultural operation recorded a net loss of $32,230. With salaries of $14,938 paid out to officers and stockholders and other expenses, the JMB Company recorded a net loss of $24,558. On the plus side, the company’s assets now topped $1.8 million.19 The mid-1920s also saw a series of calamitous natural events that forced many plantations into bankruptcy. Continuous rainfall in 1923

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was followed by a six-month drought; mosaic disease and rot struck in 1924, along with Louisiana’s worst anthrax epidemic since 1901, which caused a loss of $1.25 million for the state’s livestock sector.20 In 1925, rain and freezing weather came earlier than usual, leaving thousands of acres of frozen cane in the fields and forcing the closure of more mills. A late August 1926 hurricane hit Terrebonne Parish. As the area began to recover, the Great Flood of 1927 toppled the levees of the Atchafalaya Basin, drowning cattle and flooding fields. Mosaic disease returned and attacked the 1926–27 crop, slashing Louisiana’s sugar production from 198,000 tons in 1925–26 to 48,000 tons. Many observers believed that “complete collapse of the industry seemed unavoidable.”21 Yet despite the industry woes, sugar planters remained optimistic. U.S. Department of Agriculture experiments at Canal Point, Florida, one of the properties operated by the Southern States Land and Timber Company resulted in the development of a new cane variety, Proefstation Oest Java (POJ), that was resistant to mosaic and other plant diseases and was better able to withstand wind, water, and freezing temperatures. In South Louisiana, the Burguières Company and M. A. Patout and Son were at the vanguard of the POJ field experiments, planting hundreds of acres and producing thirty to forty tons per acre with varieties of POJ.22 Canal Point researchers also had great success in developing even heartier varieties for Louisiana, halting the steady decline in sugar production, attracting new planters, and even luring back sugar planters who had previously given up. As a result of POJ, Louisiana sugar production rose to 199,000 tons by 1929, with huge increases in total cane acreage and average yield per acre.23 Planters had a new and powerful weapon in their unending battle with nature. Ernest Burguières Fights Foreign Sugar

Ernest was steeped in sugar politics, particularly tariff protection and the control of foreign imports. In 1922, the Louisiana Sugar Planters’ Association, the American Cane Growers’ Association, and the Producers’ and Manufacturers’ Protective Association combined to form the American Sugar Cane League, giving the industry the powerhouse it needed to protect its interests. After three decades of internal competition, planters had finally put aside their differences and united for the common good.24

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In 1924, Ernest was elected president of the new organization, and he became deeply involved in its efforts to plant the new cane varieties in a place where no freeze had ever been recorded. West Palm Beach seemed to fit the bill perfectly. But in early 1925, just days before the cane was to be harvested, temperatures in South Florida descended to twenty-eight degrees. Growers had hoped that nine thousand tons of seed would be available in the fall of 1926, but that was not to be.25 In 1928, Ernest was elected the first president of the Domestic Sugar Producers’ Association, whose members included all growers in the continental United States and the territories of Hawaii and Puerto Rico. He took a firm stand against the tariff preferences the American government had given to Cuba and the Philippines. The New York Times reported that Ernest had accused the Cuban government of planning “to crush the [U.S.] domestic sugar industry” and to substitute a Cuban monopoly. He claimed that both the Cuban president, Gerardo Machado, and East Coast American investors in Cuban plantations would decimate domestic producers. He pointed out that Cuba already supplied nearly 60 percent of the six million tons of sugar annually consumed in the United States. Furthermore, Ernest claimed, “if Machado fails, he will threaten reprisals against industries of the United States now supplying his country with necessities.”26 Three years later, Ernest served as third vice president of the American Sugar Cane League. In a speech delivered at the League’s annual meeting in New Orleans, Ernest urged the U.S. government to stop importation of foreign sugar and allow American growers to satisfy domestic demand: “This country is flooded with foreign trade propaganda. Today our foreign import trade is 6 percent of our total domestic business. Two years ago it was 10 percent. If we must have that 10 percent, let us spread it around all industries equally, instead of loading it upon two or three industries like sugar. . . . The Cuban who would put us out of business is just as bad as the Russian who shoves his goods into New York. Our sugar, our molasses, our industrial alcohol and our pulp need first consideration.”27 The Great Depression

Despite American prosperity and optimism during the Roaring Twenties, the price of sugar continued its downward slide. At the beginning

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of 1929, just ten months before the crash, when the stock market was soaring to all-time highs, the price of sugar plummeted to below four cents per pound. On November 15, 1928, Jules had signed promissory notes totaling $112,500 with the Interstate Trust and Banking Company in West Palm Beach to finance the crop for another year. Even with this infusion of cash, six months later, the 1928–29 JMB Company financial statement showed a net loss of just over $80,000.28 After the stock market crash in late October 1929, the United States entered the Great Depression, one of the darkest periods in the country’s history. Eleven thousand banks failed, scores of businesses closed their doors, factories shut down, and unemployment skyrocketed. Countless farms and plantations were sold or lay idle. But the sugarcane industry had already been so battered that many planters barely noticed the downturn. And in December 1929, freezing temperatures again struck South Louisiana, wiping out the sugar crops. The JMB Company recorded a net loss for the 1929–30 fiscal year of $120,316 as a consequence of “the 18,000 tons of cane destroyed by the freeze of December 3, 1929 and left in the field.” Yet the company still had assets of $1.3 million.29 Even with the banking crisis and the high-risk, expensive nature of sugar production, the Burguières were still able to acquire loans. The Whitney Bank of New Orleans supported the company through the worst of times. In 1930, the bank loaned the family $260,000, secured by one hundred shares of stock of the Southern States Land and Timber Company and the endorsement of Ernest Burguières. The Whitney Bank loaned the Burguières another $240,000 that year, and the State Agricultural Credit Corporation loaned the company $70,000, secured by a crop lien, City of New Orleans Bonds, Louisiana Bonds, and the endorsements of Denis, Jules, Ernest, and Henry. Between 1924 and 1930, the company paid Denis five thousand dollars per year for his service as president, while Ernest received forty-five hundred dollars as treasurer, and Henry and Patout each received thirty-five hundred dollars. In 1931, the board instituted a 10 percent pay cut and decided that Pat and Henry would have to find work elsewhere. By the 1930–31 fiscal year, the JMB Company had begun to recover, recording a net loss of $106,515—still substantial, but better than the preceding year. Nevertheless, more infusions of cash had been required: Jules Jr. had made loans to the company totaling $171,714, and Robert Moore, Ernest’s father-inlaw, loaned the firm $35,000.30

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Henry was already working with his father-in-law, Samuel Adams Trufant, a stock and bond broker. Five years earlier, Henry, his wife, Sallie, and their six children had moved from North Bend Plantation to a home at the corner of Eleonore and Perrier Streets in New Orleans’s Garden District. In 1931, Pat, his wife, Lilla, and their eight children moved from Midway Plantation to New Orleans. On the family’s last night on the plantation that had been their home for fifteen years, workers carrying torches gathered in front of the house and sang songs to bid the Burguières farewell.31 Cypremort Sugar Mill

On a sweltering evening in July 1930, the giant Cypremort sugar mill was destroyed by fire. Denis had been managing the mill for thirty years, making it one of the largest, best-equipped, and most modern factories in Louisiana. Its processing of sugar and molasses had been prolific. The watchman discovered the flames in the mill’s granulating room, which had not been used for weeks. An inadequate water supply meant that in spite of the best efforts of firemen and mill workers, the flames could not be contained. Once the sugar house had burned, the mill and the boiler room were doomed. Losses were estimated at five hundred thousand dollars and were only partly covered by insurance. At least 160 bags of sugar burned with the plant. The cause of the fire was undetermined.32 Because of the consolidation of sugar mills, the Cypremort facility had processed not only all of the Burguières’ cane but that of other planters in the area. With thousands of acres of cane ripening in the fields, Denis sprang into action and oversaw the construction of the new Cypremort Sugar Company mill. The large, modern plant was constructed of fireproof materials (steel covered with sheet metal) and had the latest in mill technology and a capacity of fifteen hundred tons per twenty-four hours.33 The new Cypremort Sugar Company transported cane from various producers in St. Mary and Iberia Parishes by truck, rail, and water. The Burguières brothers had played an active role in the planning of the Intracoastal Canal, which was scheduled to open by 1937. Not coincidentally, the Burguières plantations at both Cypremort Prairie and Bayou Salé were a short distance from the canal, making cane transportation economical and efficient. The JMB Company established a three-thousand-foot-long

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7.3 Rebuilt Cypremort sugar mill after the 1930 fire, ca. 1937. Burguières Family Collection, Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Louisiana at Lafayette

slip from the Intracoastal Canal to the door of the Cypremort factory. In Delcambre, in Iberia Parish, the company installed two electric loading stations with two diesel towboats and ten 140-ton capacity flatboats to deliver unbundled cane to the mill. The cane was then unloaded with a lift designed by Denis Burguières that significantly increased productivity and efficiency.34 The Burguières now had control of the production, manufacturing, and distribution of their sugar. Ernest Burguières, Huey Long, and Louisiana Politics in Washington

On April 22, 1932, the New Orleans Times-Picayune reported that Ernest A. Burguières was to become the next commissioner of immigration for the New Orleans District. When presented to President Herbert Hoover by secretary of labor William N. Doak, Ernest identified himself as “100 percent Republican.” He had been chair of the Louisiana Republicans in 1922 and was currently serving as president of the Republican Union League. In June 1932, he would be an assistant sergeant at arms at the

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7.4 Ernest A. Burguières Sr., ca. 1916. Burguières Family Collection, Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Louisiana at Lafayette

Republican National Convention in Chicago. Furthermore, Ernest was endorsed by the executive committee of the state Republican organization. The newspaper reported that his appointment was both “likely” and imminent.35 While there were no objections in the Senate during the initial discussion, two days later, Hoover received a telegram from the Regular Old Line Republican Organization’s general chair, Joseph B. Mayes, protesting Ernest’s appointment and requesting that the president delay filling the office until after the Republican convention. According to Mayes, the executive committee of the Republican Union League, of which Ernest was president, was not representative of the “Old Line” party. Moreover, Democrat Huey P. Long Jr., Louisiana’s junior senator, who originally had had no objections to Ernest’s nomination, now declared him “personally obnoxious,” a phrase referring to the Senate tradition that a nominee considered personally objectionable by a senator from the nominee’s state would not be confirmed.36 Members of the executive committee did not seem concerned about Long’s rejection and appeared willing to dismiss the matter, since most believed that Long’s objections were not personal but political. Long

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had accused Ernest of speaking publicly against him and of being opposed to labor unions, charges that Ernest denied. He was “sure Senator Long has been misinformed by the opposition in Republican circles here” since Ernest and his firm had never “had any differences with labor unions in Louisiana.” Even if the charges had been true, most observers would not have regarded them as adequate grounds for denying confirmation.37 Ernest had support from many prominent figures of both political parties, including the assistant secretary of the Navy, Commodore Ernest Lee Jahncke, a member of the state central Republican committee. The charges of labor union opposition were refuted by the chair of the Senate, Henry D. Hatfield of West Virginia, who presented documentation stating that Ernest had been “eminently fair in his contacts with labor organizations.” The immigration committee reported favorably to the Senate on Ernest’s nomination, with even Democratic committee members supporting him on the grounds that Long could not show sufficient cause to justify his objections. John E. Jackson, chair of Louisiana’s central Republican committee, admitted that he was “at a loss to understand any opposition to Mr. Burguières.”38 The controversy heated up. Letters and telegrams from New Orleans flooded Hatfield’s office in support of Ernest’s nomination. Louisiana’s senior senator, Democrat Edwin S. Broussard, declared that he had known Ernest all his life and that he was very well qualified for the post. While the drama was escalating, Long was in Louisiana, and Broussard took to the Senate floor and accused Long of being “too busy running the state” to attend to business in Washington: “Certainly it does not seem to me that the Senate should wait for the junior senator from Louisiana to return and look after business here.” Senator David A. Reed of Pennsylvania agreed: “There is no reason why all business should be stagnated because some one senator goes away and leaves his duties unattended to.” Hatfield postponed the vote for a few days and summoned Long back to Washington, warning that if he failed to appear, Hatfield would not be “disposed to postpone the matter further.”39 When Long returned to Washington, riled by the charges, he took the Senate floor to defend his absence: “We have found ourselves in the midst of a Depression . . . the Hoover Depression. [I was] taking care of 650,000 school children in the state of Louisiana.” He continued, “I have understood—I may be mistaken in this, and if I am, I beg the

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senator from Pennsylvania to correct me—that even at times when the Senate was in session, the senator from Pennsylvania has himself been absent to attend to the law business. . . . [B]ut the senator makes this great spectacle of a senator being absent from his body at a time when he was undertaking to assist his state.” Two days later, after Congress adjourned, President Hoover granted a recess appointment to Ernest as commissioner of immigration, an oft-used tactic that Hoover believed would give Ernest’s candidacy leverage after the recess. Nevertheless, after the Senate reconvened in mid-June, Ernest’s nomination was rejected. Later in 1932, a Long-backed candidate defeated Broussard in his bid for reelection; two years later, Long himself went down, courtesy of an assassin’s bullet.40 The Inventor-Farmer

While Ernest was juggling political battles and the increasingly difficult job of managing the JMB Company’s finances, Denis was dealing with sugar production, manufacturing, prices, and labor and his other plantation responsibilities. With a combination of analytical skills and creativity, he invented several labor-, money-, and time-saving devices for use in the fields and the factory; in so doing, he made significant contributions to the modern sugar industry. Denis had always been the family’s designer, builder, and tinkerer. As early as 1899, when he was twenty-five, he and his uncle, Joseph M. Junca, the overseer at Cypremort, received a patent for the J. M. Junca and D. P. J. Burguières Sugar Cane Scraper, a tool for removing surplus and compacted soil from the planted cane. (See appendix 2 for Denis Burguières’s patents.) Eight years later, Denis experimented with a patent scoop to remove the rushes from Bayou Cypremort in front of the plantation home, with plans to dredge to the mouth of the bayou. Then he adapted the grab principle for handling cane using a compressed air cylinder. In 1912, Automotive Industries noted that “inventors are still hard at work evolving new and original ideas on the sleeve valve motor. . . . [This] is well illustrated by Denis Burguières . . . who has a number of useful inventions in sugar machinery.” His Reciprocating Sleeve Valve Motor had exterior valves driven by vertical shafts and connecting rods, a “superior” design that “satisf[ied] the demand of manufacturers for a simpler motor.”41

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In 1913, Denis and C. L. Corne received a patent for their Clarifying Cane Juice Settler, an evaporating apparatus with a higher degree of efficiency than earlier models. The inventors claimed, “We clarify, perfectly, cane juices. . . . The mechanical separation of the settler is perfect.” It was cleaner, easier, and more efficient; required less labor and less skill; and had “made the clarifying work of a sugar factory, a clean, pleasant operation, while heretofore it has been disagreeable and unsatisfactory.” By the end of 1916, these juice settlers were operating at Cypremort as well as other sugar factories.42 Denis was still finding ways to improve the industry in 1930, receiving a patent for “an improved method of increasing the sucrose content of the stalks of sugar cane”: According to my invention, I accomplish artificially the checking of the growth of the stalks with the consequent ripening of the cane by supplying to the tops of the stalks a finely divided material which attacks, but does not destroy, the “bud” of the cane, and which retards the formation of chlorophyll in the leaves, and consequently checks the growth of the cane. This arrested growth results in the material increase in the sucrose contained in the stalks. . . . I have found suitable substances for this purpose. Mixtures containing lime, caustic potash, common salt, weak solutions of sulphuric or hydrochloric acid and certain other solids in the finely divided form or liquids or gases, which when properly applied, will check the growth of the plants and ripen same, as described.43

In addition to his involvement in the Burguières’ business operations, Denis designed and built the Big House at Cypremort around 1910, using with virgin cypress from the family’s timberlands. Denis and Alice’s daughter, Alice Burguières Walker, wrote a description of the house as she remembered it: “The house had two stories plus an attic. The first floor had a big front porch, a long hallway with two bedrooms on one side, and a living room and dining room on the other side. Back of this was a large back porch, a butler pantry, large kitchen and two smaller rooms back of the kitchen. The second floor had a large hallway, two bedrooms, both on one side, and two bedrooms and bath on the other side. In the back was a large porch and also a large room that we called a nursery, a bath, and another room farther back where [the children’s caretaker] used to sleep.”44

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7.5 The Big House at Cypremort Plantation, ca. 1915. Burguières Family Collection, Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Louisiana at Lafayette

Other members of the family also remembered the house. In a memoir of his childhood days at Cypremort, Albert N. Burguières wrote of the “huge two-story white house built with virgin cypress, pine, and oak. The ceilings on the first floor were twelve feet high. The first floor had a library/ office, sitting/living room, and a huge dining room with a mounted tarpon fish over the fireplace mantel.” Other family members recalled that both floors had large central hallways for ventilation, and fireplaces on both sides of the house provided warmth when winter winds blew. The porch was screened to keep out mosquitoes, and every room inside had both a wooden door and a screen door. The house was situated between two rows of live oaks that had been planted by Alice Burguières.45 Even more vivid in the family memory bank is the “swinging bridge,” which Denis also designed and built. It was a suspension bridge over Bayou Cypremort, which separated the houses and the quarters from the sugar mill. Approximately sixty feet in length, the bridge seemed miles long to the children who ran across it, swinging it back and forth, making it a perilous journey for even the most experienced of the Burguières children.46 But Denis’s family also suffered great sadness. Denis and Alice’s oldest daughter, Juanita, had contracted polio as a child. Despite her physical

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7.6 The Burguières family tomb at St. Helen’s Cemetery on Florence Plantation, 2002. Burguières Family Collection, Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Louisiana at Lafayette

limitations, she graduated with honors from New Orleans’s Sacred Heart Academy. She then returned to Cypremort Plantation, where she contributed her time and efforts to St. Helen’s Catholic Church and the Louisa community. Her parents spared no expense in trying to cure Juanita’s ailments, and in 1923, she and her step-grandmother, Ida Burguières, made a pilgrimage to Lourdes in southern France. According to her obituary, though “relief at times came, . . . neither learning, nor travel, nor expert surgeons and physicians could bring health to the worn body, fatigued by disease,” and on October 14, 1927, Juanita passed away at twenty-seven.47 The Burguières suffered another loss in September 1936 when Denis’s sister, Florence, died at St. Vincent’s Retreat for Nervous and Mental Diseases in Harrison, New York, at age fifty-five. Very little is known about Florence’s life except that she was declared mentally incompetent in 1901 and was institutionalized from 1905 until her death. Florence’s body was taken by train from New York to the family cemetery at Florence Plantation, named for her. The obituary was brief, ending with, “Interment private. Omit flowers.”48 On the heels of Florence’s death, when the Big House was festively decorated with lights and red ribbons and a giant Christmas tree, tragedy

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again visited Cypremort Plantation. Denis went out into a cold night to clean the boiler in the oppressive heat of the Cypremort sugar mill boiler room and soon thereafter developed pneumonia. Though he had steered the family company through the most difficult financial period in American history and raised eight children with his wife, Alice, he did not survive this trial. Two days before the new year arrived, sixtytwo-year-old Denis P. J. Burguières Sr. died.49 He joined his parents; his brother, Joseph; his sister, Florence; and his daughter, Juanita, in St. Helen’s Cemetery on Florence Plantation, not far from the Big House, Alice’s oaks, and the prolific Cypremort sugar mill. The crop was harvested, the stalks burned, and the boiler cleaned. The new year arrived without Denis, but his thirty-six-year legacy lived on.

8 Jules M. Burguières Jr., the Florida Everglades, and Southern States Land and Timber Company, 1913–1936 For every far-seeing pioneer who has thus far carved his monument in, and his fortune from the soil and climate of Florida, there are a thousand equal or greater opportunities still open for men of vision, initiative and courage. —Jules M. Burguières Jr., Some Notes on Florida, 1936

Jules M. Burguières Jr. might well have been thinking of his grandfather, Eugène D. Burguières, and his father, Jules M. Burguières Sr., when he wrote of “far-seeing pioneers” and men of “vision, initiative, and courage.”1 Those terms could also apply to Jules Jr., who left the security of his family in Louisiana in 1913 to expand the family’s sugar empire, first in Cuba, then in the untamed wetlands of the Everglades, one of America’s last frontiers. He had inherited the gift of seeing—and seizing— opportunity. Most significantly, Jules had learned the value of land. Almost seven hundred miles south and east of New Orleans was one of the richest sugarcane areas in the world—Cuba. Cane had been grown there for centuries after Christopher Columbus introduced it in the Caribbean. Promoted as the Sugar Bowl of the World, Cuba was seen as offering excellent prospects for American sugar investors. According to a 1916 promotional booklet, Cuban Cane Sugar, though the island’s production of cane was prodigious, the industry was inefficiently run in a “hand-to-mouth fashion” using backward methods that wasted great amounts of sugar. Cuban sugar producers needed to 123

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develop varieties of cane better suited for their soil and climate, better methods of soil tillage, and better ways of maintaining property and managing plantations. Furthermore, they needed to “create their own marketing conditions . . . instead of being the slave of ” the Sugar Trust. The “enterprise and efficiency” that had put the United States at the forefront of the world’s markets, combined with “fearless capital,” could lift Cuba’s “chief industry out of its Spanish lethargy.” Cuba offered a “great opportunity” for American investors.2 This belief was shared by the Louisiana Planter and Sugar Manufacturer, which printed a letter to the Cuban industry expressing the need to take action against the Trust. The publication argued that the Cuban sugar industry, like the Louisiana industry, was being “sacrificed to a little coterie of buyers in New York” who paid only two-thirds of what the cane was worth. The Sugar Trust, the letter said, was an “unholy combination” that was as “merciless as were the Spanish Main who looted every ship they dared to attack.”3 The Burguières were interested. In 1909, they had considered expanding to Cuba with the purchase of the six-thousand-acre Manantial sugar estate and the Esperanza sugar mill, which had a capacity of fifteen thousand tons per year. Discussions were also under way with a representative of the National Bank of Cuba for the purchase of twenty thousand acres of land.4 The negotiations never came to fruition; however, the Burguières’ interest in Cuba did not wane. By 1913, Cuban sugar imports into the United States reached 1.72 million short tons, valued at $69 million. Moreover, according to the Louisiana Planter and Sugar Manufacturer, because of pending federal legislation “adverse to sugar,” there had been inquiries for “some able Louisiana men to engage in the sugar industry elsewhere.” One of those men was Jules M. Burguières Jr., who was lured away from Louisiana by the giant Cuban-American Sugar Company, which owned more than half a million acres as well as refineries on the island. Jules would serve as the company’s general manager and would conduct experiments in seed varieties, fertilizers, and various aspects of manufacturing. The news of Jules’s new position spread quickly and was applauded by Louisiana’s sugar producers: “The selection of Mr. Burguières to this great and important position at a handsome salary is a recognition of his ability and experience thoroughly well justified by the record of the man himself. Mr. Burguières is to the manner born. . . . We congratulate [him]

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upon his appointment to the distinguished position. . . . He deserves it most unquestionably.”5 Jules departed New Orleans in early September 1913, traveling first to New York to meet with his new employers and then on to Cuba, arriving on October 21. He was pleased with what he found there, writing to his brother, Ernest, “This certainly is a great country with all sorts of fruits. So far conveniences are very agreeable . . . and I will be able to do an awful lot of hard work.”6 He remained in Cuba until 1914, when he heeded the call of a new opportunity in the Florida Everglades, where the sugar industry was just getting its start. “A River of Grass” It was discovered that in this country, in a State which can boast of being the first colonized of any portion of the Union, there existed a region, of which less was actually known than of the interior of Africa. —New Orleans Times-Democrat, 1884

Originally comprising more than three million acres, the Everglades was the largest wetland in the United States, a huge, wild, and untamed mosaic of marshes, saw grass, ponds, and sloughs. Several nineteenthcentury expeditions had sought to assess the feasibility of reclaiming those wetlands for agriculture and development. In 1867, Maurice Thompson led a straggly group of Civil War deserters who had been hiding in the area’s swamps on an investigation. He later wrote about the land around Lake Okeechobee, inhabited by alligators, other reptiles, mammals, and birds of all sorts. Like the marshes that Jules Sr. had tamed in South Louisiana, the Everglades had “vast floating islands of fallen cypress trees” and “luxuriant vines . . . blending their odd, gay foliage and fiery spikes with the fronds of the palm and the sprays of the cypress.” The enthralled Thompson also noted the region’s “solitude, the tropical mysteriousness, the wild, monotonous gloom of the vast waste.”7 In the 1880s, former Confederate officer Major A. P. Williams led an expedition sponsored by the New Orleans Times-Democrat that began at Fort Myers, which he declared “a little Eden in a wilderness of tropical beauty.” Williams was less enamored of the Everglades, however,

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describing them as “nothing more or less than a vast and useless marsh and such they will remain for all time to come.” He concluded that the “Florida Everglades are of no value agriculturally.”8 In 1892, J. E. Ingraham, president of the South Florida Railway, undertook another expedition that sought to survey the area for the construction of a railroad from Tampa south and east to Miami. An experienced crew that had already ventured into the wetlands warned Ingraham that only Indians could cross the Everglades, that his party would get lost and starve, and that the marshes had so many alligators that a man could “walk across on their backs.” The dire warnings may have been exaggerated, but not by much. Some members of the expedition gave up and headed home, covered in mud and ravaged by mosquitoes, chiggers, and other voracious insects. One deserter waxed philosophical about his experience: “My advice is to let every discontented man take a trip through the Everglades; if it don’t kill, it will certainly cure him. . . . A day’s journey in slimy, decaying vegetable matter which coats and permeates everything it touches and no water with which to wash it off will be good for him. It’s enough to make a man swear to be contented forever afterwards with a board for a bed and a clean shirt once a week.”9 On May 30, 1881, Philadelphia millionaire and empire builder Hamilton Disston negotiated with Florida governor William D. Bloxman and the state’s Internal Improvement Fund (charged with managing state land and using the proceeds of land sales for internal improvements such as drainage and land reclamation) to drain the land around Lake Okeechobee in exchange for half of the land reclaimed. Disston purchased an additional four million acres at twenty-five cents an acre, making him the largest individual landowner in the country. Bloxman declared that “no other transaction, certainly since the war, has been of greater service to the state.”10 Railroad construction subsequently exploded. Henry Morrison Flagler purchased his first Florida railroad in 1885, connecting St. Augustine with New York. In addition, prospective buyers, investors, and seekers of the American Dream rushed into South Florida to take advantage of the cheap land that would be reclaimed through massive drainage projects. But Disston was unable to fulfill his promises. He died in 1896, and none of his heirs wanted to continue his work. When the real estate market was depressed in 1901, Disston’s two-million-acre empire was

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8.1 Landholdings of Southern States Land and Timber Company in Palm Beach and Martin Counties, Florida, 1917. Historical Society of Palm Beach County, West Palm Beach, Fla.

sold at auction to two majority bondholders of the Disston Land Company, Colonel Reginald Huidekoper of New York and General Charles Miller of Pennsylvania. The seventy thousand dollars they paid was a tiny fraction of the twenty-five million dollars at which Disston had valued his property. A year later, Disston’s former holdings were in the hands of a newly formed New Orleans–based corporation, Southern States Land and Timber Company.11 Southern States Land and Timber Company

On May 24, 1902, Southern States was formed by a syndicate of New Orleans capitalists and brothers Herbert H. and Arthur Lehman, grandsons of one of the founders of the Lehman Brothers investment bank. The company acquired the two million acres in the Upper Everglades, located southeast, south, west, and northwest of Lake Okeechobee in

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what are now Martin, Palm Beach, Broward, Dade, Collier, Lee, Hendry, and Desoto Counties. Southern States paid a mere twenty-five cents per acre but spent just as much for land surveys necessary to clear titles, bringing the total cost of the acquisition to more than one million dollars. With the purchase, Southern States joined the Flagler system and the United Land Company as the giant land corporations in the area of Lake Okeechobee.12 Two developments would be essential to the transformation of Southern States’ enormous land holdings into a habitable and productive agricultural region: the herculean task of effective drainage and water control, and research and experimentation on sugarcane varieties suitable for the Everglades soils and climate. Jules M. Burguières Jr. played a key role in both. The men behind Southern States possessed good instincts, perfect timing, and formidable influence, which they wielded to their advantage. The same year that the company purchased the Everglades lands, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was persuaded to begin construction on the West Palm Beach (C-51) Canal, a massive undertaking linking West Palm Beach and Lake Okeechobee. When it was finished in 1917, the West Palm Beach Canal cut right through Southern States’s property, draining millions of acres around the giant lake. Just months before the canal’s official opening, Jules Burguières acquired his first stock in Southern States. Both he and the company thus placed themselves at the forefront of what J. Carlyle Sitterson called “one of the most spectacular developments in the long history of the sugar industry in the South.”13 But for more than a decade before Jules’s arrival in Florida, Southern States and other large landholders had been butting heads with the Internal Improvement Fund, whose trustees included the governor, comptroller, treasurer, attorney general, and registrar of state lands. Throughout Jennings’s administration (1901–5), the trustees did not grant deeds to any land claimants as a consequence of conflicts with railroad companies. In 1907, Southern States sued the fund, and federal judge Charles Swayne handed down a decision authorizing the trustees “to sell or dispose the swamp and overflowed lands for purposes of drainage and reclamation.” Jennings’s successor, Napoleon Bonaparte Broward, had been elected governor of Florida on his promise to create an “Empire of the Everglades” by “wringing the last drop of water out of that ‘pestilence-ridden swamp.’” During his term, large tracts of wild swamplands and coastal areas were sold to finance his plan for drainage

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and reclamation, but his office clashed with large landowners about how this program would work, when it would be conducted, and who would be in control.14 Southern States attorney Monte M. Lemann argued against drainage taxes proposed by the agency on the grounds that too little planning and investigation had been conducted to warrant paying taxes on the company’s two million acres. Lemann also objected to a proposed Board of Drainage Commissioners made up of elected officers who were already trustees of the Internal Improvement Fund. This board would have the power to establish drainage districts and levy taxes up to ten cents per acre, yet the landowners would have no representation; furthermore, Lemann argued, the power to tax had been unconstitutionally delegated.15 Suits blocked the collection of these taxes until January 1910, when Southern States and other large landholders reached a compromise with the Board of Drainage Commissioners. Landowners would pay back taxes, but the work had to be contracted to a bona fide construction company and a competent engineer.16 Jules M. Burguières Jr. Joins Southern States Land and Timber

By the time Jules went to Florida in 1914, he was already a skilled sugar chemist with extensive experience in research and development of cane varieties and fertilizers. He also had sugarcane production, manufacturing, and marketing in his blood. Southern States directors needed someone like Jules to expedite the agricultural development of their investment. Jules and George Bensel, a native of New Orleans and the company’s longtime president, would have tremendous influence on the future of South Florida. Once an effective drainage system was in place, Southern States established demonstration farms where experiments were conducted in the production of sugarcane, citrus, and vegetables. The company planted sugarcane on a total of sixty-five acres at Loxahatchee Groves, Canal Point, the S. S. Ranch on the St. Lucie Canal, and Indiantown, all contiguous to Lake Okeechobee. For diversity, cattle ranches and dairies were set up. Though all of the locations were important in the larger scheme of agricultural development, Loxahatchee Groves, a 7,867acre tract of muck, peat, hammocks, and sand loam soils, was Bensel’s

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particular passion, growing into a traditional community and a haven of natural beauty and serenity. Since the Lake Okeechobee region differed from other cane-producing areas, techniques had to be adapted to the region’s soil, drainage conditions, and climate. Though the muck lands were fertile, the soil lacked some of the basic minerals needed to grow crops and feed livestock: it was high in nitrogen and low in phosphorus and potash and had a tendency to be acidic. The discovery of the trace elements necessary for cultivation in the muck soils was “one of the great triumphs of Florida agricultural science.”17 Experimentation in cane varieties began when the U.S. Department of Agriculture established a sugarcane breeding station at Canal Point in 1920. Cane seed germinated quickly in Canal Point’s tropical climate, enabling the growth and testing of thousands of different varieties in a relatively short time. Those that were disease-resistant and early maturing, with long ratooning periods (the length of time that the sugarcane stubble can be used to propagate the next crop) and high sugar content were developed and distributed to sugar planters. The studies at Canal Point also resulted in the development of fertilizers that reduced the cost of cane production.18 These demonstration farms were vital to the development of agriculture in the Everglades. In his history of Southern States Land and Timber, Bensel asserted that the company’s demonstration farms and experimental labs attracted to Florida other large corporations, among them the Brown Company (dairy) and the Southern Sugar Company and its successor, U.S. Sugar Corporation, and led to the creation of Florida’s Everglades Experimental Station, which conducted further agricultural research.19 Loxahatchee Groves

Bensel began work with Southern States in 1903 as a twenty-sevenyear-old branch sales manager in the West Palm Beach division. Under Bensel’s direction, Loxahatchee Groves was founded in 1917 and engineer T. G. Thorgesen was hired to create the first topographical survey map of the area. According to Eleanor Hope, a local historian and longtime resident of the community, “Thorgesen walked the entire area. Even though his methods were somewhat primitive, his attention to detail and accuracy [was] amazing.” The company built twelve houses

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on the property as well as a one-room school (where the farm supervisor’s wife served as teacher) and a grocery store/post office/gas station run by Thorgeson’s wife. All of the buildings were constructed with lumber sawn at the Southern States mill.20 The settlement’s first residents produced their own meat, milk, fruit, and vegetables. Tom Bensel, George’s brother, supervised the planting and harvesting of fifty-six thousand citrus trees and acres of tomatoes, potatoes, and other vegetables. These crops were so successful that large fruit and vegetable packinghouses became necessary. The Bensels also experimented with the latest in farm equipment, the Moline tractor, proving that the soil at Loxahatchee could support the tractor’s weight and “revolutioniz[ing] agricultural development in the Everglades.”21 Southern States added a demonstration farm and dairy at Loxahatchee Groves in January 1918, and by 1925, it was described as the “finest cattle herd in south Florida.” Jules Burguières was instrumental in this effort as well. Among his contributions, he served as a spokesperson for the state committee to eradicate the cattle tick during a serious epidemic that infested South Florida herds in the 1920s. A special dipping solution that eradicated the ticks was developed at Loxahatchee Groves, helping to bring tick fever under control.22 Jules believed that cattle would be profitable in South Florida, so he worked hard to attract other cattlemen. In September 1917, the Palm Beach Post reported that Jules had met with a prominent Texas cattleman, Caesar Kleberg, and that Kleberg considered Florida ideal for the enterprise. According to Jules, “Within a few weeks, I shall have Mr. Kleberg come to this county where he will see the real thing in the grazing-grounds. His visit to Palm Beach County will be the means of a great deal of valuable publicity for this portion of the state, for I feel sure that when he shall have once closely investigated what this county has to offer, he will have no hesitancy in declaring this the best spot of all the south in which to produce a fine class of cattle at a minimum cost. His opinion . . . will mean the advent of much capital to this county.” Southern States’s efforts transformed muck land, saw grass, and marshes into a thriving agricultural region.23 Cape Sable

In 1917, at the same time that Jules became involved at Loxahatchee Groves, he was also investigating the feasibility of planting sugarcane at

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Florida’s southern tip. Because of commodity shortages during World War I, he knew the timing was right to acquire more land for sugarcane, and he set his sights on Cape Sable, southwest of Miami, the southernmost point on the U.S. mainland. Jules and other enterprising businessmen traveled to this hinterland, first by rail and then by boat. D. LeBaron Perrine, publisher of Tropic Magazine, accompanied the group, and described his fellow travelers: “Probably never before in the history of the Cape had such a distinguished company of men met here, each with his own particular enthusiasm for development projects and along lines in which they were individually famous.” Perrine described Jules as “an extensive cane planter and sugar mill owner in Louisiana, [who is] looking to south Florida as a field for future operations in this profitable business. . . . His visit to the Cape was to satisfy himself as to soil conditions there.”24 Joining Perrine and Jules at the Cape Sable Club were William Jennings Bryan and his wife, Mary Baird Bryan, as well as Walter R. Comfort, a New York confectioner “who makes 65 thousand gallons of ice cream a day and who uses four million pounds of sugar a year.” Also at the club was Missouri rancher James Bright, whose Bright Brothers Farms owned a huge tract in the area, where he had demonstrated the advantages of raising purebred cattle. Bright had conducted experiments in forage and stock breeding, proving that profits could be made in Hialeah, on the edge of the Everglades. In addition, the group included Samuel Untermeyer, a New York lawyer and financier; his brother, Isaac Untermeyer, a capitalist; Francis E. Baker, presiding judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals in Chicago; Minor Whitney, president of United Fruit Company, New York; and William P. Smith, a Miami lawyer. Though sugarcane was planted at Cape Sable, Jules was not one of the investors.25 Florida Land Boom

In 1911, Florida was hailed as “the greatest land proposition ever offered . . . far more fertile than the Valley of the Nile.” By the century’s second decade, lands yet to be surveyed or drained were sold to large developers, who in turn divided the acreage into lots and small farm tracts. Speculators moved in, luring investors with fantastic claims and exaggerated predictions about the future of Florida. Land was grossly misrepresented

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8.2 Southern States Land and Timber Company sign, Florida, 1917. Historical Society of Palm Beach County, West Palm Beach, Fla.

and often bought sight unseen. Many unsuspecting owners discovered they would have to rent boats to inspect their property, which was still under water. Said one outraged buyer from Iowa, “I have bought land by the acre, I have bought land by the foot; but, by God, I have never before bought land by the gallon.”26 Promotional ads ran in newspapers across the country, attracting real estate investors, developers, planters, small truck farmers, and countless others who migrated to partake in the feast. The result was a land boom of enormous proportions right before, during, and just after World War I. “All of America’s gold rushes, all of her oil booms, and all her freeland stampedes dwindled by comparison . . . with the torrents of migration pouring into Florida” by the early fall of 1925. Between 1900 and 1930, the state’s population tripled, reaching 1.5 million.27 This boom persisted even as the rest of the country suffered. Between the 1910s and 1920s, more than one hundred thousand businesses around the country closed their doors, but Florida’s economy continued to soar, with the new wave of eager capitalists pouring into the Everglades driving up land sales and prices even further. Wealthy northerners and

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Europeans were enticed to Florida by northeastern newspapers, which lauded the “Tropical Paradise.” By 1924, northeasterners could travel by sea on the Clyde Steamship Line, the first luxury liner service between New York and Miami. Expanded rail lines and bus tours sponsored by developers drew old and young alike. Sumptuous hotels and glamorous coastal resorts sprang up along the passenger ship routes, and quaint towns along Lake Okeechobee offered idyllic lifestyles. The final enticement for undecided buyers was liberal financing dangled by banks. And at the same time that Florida was booming, an estimated four hundred thousand farmers elsewhere in the country lost their land to lending institutions. The prospect of cheap land lured many of them to what became known as the “Poor Man’s Paradise,” the “Promised Land,” and the “Land of Destiny.”28 In particular, Florida attracted sugarcane planters who believed the state would be the new American Sugar Bowl. During World War I, America and the rest of the world experienced serious sugar shortages, with U.S. scarcity heightened by the unavailability of cargo vessels to import sugar from Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and the Philippines. This upsurge in demand brought the prices of raw and refined sugar to unprecedented heights. In 1919, raw sugar on the New Orleans market was fourteen cents per pound, almost doubling prices paid in 1915; for a few months, prices even topped twenty-four cents per pound.29 One of those who moved to Florida during this time was Jules’s younger brother, Ernest A. Burguières. In 1925, he and his wife, Isabella, and their son, Ernest Jr., moved to a Spanish adobe house in Palm Beach, and during the 1920s, Jules and Ernest partnered with Buckner Chipley in a real estate development company, Burguières and Chipley, in West Palm Beach. In 1925, the firm placed an ad in the West Palm Beach Post announcing the sale of thousands of acres for subdivisions on land located on the old military trail from Fort Basinger to the Caloosahatchee River. The land, consisting of both prairie land and forests of palm trees, was priced at fifty dollars per acre. Subsequent ads touted “exclusive listings” of properties in Okeechobee, St. Lucie, and Palm Beach Counties.30 With so much invested in the region, it is not surprising that both Jules and Ernest were promoting the state. In 1921, Jules announced that Florida sugarcane manufacturers had just produced their first vacuum pan sugar. Further good news came in the form of a report by sugar expert and engineer Anthony R. McClane that revealed that cane

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planted in the Okeechobee region in 1913 was still producing seven years later without having been replanted. McClane also noted that no sugarcane had to date been killed by frost in the Everglades and that the treeless, level land was perfect for mechanized cane cultivation. The report concluded that the Everglades should produce sugar “more cheaply than any other area in the world.”31 Representing Burguières and Chipley, Ernest gave a series of interviews to the New Orleans Item in 1925. The paper described him as “a Louisiana planter who has plunged into the thick of things” in Florida. Ernest hailed his new state not only for its bounty but also as a model for Louisiana in attracting outsiders and in generating economic success. South Florida, he stated, had grown so prolifically not just because of its “dazzl[ing] residential property” but also because of the concerted drive for the development of agriculture suitable to the diverse types of soil. In addition, according to Ernest, Florida had adopted an equable and simple incorporation law and had one of the best automobile codes in the United States, fair and uniform. Moreover, police officers in Florida were lenient with visitors (investors and tourists) who exceeded the speed limit and were always courteous as the “welcoming committee to help and make them feel at home.” Finally, Florida had no state taxes or inheritance taxes, which Ernest described as “the most unjustified form of all taxation.” Ernest also cited Florida’s development of a strong tourism industry as an example for Louisiana and argued that his native state could rival Florida in that area by developing Lake Pontchartrain’s frontage at New Orleans, the St. Tammany district, and the Louisiana Gulf Coast.32 Southern States Land and Timber Company

Since its founding in 1902, Southern States had not sold lots to individuals until drainage and other improvements had been made; its transactions primarily involved large developers. In 1916, during the term of Southern States president Maurice Stern, the company sold large and valuable ranches from Okeechobee Boulevard north to the St. Lucie Canal.33 William J. “Fingy” Conners, a dock scrapper who rose to become a New York State Democratic Party boss and Florida millionaire, attended a celebration of the opening of the West Palm Beach Canal in 1917. Immediately after listening to a speech in which George Bensel

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extolled the region’s bright future, Conners bought four thousand acres and achieved what most observers had thought impossible—the construction of a forty-mile highway over the soft muck land around Palm Beach. The accomplishment earned Conners plaudits as the sponsor of a remarkable engineering feat and the man who brought the Tin Lizzie to South Florida. Seven years later, Conners owned more than twelve thousand acres on or near the east shore of Lake Okeechobee.34 Also in 1917, Southern States advertised in the West Palm Beach Post, “Saw Grass Lands for Sale—in the Upper Everglades, on and adjacent to the West Palm Beach Canal, in tracts of 640 acres and upwards. These ’Glade lands have an elevation of 16–21 feet above sea level, according to the surveys of the State Engineer.” Southern States also attracted New York advertising magnate Barron Collier, who purchased 610,000 acres from the company on his way to becoming Florida’s largest landholder and establishing luxury hotels, resorts, and exclusive fishing clubs in what is today the county that bears his name.35 By 1924, hundreds of miles of canals and highways had been completed, but the region still needed a better railroad system. Bensel and Jules persuaded the Seaboard Air Line Railway, one of the three major railroad systems in Florida in the early 1900s, to buy one hundred thousand acres in Martin County and another one hundred thousand acres in Palm Beach County. The railroad eventually extended from Central Florida through Southern States’ property to Palm Beach and Miami. The sixty-six miles that separated the two were subdivided into lots, the lots were sold, and the area was transformed into “one of the largest cities in America.” Seaboard thus became a leader in the development of Florida agriculture.36 In the first half of the 1920s, Bensel reported that Southern States had sold 257,000 acres, all in large blocks, for $6.6 million. Among the buyers were R. J. Bolles, later accused of swindling people in his efforts to profit from the Florida land boom, and Arthur Lehman, who became a director of Southern States in 1931.37 Though Jules was employed by Southern States Land and Timber from the time of his arrival in Florida in 1914, he had also begun personally investing in land, including transactions with the company. Jules also sold property to Westwood Development Company, the Southern Sugar Company (of which he became a director and company executive), the City of Palm Beach, George Bensel, Palm Beach County, and Palm Beach Loxahatchee.38

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The Roaring Twenties: The Best of Times

The end of World War I ushered in the dizzying Roaring Twenties. In 1919, women won the right to vote. Probably not coincidentally, women’s hemlines rose as high as their spirits, and flappers flaunted themselves doing the Charleston, the Shimmy, and the Bunny Hug, causing great consternation in the home, in churches, and in the press. Prohibition became law in 1920, opening the doors to bathtub gin and bootleggers, gangsters and giddy intemperance, speakeasies and salacious cabarets. By 1924, the United States had 2.5 million radios blasting riotous jazz to a postwar America with an insatiable desire for pleasure. It was a time of great social change, mirrored in the writings of the Lost Generation and modernism in literature, art, architecture, and music. In 1928, the groundbreaking was held for the Chrysler Building, the tallest skyscraper in New York City at the time but soon surpassed by the Empire State Building, the purest expression of Art Deco architecture in America and an icon of American strength and culture. It was the decade of Charlie Chaplin, Charles Lindbergh, and Babe Ruth; the first talkies; and the first refrigerators, washing machines, and vacuum cleaners. The Great War had dramatically changed forever America’s social, cultural, and economic landscape. Perhaps the most extravagant expression of the Roaring Twenties lay just twenty-five miles to the east of the Lake Okeechobee area, where the serious work of drainage and reclamation was being conducted by the Internal Improvement Fund and private investors. Located on white sandy beaches, Palm Beach was a tropical oasis built on the enormous wealth of developers and financiers. “All roads lead to Palm Beach,” the ads read—but only for members of the old-guard American aristocracy and European royalty, who flocked to this social mecca where architect Addison Mizner’s iconic Spanish Revival palaces graced the azure waters of the Atlantic. Palm Beach became an American hideout for barons and baronesses, dukes and duchesses, dancers, writers, wealthy dowagers, and the pedigreed—the bright and beautiful precursors of the jet set who possessed unimaginable wealth. The social snowbirds arrived at Thanksgiving for the opening of “the season,” a six-month holiday of charity balls, galas, and dinner dances at the prestigious and opulent Everglades Club and the Breakers Hotel. As a single man in this cosmopolitan society, Jules Burguières would have been one of “the Swords” of Palm Beach—one of the town’s eligible bachelors. By 1920,

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8.3 Jules M. Burguières Jr. and silent movie star Bessie Love, ca. 1920. Burguières Family Collection, Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Louisiana at Lafayette

he had been elected as the first chair of the Florida Development Board, the predecessor of the Florida Chamber of Commerce. In addition to his involvement with the Southern States Land and Timber Company and Burguières and Chipley and his participation in the Florida Development Board, Jules also served as president of Farmers Central Bank and Trust Company.39 Though he was engrossed in his work, participation in Palm Beach’s social scene was imperative for a man of stature. As a member of the highly exclusive Everglades Club, he would have met some of the most important men and women in America. In 1929, Jules was a guest at a luncheon for Mr. and Mrs. J. Fred Pierson Jr., grandson of New York railroad baron Henry L. Pierson. Also in attendance at that luncheon was Mary Dahlberg, the wife of Bror G. Dahlberg, the president of the Celotex Corporation of Chicago and later the owner of the Southern Sugar Company.40 Palm Beach was also teeming with famous actors and actresses. Jules met silent film star Bessie Love as well as Princess Marie de Bourbon of

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Spain, a model and actress whose face graced advertisements for Pond’s skin creams and whom Jules introduced to members of his family in New Orleans in 1925.41 The Twenties: The Worst of Times

In the midst of this frivolity, conspicuous consumption, and exorbitant profits, land sales and prices continued to rise, finally peaking in 1925, when land values quadrupled in less than a year. A plot that sold for $25 in 1896 sold for $150,000 in 1925. On July 1, 1925, an ad in the West Palm Beach Post showed a grand Mediterranean villa surrounded by towering coconut trees and asked—and answered—the question that had been on investors’ minds since the land bubble began: “Last? Of Course It Will Last!”42 But of course it didn’t. Two months later, Florida governor John Wellborn Martin sold thirty-four parcels of state-controlled land, varying in size from 14 to 640 acres, for between $150 an acre and an exorbitant $685 per acre. At the same time, however, U.S. Internal Revenue Service income tax specialists were examining real estate records for profits, the railroad and shipping lines were putting embargoes on all cargoes except foodstuffs, and anti-Florida propaganda was appearing almost daily in northern newspapers. Sales began to slacken. Speculators found fewer and fewer buyers and began dropping prices to sell properties and realize profits before it was too late. By September, profits plunged. Then panic set in. With so many sellers and so few buyers, “prices came down with a sickening thud, twitched a bit, and then crawled down even lower.” The days of properties being bought and sold at auction as many as ten times in one day were over.43 When the land bubble burst, banking regulators hoped to prevent another crisis. To quell fears, the West Palm Beach Post ran the headline, “Leading Banks Show Deposits of $30,000; Great Prosperity Here Evidenced as Institutions Declare Dividends; Funds Have More Than Doubled Previous Years.” But when land values collapsed, money and credit dried up. Depositors rushed the banks in 1926 in a frenzy to withdraw their savings, leaving a trail of defaulted mortgages and penniless masses. As president of Farmers Central Bank, Jules was mired in this hysteria. The bank’s mortgage loans on overvalued Florida real estate recovered five cents on the dollar or less, and Farmers Central joined

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8.4 Run on Farmers Central Bank, 1926. Historical Society of Palm Beach County, West Palm Beach, Fla.

the more than 45 national banks and 171 state banks that collapsed in Florida between 1925 and 1932. Many of those banks, including Farmers Central, eventually reorganized and reopened. Jules was reinstated to the board, and George Bensel joined him in 1929.44 According to Bensel, of the 257,000 acres Southern States sold in the early 1920s, “all but two of these purchasers defaulted, and in the final result the company [took back most of the] acres sold. One of the most amazing of these purchases [was made by] a large syndicate from Philadelphia which, after buying 50,519 acres with down payments of $528,809 and mortgages for balance, abandoned their purchases entirely.”45 In addition to this human-induced financial disaster, nature dealt another blow to the economy in the form of mosaic disease, which infected a wide swath of cane fields and citrus groves in 1924. Early in 1926, South Florida experienced its first recorded freeze, wiping out many crops and almost completely destroying the citrus trees. Cane planted by the American Sugar Cane League the previous year had been expected to produce nine thousand tons of seed to be shipped to Louisiana, so the freeze caused formidable losses in both states.46 Later in the year, when it seemed that Florida’s economy had hit its nadir, the Lake Okeechobee region was crippled by a hurricane that battered Palm Beach and Miami with 125-mile-per-hour winds that blew storm waters over the dikes. More than four hundred people were killed, and thirteen thousand homes and farms were destroyed. An even more powerful hurricane followed in 1928, pushing water from Lake

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Okeechobee into the surrounding towns and drowning nearly two thousand people in one hour.47 Finally, in 1929, the year of the Wall Street crash and the beginning of the Great Depression, nature unleashed an infestation of the Mediterranean fruit fly that annihilated crops and ruined what was left of the tourist industry. Between 1925 and 1929, this American dreamland was transformed into a bleak economic wasteland that would not recover until World War II. Southern Sugar Company/U.S. Sugar Corporation

During these chaotic years, Jules continued his involvement with both Southern States Land and Timber and the J. M. Burguières Company in Louisiana. In 1928, he was offered an executive management position at Southern Sugar Company, which dominated the sugar industry between 1925 and 1930. The company’s president, Bror G. Dahlberg, was the mastermind behind the Celotex Corporation, which produced wallboard from dry cane stalks, creating an enormous demand for sugarcane. Jules knew Dahlberg socially, and Dahlberg knew that Jules’s experience in sugar production, manufacturing, research, and experimentation would make him an invaluable asset. Jules became Southern Sugar’s vice president in West Palm Beach and Clewiston, where the Clewiston Sugar House factory was built in 1929.48 After the harvest of the 1930–31 crop, Southern Sugar, like countless other businesses, was forced into receivership. Charles S. Mott, the multimillionaire vice president of General Motors Corporation, and Clarence R. Bitting, a specialist in financing and managing industrial properties, bought Southern Sugar, including both its land and the Clewiston Sugar House, and named the new enterprise the U.S. Sugar Corporation. Jules remained with the new company as an executive manager and board member through 1935. The preceding year, U.S. Sugar produced the largest tonnage of sugarcane and raw sugar in the history of the Florida sugarcane industry.49 Jules Promotes Florida

In spite of the Florida land bust and the Great Depression, Jules remained convinced that the state had not reached its full potential. In

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1936, he made a strong argument for potential investors, tourists, and residents in a marketing publication, Some Notes on Florida: “There are greater and better opportunities for profit in Florida than have yet been realized. Few realize the immensity of the territory . . . the second largest state east of the Mississippi [with] a coast line double that of any other state; there are more than thirty thousand lakes in Florida, including the second largest body of fresh water in continental United States . . . and about twenty million acres of untouched fertile soil, abundant rainfall . . . and the longest growing season of any state in the Union.” Another advantage of Florida, with its miles and miles of railroads, highways, and shipping routes, was its access to the “great consuming industrial population of the north and east.” Jules acknowledged that Florida’s sugarcane industry had “lagged” in spite of the many efforts made for its advancement and that “it is only since 1930 that real progress has been made.” His dissatisfaction with government intervention in the sugar industry was unequivocal: “Governmental restrictions on the production of our own necessities may again defer the right of Florida to supply a substantial portion of our sugar requirements which are now supplied by alien peoples.” Jules also called attention to the state’s well-established and growing cities, excellent schools, and public libraries. The low death rate, he maintained, was a consequence of the state’s “restoring climate,” which promoted limitless leisure activities in the sparkling waters of the Atlantic. For the avid golfer, he boasted of the splendid, meticulously manicured links dotting the region; for the hunter, the great Everglades marshes provided an endless array of wild game.50 Jules tempered his enthusiasm by cautioning potential investors that “development is inherently speculative and should only be undertaken with a complete and thorough understanding of that fact.” Jules had learned much in his twenty-five years in the state: No magical method has been discovered in Florida of obtaining riches from the soil without first putting into the soil capital, labor, intelligence and management, although the result per unit is probably greater in Florida than elsewhere. Agricultural failures in Florida have been almost uniformly due to lack of sufficient capital, shiftlessness or ignorance. . . . Unintelligent purchase of stocks, bonds, real estate or a business enterprise is pure gambling without the redeeming feature of knowledge of that fact on the part of the person parting with hard earned cash; if he knew he were gambling he might enjoy it, but thinking that he is making an investment makes the loss doubly hard to bear.51

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Christmas 1936

A few days before Christmas, just as the season was unfolding in Palm Beach society, Jules received word from Cypremort that his oldest brother, Denis, longtime president of the J. M. Burguières Company, was very ill with pneumonia. When Denis died the following week, Jules made his way back to South Louisiana to attend his brother’s funeral. At some point while there, he decided not to return to Florida. Perhaps he felt that his work there was done. More likely, he felt that only he could keep the family company (which owed him thousands of dollars) afloat. Yet the move would require an enormous adjustment, requiring him to leave one of the most glamorous cities in America to live at the still-remote Cypremort Plantation, surrounded by little other than vast fields of sugarcane. Nonetheless, he decided that he and his brother, Ernest, the two oldest living sons of Jules M. Burguières Sr., would take up the yoke of the J. M. Burguières Company, now more than sixty years old.

9 Back to the Plantation

The Reign of Jules Martial Burguières Jr., 1936–1960

The best thing in life is to keep busy. It helps me to overcome lots of troubles. —Denis P. J. Burguières to Elise Burguières, February 1910

Having never severed ties financially or emotionally with his South Louisiana family, Jules returned to Cypremort Plantation after twentyfive years in Florida. He moved into the plantation home along the banks of the sluggish Bayou Cypremort, where his closest neighbors were his deceased family members. Prior to his return to Louisiana, the family business had been a collaboration of brothers working in a spirit of cooperation and solidarity, each employing his individual talents in the service of the J. M. Burguières Company. But now that Denis was gone, Jules dramatically changed the company’s management style. For the next twenty-four years, there were no stockholder meetings. Few dividends were paid, and the family company records were locked away. Jules assumed absolute power. The man and his legend are complex, encompassing at least four personae: Jules the Businessman, Jules the Scholar, Uncle Jules, and Mr. Jules the Boss Man. Some people remembered him as “distinguished,” “brilliant,” “kind,” “a perfect gentleman,” “fastidious,” and “religious.” Yet to others, he was “shrewd,” “condescending,” “domineering,” and “uncompromising.” He undoubtedly made a lasting impression on everyone who knew him. His brothers and sisters, his stepmother, and his twenty-six nieces and nephews either respected him or reviled him. His fellow planters considered him a champion of the sugarcane industry for his seminal work in both Florida and Louisiana. Whether they 144

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9.1 Jules M. Burguières Jr., ca. 1955. Burguières Family Collection, Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Louisiana at Lafayette

liked him or not, all would agree that Jules M. Burguières Jr. was “a force to be reckoned with.”1 Shortly after Denis’s funeral, Jules “moved into the house at Cypremort Plantation and took over the family company, just like that.” Indeed, he assumed power as absolute ruler of the family dynasty and held it until his death in 1960. Denis’s oldest son, Denis Jr., had expected to inherit the company reins and was shocked when his uncle stepped in. According to Denis Jr.’s son, Philip, My father was the oldest son of his generation, and in French families, authority tends to go from the oldest son to the oldest son to the oldest son. My grandfather, Denis, . . . ran the plantation through the depression. Upon his death, the natural heir would have been my father, Denis Jr., who was living at North Bend Plantation. Suddenly, Great Uncle Jules shows up after living in Florida—[he] has rarely even been seen, is in his sixties—to run the company. He’s the third-oldest son of the previous generation. He’s a bachelor. He’s never been married. He’s spent most of his life in Florida. Now he comes roaring in to run everything. . . . My mother’s explanation was that they were

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taught to respect their elders, so my father just backed off, since Jules was his uncle, and Uncle Jules started running the whole operation. My father kept running the six-thousand-acre Bayou Salé plantation. But then he and Uncle Jules had some kind of conflict, which must have been of enormous proportion, because my father quit. He left the gorgeous Bayou Salé plantation home.2

Jules’s youngest brother, C. Patout Burguières, was also surprised. Pat had managed Midway Plantation while Jules was in Florida, and Pat, too, had expected to assume the mantle. But the coup was swift and final. Uncle Jules was back. He was officially granted residency in the big house at Cypremort Plantation in 1939 when the company directors dedicated it for his “use and habitation.”3 Jules the Businessman had no qualms about assuming authority. He was a stockholder and vice president of the family company. Even while he was living in Palm Beach, he had remained active in the family business and in the Louisiana sugarcane industry, maintaining high positions in industry organizations in both Florida and Louisiana. He and his brother, Ernest, the JMB Company’s treasurer, had worked in partnership on company finances. Before the depression, Jules and Ernest had forged a strong relationship with the Whitney Bank of New Orleans, and that connection had kept the company afloat during the worst of times. According to Henry Burguières’s daughter-in-law, Gertrude Reynaud Burguières, the bank “didn’t foreclose because they thought a lot of Uncle Jules and Ernest and the Burguières. They were good businessmen. The banks knew that they would bring the plantations back, and that the debt was not a dead one.” Ernest Burguières’s granddaughter, Leila Bristow, confirmed the esteem in which bankers held the family: “Ernest’s word was his signature.”4 Jules felt justified in assuming leadership in large part because he had made substantial personal loans to the JMB Company and because he had acquired a 1928 loan from the Interstate Trust and Banking Company in West Palm Beach—a one-hundred-thousand-dollar loan that ultimately hung like an albatross around the JMB Company’s neck for decades. His long-standing role in keeping the company solvent meant that it was not unreasonable for him to assume leadership and for Ernest to continue as treasurer. Jules was also recognized as a scholar. He had a passion for reading and researching the worldwide history of sugarcane and amassed “one

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of the finest private sugar collections ever assembled in this country,” including more than one thousand books, some published as early as 1574. He also acquired valuable prints, maps, and paintings relating to the sugarcane industry and had a climate-controlled building constructed at Cypremort Plantation to house his rare books and documents. Jules allowed his nieces and nephews to enter this hallowed sanctuary to select books to read while vacationing at Cypremort.5 Finally, Mr. Jules the Boss Man was the prototype of the aristocratic planter. Henry Colar, who worked as a field hand at Florence Plantation for fifty-nine years, remembered a demanding, intolerant boss. “He had me pumping water back there by the pump house where that brick pile was. . . . I was sitting on there one night and . . . Mr. Jules drove up. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘so you’re sitting there watching the pump pump the water.’ I said, ‘Yes, sir.’ He said, ‘You sitting there on the brick pile.’ I said, ‘Yes, sir.’ He said, ‘I’m gonna bring you a pick and you can pick that brick pile. ‘Oh, yes sir!’ I said [to myself ], ‘If you bring a pick, you gonna pick it yourself.’”6 Harvey Blanchard, who first hauled cane for the JMB Company and later leased and farmed the fields at Florence Plantation, recalled that “Mr. Jules was an old southern gentleman. He wore suits and ties every day, even though he would go out in the fields.” Philip Kerne, the son of P. A. Kerne, the engineer for the Cypremort sugar mill, began rogueing cane (walking row by row through the huge fields, looking for signs of mosaic disease) when he was just ten years old. He, too, remembered “Mr. Jules,” impeccably attired in a suit and bow tie, carrying his walking stick and crossing the swinging bridge between his house and his office, looking like he “could walk on water.”7 Curless “Blackie” Tabb was Jules’s longtime chauffeur, driving him to New Orleans and St. Louis for “his big business meetings” or to Pass Christian, Mississippi, to visit his family. Tabb (who was white) said that he had received “the high position” of chauffeur because he had won Jules’s trust and because his ancestors had worked as field hands for the Burguières. Tabb remembered a fastidious man who insisted on wearing white gloves whenever he was driving. On one occasion, Tabb made the mistake of picking up Jules’s gloves, and “boy, did he give me some eyes! Let me tell you, I never made that mistake again!” And in the office, “every time Mr. Jules used [the telephone], he had a big jug of [rubbing] alcohol. . . . He rub[bed] it for fifteen minutes before he used it!” No one dared smoke around Jules, and Tabb saw his boss drink liquor only once.8

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Though Tabb described Jules as “always good to me” and “a very generous man.” others remembered his frugality. He always purchased black Plymouths, the cheapest cars available. His younger brother, Henry, splurged on a beautiful canary-yellow Buick convertible but tried to keep his extravagance secret, storing the vehicle in the sugar room. According to Harold Junca, “Only when the sun went down did Henry dare take it out!”9 Louisiana Sugar, 1936–1960

During Jules’s tenure as the leader of the JMB Company, the sugar industry continued to move toward consolidation. Between 1937 and 1959, the number of sugarcane farms in Louisiana decreased from more than 10,000 to 2,686, while the number of acres planted per farm increased from 28 to 101. Likewise, the number of sugar mills plunged from 92 to 47, while the seasonal grinding capacity increased from 57,000 to 116,000 tons per mill. During the 1943–44 season, the five Burguières plantations yielded a total of 43,592 tons of cane. Because the price of sugar continued to fall below the cost of expenses for production, maintenance, and replacement, profits were at best meager. But the Burguières could not simply give up cane farming because of their huge investments in the enterprise.10 In 1934, Congress had enacted a quota system for domestic production and foreign sugar imports that was instrumental in the survival of the Louisiana sugar industry after the depression. During World War II and for a few years thereafter, the quotas were suspended, since sugar was in such high demand. These conditions should have resulted in a windfall for planters, but price controls and labor shortages precluded the boon to the industry.11 One source of farm labor during the war was German prisoners of war, almost five thousand of whom were put to work in the cane fields to harvest the 1943–44 crops. Approximately forty of these men worked on the Burguières’ plantations. Unaccustomed to the South Louisiana heat and humidity, the prisoners were permitted to rest for fifteen minutes of each hour. Ed Burguières sympathized with the prisoners and brought a ping-pong table to the camp for their evening recreation, a gesture that was not appreciated by the authorities in charge.12 The labor shortage persisted until better field technology was developed. Mechanical harvesters, one-person cane loaders, special tractor

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9.2 Jules M. Burguières Jr. (l) and Ernest A. Burguières Sr. at Cypremort Sugar Company, ca. 1957. Burguières Family Collection, Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Louisiana at Lafayette

equipment, flame cultivators, ditch bank grass burners, and cane pilers drastically transformed the industry, and by 1944, the JMB Company owned nearly sixty thousand dollars worth of tractors, trucks, trailers, and cars. By the end of the decade, the mechanical harvesters were cutting more cane in one day than two hundred laborers could. And with more and better roads, cane could be transported from the fields to the mills by trucks.13 Cypremort Sugar Company

By 1942, Cypremort Central Sugar Company served between six and seven hundred cane growers from St. Mary and Iberia Parishes. That year, the factory ground more than seventy thousand tons of cane, 60 percent of which came from JMB Company fields. The mill produced 11.7 million pounds of sugar (mostly raw) and 324 thousand gallons of blackstrap molasses. The juice clarifying and settling system invented by

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C. L. Corne and Denis Burguières played a central role in operation’s efficiency. In 1951, the Cypremort Sugar Company was one of only fiftysix surviving mills in Louisiana.14 A year later, Jules reported to a local newspaper that the factory was converting to electrical power, replacing engines and steam-driven pumps with electric motors. Moreover, electric power and propane tractors would mean significant savings for planters. In the decade and a half since he had taken over his family’s company, the amount of field labor required had been cut in half, and milling capacity had reached almost fifteen hundred tons per day, with the Burguières properties supplying about 50 percent of the cane ground at Cypremort. The company employed about one hundred men in its factory and office and two hundred in its fields. The Cypremort Sugar Company was the first factory in Louisiana to handle raw sugar in bulk, eliminating the costs of bags and handling.15 The completion of the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway in 1949 meant that sugar, oil, cattle, salt, and other commodities could be transported much more quickly and efficiently by barge. In addition to enabling the Burguières to get their products to market, the Intracoastal Canal attracted industrial development. The opening of two carbon black plants at North Bend in the early 1950s led to the creation of a hard-surfaced highway that connected the peninsula with the interior, benefiting the entire region. Jules had been a strong proponent of the highway’s construction.16 Despite these developments, the JMB Company continued to struggle financially. Oil and gas leases on Côte Blanche Island and on Bayou Salé properties brought in much-needed funds, but because the company was still in debt to the Whitney Bank, oil and gas royalties went to the bank. The company borrowed money from the Burguières sisters, while the brothers mortgaged their personal assets to get funds for the company, which still owed Jules’s estate $178,313.17 Passages

The new century had ushered in the rise of the third generation of the Louisiana Burguières, which had included nine children. Joseph passed away in 1911, and in 1936, Florence and Denis died. On June 18, 1938, Henry Burguières passed away. On October 17, 1948, Ida Broussard

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Burguières, Jules Burguières Sr.’s second wife, died, having outlived her husband by forty-nine years. On May 29, 1959, however, the company took a severe blow with the death of Ernest A. Burguières Sr., Jules’s closest confidante, the company’s secretary/treasurer, and the manager of the company’s New Orleans office for more than half a century. He had spent his life overseeing day-to-day operations both in New Orleans and on the plantations, making the long trek from the city to St. Mary Parish each week to meet with Jules. The two men would sit on the front gallery of the big house, talking, reading, and examining stacks of books and ledgers. Recalled former field laborer Henry Colar, “They was always looking up things in books.” According to Ernest’s daughter, Robin Burguières Bristow, he kept to this routine “week after week, year after year, regardless of holidays or personal needs. Keeping the company and the family on track was the priority. He was the glue in the company, a rock for the family, who made sacrifices and endured stress, with little financial reward.” He told her that he was working for future generations, that his “grandchildren will be the ones who will benefit from all of this.” When Robin was a child, no one in her New Orleans home was allowed to use the telephone during grinding season, and her father was on call twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for months every year. Robin learned that an equipment breakdown could cost the company thousands of dollars, so every second counted.18 One of Ernest’s key contributions to the J. M. Burguières Company was his effort to diversify. During the 1940s and 1950s, he negotiated the first leases with Standard Oil to drill on family property. In addition to his work with sugar industry associations and with the state Republican Party, he was a New Orleans civic leader. He chaired Loyola University’s building campaign and served as guarantor for the development of the College of Commerce and Business Administration at Tulane University. He belonged to the Boston Club, the Louisiana Club, the Krewe of Rex, the Chamber of Commerce of New Orleans, the New Orleans Country Club, and the Southern Yacht Club in Pass Christian, Mississippi, to name a few. After services at New Orleans’s Holy Name of Jesus Church and at St. Helen’s Church in St. Mary Parish, he was buried in the tomb occupied by his parents at the family cemetery on Florence Plantation.19 Fifteen months later, on September 7, 1960, dark clouds gathered once more around the family and the company. After a typical workday

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that included an inspection tour of the salt mine at Côte Blanche Island, Jules attended a police jury meeting in Franklin, where he spoke on industrial growth in St. Mary Parish. He outlined his formula for success, including courting the growing oil industry, developing tourism, and improving transportation. Jules was an authority on the subject, having added service on the boards of the U.S. Small Business Administration and the Louisiana Department of Commerce and Industry to his earlier efforts at boosterism in Florida.20 The audience, enthusiastic about his ideas, applauded as he returned to his seat. But just as the next speaker was beginning, a disturbance in the room quickly turned into chaos. There were calls for an ambulance. As the crowd cleared, at the center of the turmoil was Jules, slumped over in his chair, stricken by a massive heart attack. Seventy-eight-yearold Jules M. Burguières Jr. died as he had lived, fully engaged in work and life.21 Harold Junca, a pallbearer and lessee of the JMB Company, recalled the rain and dark skies when Mr. Jules joined his parents and deceased siblings in the family plot on Florence Plantation.22 The 1960–61 sugarcane crop, ripe for harvest, encircled the tombs of the Burguières. Though three of Jules’s siblings survived him, none were intimately involved in running the JMB Company, and his death signaled the end of an era. His passage from the scene opened a Pandora’s box, unleashing long-held suspicions, jealousy, and bitterness.

10 A Family Business in Crisis Edward E. Burguières, 1960–1981

Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city. —George Burns

“Uncle Jules ruled with an iron fist,” recalled Gertrude Reynaud Burguières. Her husband, Samuel Trufant “T” Burguières Sr., son of Jules’s brother, Henry, had grown up under the one-man rule of Jules M. Burguières Jr. Because Jules had kept the J. M. Burguières Company ( JMB Company) afloat with personal loans since 1936, no one had dared question him, much less oppose him. But once he was gone, all hell broke loose. Finally, the family would get answers to the Big Questions: What company secrets had Jules locked away for twenty-five years? Who would inherit the millionaire bachelor’s land and stock in the JMB Company and in the Southern States Land and Timber Company? How would the family company repay his loans? Who would replace him? The J. M. Burguières Company faced a critical period of transition that tested the family members’ mettle and determination to preserve the legacy handed down from their founding father. Less than onethird of family-owned U.S. companies survive the transition from the founding generation into the second generation, and only half of those make it to the third generation.1 Most family companies eventually either shut down or sell to outsiders. Even though Jules had been a business mastermind, he failed in his obligations to the company in at least one very important way—he had not prepared for the company’s management after he was gone from 153

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10.1 Edward E. Burguières, 1975. Burguières Family Collection, Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Louisiana at Lafayette

the scene. After his death, members of the family found their voices. Grievances dating back to the company’s formation in 1901 surfaced, and new conflicts arose over company management and reconciliation of stock ownership, management of company funds, and unpaid debts to the estates of deceased family members. Both family members and outsiders sued the JMB Company, and there were two attempts to sell the business. The company’s survival was in doubt. Two years after Jules’s death, amid the family strife and the deteriorating state of the industry, the company was forced into receivership. Three months later, on October 29, 1962, the company was reorganized. The Whitney Bank, the original executor of the Jules M. Burguières Estate, appointed Abner E. Hughes, a certified public accountant, as the company’s chair and a director. But none of Jules’s surviving siblings wanted to serve as an officer because of the “intense hostility” within the company, which stifled the possibility of growth and development.”2 During a chaotic two-year period, the baton was passed to the next generation. Denis P. J. Burguières’s son, Edward Edmond Burguières, received the dubious honor of serving as president, a position he held for the next twenty years. First he created a board of directors and held elections for officers. The last living Burguières brother, C. Patout, became

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vice president, Sam Burguières Sr. (Henry Sr.’s son) was treasurer, and Jules’s sister, Marie Louise Burguières Syme, was secretary. Also serving on the board were Ernest A. Burguières III (grandson of Ernest Sr.), Marion Christ Clerc (daughter of Inez), and Joan Burguières Brown (daughter of Ernest Sr.). Every surviving branch of the family was represented.3 Ed Burguières was the third child of Denis P. J. and Alice Burguières. Beginning in 1939, he owned retail stores that sold tractors and other large machinery. He was also a natural politician. In 1944, he was elected to the Louisiana State Senate, representing Lafayette, St. Martin, and Iberia Parishes. In 1956, he served as gubernatorial candidate Earl K. Long’s campaign manager in Iberia and surrounding parishes. Ed’s oldest son, William, remembered driving his father and Long around the small towns along Bayou Teche, introducing Long to the “big shots.” When Long won, he appointed Ed as the Senate’s sergeant at arms.4 When Ed became president of the JMB Company, he had already spent a great deal of time on the plantations. According to his sons, “He knew farming. He grew up with sugar. He knew the lay of the land. He knew the history of the land. He knew the people, and it was his home, so he knew what was going on.” Nevertheless, his tenure was difficult.5 One of Ed’s primary goals was to heal the divisions within the family and to get his aunts, uncles, and cousins involved in the business. To that end, he paid the first significant dividend to shareholders in twentyfive years and invited family members to observe the board meeting in New Orleans. But Ed faced an uphill battle. His son, William, recalled accompanying his father to the meeting. When they got onto the elevator, his father said, “‘Billy, I want you to meet your cousin.’ I looked at him and said, ‘How you doing?’ And he looked at me and said, ‘Billy, do you know your father’s a thief, an outright thief? Do you know he’s stealing money from the company?’ . . . He never saw me before in my life, and [that was] the first thing he says. . . . Our dad wanted to get this family distrust out, but he never could. It was too ingrained.”6 The open meetings soon became chaotic, with the numerous comments from family members not on the board preventing the directors from transacting business. Ed and the board changed course, closing the directors’ meetings but adding an annual general stockholders’ meeting in New Orleans. At first, according to William, the stockholders’ meeting was simply “a shouting match between the old members of the family.” The meetings became even more confrontational with time,

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reaching their nadir when one family member punched another, drawing blood.7 The family became divided into two camps—those who supported Ed’s agenda and those who challenged him and sought to thwart his plans. A “larger-than-life, brash politician and salesman,” Ed wielded his razor-sharp wit to his advantage and at times laughed at his relatives’ behavior and taunted them. According to Ron Cambre, who married Ed’s niece, Gail Burguières, Ed would play “one faction against another until they wore each other out; then he would do what he wanted. He ruffled a lot of feathers and made many enemies. . . . You either loved or hated him.”8 Burguières versus Burguières

Jules Jr. had originally named his brother, Ernest, as the sole legatee of his estate. But on May 27, 1959, two days before Ernest’s death, Jules wrote a new will in which he bequeathed 15 percent of his estate to each of his three living siblings, Marie Louise Burguières Syme, C. Patout Burguières, and Inez Ernestine Burguières Christ. The remaining 55 percent of his estate was to be divided equally among his twenty-six nieces and nephews.9 Many family members were surprised by Jules’s will since there had been bad blood between him and some of his nieces and nephews. According to Philip Burguières, his father, Denis P. J. Burguières Jr., and at least four other family members “hated [ Jules’s] guts,” and Jules knew it: “So why didn’t he leave his money to twenty-one nieces and nephews instead of to twenty-six?” The answer, according to Philip, is that “the bottom line, when it comes to money, [is that] in general—not always—the Burguières tend to treat everybody equal. And you see that consistently in the J. M. Burguières family.”10 In 1961, Pat Burguières filed an opposition to the account and the tableau of distribution in the Succession of Jules M. Burguières Jr., claiming that the J. M. Burguières Company “had been formed illegally, and has been run as such, and is still being run the same, and their attorneys have full cognizance of this.” The suit also repeated his earlier contention that the stock in the family company had not been distributed fairly and argued that Denis, Jules, and Ernest “had taken charge of [Florence’s] fortune . . . converting it to their own uses, which

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transactions were concealed fraudulently by manipulation of the books of the company.” Pat also sought a final accounting of the administration of the Succession of Joseph E. Burguières on the grounds that his estate, too, had been manipulated. Marie Louise Burguières Syme was dissatisfied with Jules Jr.’s estate settlement because she had not had access to the company’s books and because of the excessive fees (sixty thousand dollars) paid to attorneys. On August 14, 1961, the court dismissed the opposition at the cost of the opponent, and Jules’s estate was settled. It was valued at one million dollars.11 But one more inning remained to be played. Jules Jr. had stipulated in his will that if any legatees “filed any suit or otherwise assert[ed] any claim or demand against me or my estate, or against any of my brothers or their estates, concerning the management of any one of us of the financial or other affairs of The J. M. Burguières Company or the management by any of us, of the financial or other affairs of any of the descendants of my father, Jules M. Burguières, then . . . I revoke the bequest herein made to such legatee or legatees.” On December 6, 1963, Whitney filed a motion to show cause why Louise’s and Pat’s legacies should not be canceled. The JMB Company filed suit against them, claiming that because they had contested the will, they had forfeited their inheritance. Louise and Pat were able to obtain enough signatures from shareholders to force the company to drop the suit, and on January 31, 1964, the court ruled that their legacies should be maintained. The legal battles created new wounds, both personal and financial, that would carry over to the next generation. When his nemesis, Jules, died, Patout was seventy-one years old, retired, and living at 1553 Calhoun Street, New Orleans. He and his wife, Lilla Withnell Burguières, their eight children, and later their many grandchildren had made the city their home after leaving Midway Plantation in 1931, and Pat and Lilla decided that when they died, they would be buried at New Orleans’s Metairie Cemetery rather than with his family at St. Helen’s Cemetery.12 Côte Blanche Island

What has been described as “the greatest natural curiosity” in Louisiana, just east of Cypremort Plantation, is Côte Blanche Island. It and Avery Island, Weeks Island, Jefferson Island, and Belle Isle are salt domes

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that rise twenty five meters or more above the level of the surrounding marshes and swamps. These “mountains in the sea” were created more than two hundred million years ago when salt was formed in a channel of the ocean. In time, thousands of feet of alluvial sediment covered the salt layer, producing great pressure that pushed up the salt. In 1917, the J. M. Burguières Company partnered with the Caffery family to purchase Côte Blanche (French for “white coast”), on which cane had been grown since 1840 and which was a popular recreation spot for locals and visitors from New Orleans, who enjoyed “the great avenues of oaks and crape myrtles all pink with plumes” and “the sweet forest-covered hills . . . all wearing cane-ribbons.”13 On June 21, 1921, salt was struck on the northwest corner of the island at a depth of six hundred feet. However, no mine was immediately established. Beginning in 1918, efforts to drill for oil and gas also took place on Côte Blanche, but they, too, did not initially meet with success. Despite the island’s potential, the cash-strapped Burguières-Caffery partnership authorized Jules Burguières Jr. to sell Côte Blanche for a much-needed three hundred thousand dollars in 1935, but he was unable to find a buyer.14 In 1955, the Shell Oil Company struck oil at Côte Blanche with a well drilled through approximately 12,500 feet of salt to a petroleum reservoir on the flank of the dome at approximately 16,410 feet. Six years later, the Carey Salt Company signed a lease to mine salt on the island. These two developments provided the J. M. Burguières Company with alternative and dependable sources of income not subject to the external forces—weather, market conditions, government regulation—that had plagued the company’s cane-growing operations. Within twenty years, salt had become the family enterprise’s new white gold.15 To Sell or Not to Sell

Despite the income generated by mining, the JMB Company’s travails continued into the 1970s, with very meager dividends distributed. Burdened by its indebtedness to Jules’s estate, still riven by intrafamily conflict about company management, and suffering in a weak business environment, the company was completely stagnant. By 1977, Ed saw little chance for its recovery and growth and concluded that everyone would benefit if the family business was sold. According to his son,

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William, “He felt all along that because of all the bickering between the family factions, the company would never be viable. Because of the lawsuits by family members and others, they would end up spending all of whatever money they had, giving it to a league of lawyers.” In fact, the company already had been forced to sell two hundred shares to pay legal fees. Oil and gas developer Don C. Wiley offered $3.6 million, or $600 a share, for the JMB Company. Having received paltry dividends for so long, many family members saw the money as a windfall, but Ron Cambre disagreed: he thought it would be a disaster to sell the company for that price—or for any price.16 Cambre’s first move was to solicit the assistance of his wife’s cousin, Philip Burguières (grandson of Denis P. J. Burguières Sr.), whom Cambre had never met but who had achieved great success in the oil industry. Philip was an executive at Cameron Iron Works, and although he retained his stock in the J. M. Burguières Company, he had never been involved in its management. In fact, Philip’s father, Denis P. J. Burguières Jr., had relinquished his position on the board of directors in the 1930s because of the enmity between him and Jules. Cambre and Philip, two young, ambitious businessmen, met at New Orleans’s Pontchartrain Hotel and agreed to join forces, beginning a long partnership as leaders of the family company as well as a lasting friendship.17 At a special shareholders’ meeting of the JMB Company on July 11, 1977, the family members discussed the pros and cons of the sale. Ed argued, “The youngest in our generation is forty-five, and in ten years this [business] is going to be so watered down that nobody is going to get anything. Suits within the family have hurt us. . . . I would like to get out of a bad situation. . . . I will vote to sell.” Ernest A. Burguières Jr. agreed: “I am sick of suits. . . . The best we have is Ed, our president, our politician. When Ed goes, we do not have anybody to run this company. The younger people have not been given a chance. If Ed dies, you haven’t got anybody.” (Never missing a beat, Ed quipped, “When Ed dies, it may run twice as good.”)18 Cambre, in contrast, urged the shareholders to table the motion until the stockholders had a chance to determine the company’s true value. Philip distributed a letter outlining the reasons why the company should not be sold. He reminded the board that the valuation of a company was “a very imprecise art at best,” particularly when looking at a family-held corporation that had almost all of its assets in land and associated minerals. Philip believed that the JMB Company, which held

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approximately fifteen thousand acres of farmland and tideland in areas known to produce large amounts of oil and gas as well as salt leases, was in strong position over the next two to three decades. He echoed Cambre’s call for an independent appraisal and advised the shareholders to wait. Sam Burguières Sr. strongly backed Cambre and Philip, and 69 percent of the shareholders voted against the sale.19 But some shareholders still wanted out. In 1977, Ed found another potential buyer, William Patout, president of M. A. Patout and Son, sugar producers and manufacturers at Enterprise Plantation in Patoutville. The Patouts and the Burguières were cousins and had had neighboring sugar plantations for more than a hundred years. Furthermore, when the JMB Company closed the Cypremort sugar mill, which was a financial sinkhole, in 1977, the Patouts had bought the machinery. It seemed like a perfect fit. So Ed sold some of his stock to the Patouts and convinced other family members to sell for twelve hundred dollars per share. For the first time, someone other than a direct descendant of Jules Sr. owned stock in the JMB Company.20 Billy Patout soon held 20 percent of the company’s shares. According to Philip, this was another defining time in the history of the company when all could have been lost: “Billy was trying to get more stock. He was trying to get 50 percent and kick us out and take over the company. That was his plan. And we knew that was his plan, because he told the shareholders he was trying to buy stock from them. Now, why did he want to do that? He wanted our sugar. That was all he cared about. He wanted to grind it in his mill. He bought 1,311 shares. I spent, personally, the next ten years trying to buy the stock back from him. I made them an all-cash offer of two million dollars to buy their stock back.”21 In 1981, alarmed by efforts to sell the company and by the attempted takeover, Cambre, Philip Burguières, and Sam Burguières Sr. led forces in a proxy battle to amend the company charter to allow the company the right of first refusal on all stock transfers. The amendment passed by a small margin, effectively ending M. A. Patout’s stock acquisition effort. Philip and Cambre subsequently bought back the Patout stock for fourteen hundred dollars per share, returning the company to complete family control.22 By this time, Ed Burguières had grown tired of the demands of running the company and of the family conflict. He continued to believe that selling was the best option, but Cambre and Philip had a different idea: they would take over. They met with Ed, who was “enormous in

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every way—enormous personality, enormous in physical size, imposing, full of life,” at the Pontchartrain Hotel to discuss the plan. According to Philip, the scene seemed to have come straight from Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, with Ed playing the part of Big Daddy: Ed had that room at the Ponchartrain Hotel, up on one of the highest floors, sixth or seventh floor. He had a white linen suit on, and he invited Ron and me to go up to his room. He had a four-poster double bed . . . and he lay on the bed with all of his clothes on, staring at the ceiling. Ron was on one side of the bed and I was on the other side, sitting in straight chairs, and we were there about an hour and a half. And he kept looking at the ceiling and he was explaining to us why we had to sell the company. “You two guys”—and he was always very complimentary—“you all are so smart. But you all are really too smart to run this company, and, you know, why would you even want to run it? You don’t understand that you have to deal with these different segments of the family. They’re not going to like you, and plus, you all don’t know anything about the sugar business anyway. You don’t know how to grow sugarcane. You don’t even know where the boundaries are between the plantations. How in the world can I turn the company over to the next generation? It’s going to be a disaster. So the best thing I can do for everybody is to sell the company.”

Philip saw the wisdom of Ed’s words but continued to argue against a sale. “I started talking about potential, and he said, ‘Philip, I’ve been hearing that word, potential—I’m eighty years old. I’ve been hearing that word, potential, for eighty years, and nothing’s ever happened.’ And I said, ‘Well, Uncle Ed, something will happen someday. It may not even happen in my lifetime, but when you own fifteen thousand acres of prime real estate in South Louisiana, it’s going to happen.’ . . . So he gave us all the reasons why we shouldn’t do it, [but] at the end, he said, ‘If you guys want to give it a try, I’ll support you.’ And he did.”23 Ed retired as president of the company in 1980. He and Sam Burguières Sr. encouraged and supported the election of younger family members to the board of directors. With their backing, Philip was elected chair of the board and Cambre was elected president, the first in-law to hold that post. Ernest Burguières III also joined the board.24 Ed Burguières had steered the company through chaotic times. According to Cambre, Ed made some difficult but necessary decisions— most notably, closing the Cypremort sugar mill, which was dragging the

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company deeper and deeper into debt; leasing company land to area sugarcane farmers; and beginning salt mining at Côte Blanche. But in Cambre’s estimation, Ed also made mistakes, chief among them razing the Big House at Cypremort Plantation, which had been unoccupied since Jules Jr.’s death and whose condition had deteriorated. Many family members were outraged that they knew nothing about the demolition until it was over and had not received the opportunity to recover furniture and documents from the house. They saw the house’s demise as an incalculable loss of family history and legacy. But in Ed’s view, the company could not afford to renovate and secure the house against vandalism. Many Burguières were also upset about the sale of Jules’s rare book collection, but Ed felt that the company needed the ten thousand dollars the library brought in.25 Edward Edmond Burguières passed away in 1981 after spending his last years with his wife, Elsie, at his beloved dairy farm in Franklinton, Louisiana. He had instructed that he be “taken back to his boyhood home and the land he loved.” He was laid to rest beside his ancestors in St. Helen’s Cemetery at Florence Plantation, where “he would be surrounded by one of the best cane fields in Louisiana while keeping an eye on Côte Blanche.”26

11 From the Ashes

Philip Burguières and Ron Cambre, 1978–2013

Like all the best families, we have our share of eccentricities, of impetuous and wayward youngsters and of family disagreements. —Queen Elizabeth II

The year 1978 marked another changing of the guard for the JMB Company—the fourth generation of family management. Philip Burguières and Ron Cambre were taking a risk by stepping into the turmoil that had long engulfed the J. M. Burguières Company ( JMB Company). But they were confident that despite the family’s history of conflict, unity and prosperity were possible. Like Jules Sr. and his sons, Philip and Ron were visionaries with the patience and nerve to see the big picture over the long term. They knew that wealth and prosperity lay in the land. Such confidence was not unwarranted. Though they had known each other for just a year before taking the company’s helm, their careers were quite similar. Both were young executives who had risen to the position of president and CEO of large corporations. Both were ambitious, driven, and unafraid of challenges. And both thought the JMB Company was worth fighting for. Involving himself in the family business had not been an easy decision for Philip. “As a child, listening to my parents’ conversation, I had heard so many negative things about the company and the people who ran it. . . . When I was growing up, Uncle Jules was a very controversial person.” Conflicts with Jules had caused Philip’s father, Denis P. J. Burguières Jr., to move his wife and children out of their home at North Bend Plantation. As Denis grew older, he “went into a 163

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11.1 Philip J. Burguières, 2002. Burguières

11.2 Ronald C. Cambre, 1998. Burguières

Family Collection, Center for Louisiana

Family Collection, Center for Louisiana

Studies, University of Louisiana at Lafayette

Studies, University of Louisiana at Lafayette

shell . . . and was a little bitter and became totally uninvolved with the company, other than to write letters criticizing the management.” Philip feared that becoming involved in the company would be disloyal to his father, who had died in 1976, so he asked his mother’s opinion: “I’ll never forget what my mother said: ‘Your father would be very proud of you.’ And that was my release.”1 Philip held a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Southwestern Louisiana (now the University of Louisiana at Lafayette). He spent four years as a U.S. Navy officer during the Vietnam era, an experience that Philip described as having “opened up the whole world to me. . . . I was a twenty-two-year-old ensign, and all of a sudden, I was responsible for five to six hundred people.” He subsequently obtained a master’s in business administration from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, and together, “the Navy and Wharton redefined my life.”2 He began his business career in 1971 at Cameron Iron Works in Houston, eventually becoming at thirty-five years old the youngest CEO of a Fortune 500 company. In 1991, he joined the Weatherford Company, an international energy corporation, where he orchestrated a series of acquisitions and consolidations that turned it into the largest

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fishing and rental tool company in the world. In 2000, he was described as “one of the world’s foremost oil-field service executives.”3 Beginning in 1996, Philip endured a series of personal crises that included depression and the death of his first wife, Cheryl Courrégé Burguières (1944–2005), after a long battle with cancer. In 1999, he and his longtime friend, Bob McNair, brought the National Football League back to Houston when the league agreed to add a new franchise, the Texans. Philip is now a part owner and vice chair of the team. He has worked to help others suffering from depression, and he views his most important current role as that of a mentor to his children and grandchildren and to the Texans players. On April 20, 2007, he married Alice Harcrow.4 New Orleans native Ron Cambre also played a pivotal role in revitalizing the family business. Cambre holds a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from Louisiana State University and is a graduate of the Harvard Business School’s Program for Management Development. In 1964, he began a thirty-year career with Freeport McMoRan, one of the world’s largest producers of copper and gold. When the company spun off Freeport McMoRan Resource Partners, he was appointed its first president and CEO. In 1993, Cambre was named chair of the board of Rio Tinto Minera, a Spanish mining group in which Freeport holds a majority interest. But he aimed higher. In 1993, he joined Newmont Mining Corporation, a leading international producer and marketer of gold and other products, as vice chair and CEO; a year later, he was elected president and chair, overseeing Newmont’s growth into the largest mining company in North America and the largest gold mining company in the world.5 Following in the footsteps of the early twentieth-century Burguières brothers, Philip and Cambre brought a team leadership approach to the JMB Company. According to Philip, “The greatest thing about my job as chairman of the family company was that I had somebody to do it with—Ron Cambre. The two of us equally ran the J. M. Burguières Company. If one of us had to do this by ourselves, we couldn’t have done it, because the pressure from the segments of the family that were against us . . . would have been too overwhelming. It would have been too emotional for one person. But we could call each other and share things. . . . Though the board has changed over the years, the two of us have been the constant since 1978.”6

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But some family members considered Cambre and Philip’s combined knowledge and experience not an advantage but reason to be wary, fearing that the two men could manipulate money, votes, policy, and other aspects of company management. Cambre believed that the members of this camp resented his and Philip’s “personal success. . . . It is hard to understand this, but that’s human nature.”7 The mistrust that had bloomed a generation earlier had not been eliminated. On the Move Again

For the JMB Company, the 1980s brought change, progress, and a stability that had been absent since the 1920s. For the sugar industry in general, however, the steady decline in profits continued. Government policy and the commodities market still hampered the company’s operations. The general belief was that sugar was a dying industry. According to Philip, “I remember when I was seven or eight years old, my daddy telling me that by the time I was fifteen, there would be no sugar business, and I’m sure his daddy told him the same thing in 1910. People have been saying the sugar business is dying for 150 years, and, every time it looks like the funeral service has been set, a notice comes out that it’s delayed again. . . . So now, if you’re a sugar farmer in Louisiana, you have to be a somewhat optimistic person, or you just fold your tent and go home.”8 Yet optimism was not enough. Diversification was needed. Philip and Cambre knew that the sugar, salt, oil, and gas businesses were cyclical, that the company had to be flexible and patient, and that long-term investments would eventually pay off. During the decade, the company added to its landholdings, acquiring four thousand more acres in Louisiana and twenty-six thousand acres in Texas. The JMB Company also acquired full ownership of the Southern States Land and Timber Company in Florida and with it the mineral rights to three hundred thousand acres of land. Although the JMB Company still had cash-flow problems, it was well positioned to reap future profits from sugarcane, oil, gas, salt, and mineral rights.9 JMB first negotiated better leases for its major income-producing activities. The company raised the price it charged to lease an acre of land for cane growing. Royalties for oil and gas were increased to 20 percent, and by 1986–87, revenue from oil and gas activities provided

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57 percent of the JMB Company’s income. The company also signed a contract with the North American Salt Company for the Côte Blanche salt mine, and by 2010, its revenues had soared to $1.4 million per year, or 54 percent of the JMB Company’s total income.10 The 1980s also saw the relocation of the JMB Company’s office from New Orleans to Franklin, a short distance from the five plantations in St. Mary Parish. By this time, it was clear that the business had reached a point where outside management of the plantations was necessary. The first plantation manager was Cliff LeBlanc, who held the post for a decade beginning in 1981. Lyn Simon replaced him in 1991, followed in 1997 by Debi Lauret, who had begun working for the JMB Company in 1983. Since that time, Lauret has been at the center of all family and company transactions and events. In 2007, the company created the position of general manager. Glenn Vice was employed to fill the new position, which is responsible for oversight of all of the company’s activities, including sugar production, wetland banking, the salt mine, and the Texas cattle ranches.11 Philip and Ron also brought in financial analyst Harry Smith, who improved financial reporting and controls. According to Philip, Smith “began auditing the salt business, started making farmers accountable. He would review the records of the sugar mills. Basically, we started managing the business, and it’s amazing what a change that made.” The company’s downward slide was halted.12 Philip and Ron also reorganized the JMB Company Partnership in a way that saved the firm millions of dollars in taxes and limited its liability. They first proposed the idea in 1991, but stockholders did not approve the change until 1996, a delay Philip attributed to “vestiges of 100 years of history. By that I mean, lack of trust. . . . Now everyone has benefited from it.”13 Southern States Land and Timber Company, 1960–2011

Though the JMB Company’s main income came from sugar, salt, and oil and gas, Southern States Land and Timber also generated millions of dollars. Both Ernest A. Burguières and Jules M. Burguières Jr. had owned stock in Southern States, and with their deaths, that stock passed to other members of the family, who combined to control 43 percent of the company. In 1999, the Burguières family stock in Southern States

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11.3 J. M. Burguières Company Office, Franklin, Louisiana, 2012. Burguières Family Collection, Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Louisiana at Lafayette

was consolidated into the JMB Company. Then, in the next two years, the company made tender offers to the remaining shareholders. According to Ron Cambre, “The split ownership was not sustainable. The offer was simply ‘Buy us out or sell to us.’” This included shares owned separately by the Ernest A. Burguières branch as a result of Ernest’s participation and investment in Southern States Land and Timber. By 2002, the JMB Company had purchased 975 more shares at four hundred dollars each, giving the Louisiana Burguières complete control of Southern States.14 By 1974, Southern States’ administrative office had moved from West Palm Beach to New Orleans, and the company had sold the last of its original two million acres of land. However, it retained the mineral rights on three hundred thousand acres. After the Burguières took over, Southern States’ administrative operations were relocated to JMB’s office in Franklin. In 2003, Smith was promoted to executive vice president and general manager of Southern States Land and Timber Company and CFO of the JMB Company. Under his guidance, the mineral

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11.4 Location of J. M. Burguières Company Texas ranches, 2013. Burguières Family Collection, Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Louisiana at Lafayette

rights controlled by Southern States have generated approximately twenty million dollars in revenues for the company.15 Having solved the company’s cash-flow problems, Philip and Cambre began a program of reinvestment. The JMB Company moved into an elegant 1889 Greek Revival home on Main Street in Franklin after spending more than a million dollars on renovations. Though the expenditure brought criticism, Philip argued, “The image that we present makes an enormous amount of difference. . . . When somebody comes to do business with us in Franklin, and they go to a beautiful antebellum[-style] home, they’re going to get a whole different view of who they’re dealing with, that we are not just a bunch of people who came in on the watermelon truck. . . . We want to show that we are a family company of some substance, of some intelligence, of some integrity, etc. And this is part of a very structured plan.”16 Another part of the plan was to expand the business even more. From 2005 to 2009, the JMB Company purchased the Hovey, Cane, McGill, and Burnt House ranches in Texas, paying between $125 and $225 per acre for fifty-eight thousand acres of land that had been overgrazed and otherwise abused. But Philip and Cambre believed that the barren landscape could be restored to serve as lush grasslands for herds of cattle

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and that the property had “substantial potential” for natural gas and water development. The JMB Company has leased the land for several hundred thousand dollars to Alpine Oil and Gas, which is exploring for those resources. In addition, water studies will be conducted, because, according to Philip, “We think, in the next ten years, that the water resources we have under these ranches are going to be worth literally tens of millions of dollars.”17 In 2010, the JMB Partnership spent $2.5 million to purchase the Kilgore Plantation in St. Mary Parish—land that Jules M. Burguières Sr. had bought and sold for a quick profit in the nineteenth century. On the plantation, 329 acres are eligible for wetland banking, and Kilgore is considered one of the company’s most promising sources of income for the foreseeable future. The company now owns more than 1,100 acres in St. Mary Parish, with a potential for about 940 banking credits. Similar plans are under way to obtain mitigation credits in Florida for Southern States’ surface access and mineral interests in the J. W. Corbett Wildlife Management Area.18 Ironically, landowners who developed the wetlands now are being paid by the government to return the land to its original condition. The Board of Directors and Management of a Family Business

The J. M. Burguières Company’s board of directors has played varying roles through the years. When Jules Sr.’s older sons made up the board, each man brought unique skills to the company, and each was very involved. Between 1935 and 1960, according to Ron Cambre, “Uncle Jules was the board and management.” Between 1960 and 1970, the company was in receivership and battling a lawsuit in a period of “great turmoil.” While Edward Burguières was manager/president, Abner E. Hughes, whom the Whitney Bank had named as trustee of the J. M. Burguières Trust, became chair of the board; he and company attorney Henry Pierson played critical roles in the business during this period, and according to Cambre, “Without the outside guidance, the company would not have survived.” Hughes remained with the company until the end of 1989, when he retired at age seventy-five.19 From 1970 to 1978, the board was in transition, fighting over the sale of the company, succession, and management. When Philip and Ron became chair and president, respectively, the board comprised

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representatives from the various branches of the family and included lawyers, real estate magnates, business leaders, engineers, educators, stockbrokers, social workers, and estate appraisers. (See appendix 3 for a list of JMB Company board members from 1901 to 2013.) The persistence of long-standing feuds and resentments among branches of the family, passed down from generation to generation and complicated by new, personal animosities, meant that board meetings were often unpleasant and contentious. Moreover, the interests of individuals were not always the same as the interests of the business. For example, during the many years when shareholders received no dividends, some family members saw no practical reason to hold stock in the company, even if it was a family business. Selling at a good price meant immediate cash, which benefited them but not necessarily the company. The original reasons for the rifts between the branches of the family have become hazier with every generation, and today, most of the younger Burguières have no idea what caused the feuds. New Orleans, February 17–18, 2006

At seven o’clock on a stormy evening in a city still reeling from Hurricane Katrina, the 2006 annual meeting of the J. M. Burguières Company began, featuring the usual grand display of family, money, and power. The board of directors, the Family Council, the CFO, lawyers, managers, and their spouses began arriving at Arnaud’s, a Creole restaurant founded in 1918. Guests were directed to a second-story private dining room for dinner, the traditional prelude to the business meeting, which would convene the next morning at the Monteleone Hotel. This gathering was a time for socializing. Close and distant relatives greeted one another with hugs and kisses or handshakes and polite nods. Each knew the others’ place on the Burguières family tree. Waiters in white worked the room efficiently, serving wine, champagne, and canapés of shrimp and crab from the nearby Gulf waters. At the appointed hour, the attendees were seated under the crystal chandeliers. As he had for the preceding twenty-nine years, Chair Philip Burguières welcomed his family. In keeping with tradition, a prayer of thanksgiving was offered. The clinking and clattering of silverware and plates signaled that Burguières were off to another entertaining and productive assembly. All seemed well, at least on the surface.

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But a few clues indicated that something was amiss. A significant number of chairs were vacant. And despite the friendly atmosphere, there seemed to be an undercurrent of concern—the words planning, bloc, and strategy were being whispered. Rumors indicated that the representatives of the Ernest Burguières and C. Patout Burguières lines were going to be ousted from the board and that a separate dinner was being held elsewhere in the French Quarter. Weeks earlier, Philip had learned of accusations that he had engaged in questionable financial management practices and that he was attempting to take over the company. He had answered those charges directly in letters to shareholders, insisting on his honesty, good intentions, and dedication to the family company, but his detractors had not been mollified.20 Nevertheless, the dinner concluded with a cheerful farewell. Bright and early the next morning, more than one hundred stockholders and family members from all five surviving branches of the Louisiana House of Burguières arrived at the Queen Anne Ballroom. Philip called the meeting to order. But no sooner had the gavel sounded then a loud voice called for a vote to elect a chair for the meeting. There was a moment of confusion and surprise, followed by loud whispers and stifled murmurs from the large gathering. For twenty-nine years, only Philip had chaired company meetings. Standing firm, Philip refused to relinquish his position and began the business of the day, despite objections. Ron Cambre gave the president’s report, summing up the accomplishments of the previous year, which included a “bonanza” of millions of dollars from Southern States Land and Timber Company. But the next order of business was the showdown. Philip called for the election of a five-member board of directors. The vote was standard procedure, but the reduction in the number of board members from eight in previous years to five was anything but standard. Some shareholders protested that this change had been made without their knowledge or their vote. Furthermore, a five-member board, they argued, was less representative of the family than an eightmember board.21 Philip explained that the change was based on the recommendation of family-business experts from Harvard who believed that a five-member board would be more efficient yet still provide fair representation for the shareholders. The board of directors had the authority to make this change and had in fact done so the previous day.

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Opponents of the change saw it as a ploy to eliminate particular board members who challenged the status quo. They believed that the payment of a dividend of four hundred dollars per share being made that year was intended to distract and quiet the shareholders while Philip and Cambre moved to take complete control of the family business. The arguments continued for two and a half hours and expanded from the matter of representation on the board to include old feuds and personal animosities. In the midst of the chaos, a voice rang out: “This is a family.” Ironically, the speaker was Lillamaud Leike Hammond, the granddaughter of Pat Burguières, whose branch had been at odds with the company for three decades. She had drawn a line between the past and the present for those who had forgotten that family and company were inseparable and always had been. Another voice from the back of the room reminded the attendees of the astronomical legal expenses that had resulted from past feuds. Hammond made an appeal: “Let’s not go back there.” The discussion continued, but the mood had changed. Ultimately, however, the board’s vote to reduce the number of members was upheld. When shareholders finally voted on who the members would be, the representatives of the Ernest Burguières and C. Patout Burguières lines had indeed lost their seats. Though Pat’s line returned to the board with Robert Gorman’s election in 2012, Ernest’s line still has not regained representation, even though it comprises the secondlargest bloc of stockholders, with more than 20 percent.22 The Next Generation

The JMB Company subsequently took steps to put an end to the discord and to prepare for the leadership transition that would occur when Cambre and Philip retired. Several cousins in their twenties and thirties from various lines were sent to participate in a Harvard Business School program, Families in Business: Generation to Generation, a study of the unique challenges of running a family business. One result was the formation of the Family Council, a group of fifth-generation family members that seeks to provide better representation, participation, and communication among individuals, families, and the board of directors. Whereas the board of directors manages the business, the Family

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11.5 Renovated Cypremort Plantation House, Louisa, Louisiana, 2013. Original home built ca. 1830s. Burguières Family Collection, Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Louisiana at Lafayette

Council manages the family, holding an assembly prior to the shareholder meeting every year. Business and family are inseparable. Since 2009, Leila Bristow has been among the leaders of the Family Council. Bristow is the keeper of tradition, the storyteller, the family historian, and her untiring efforts to reclaim the family’s past and shared roots have resulted in a more cohesive clan that now includes every family line. The Council has also embraced the responsibility of preserving that information for generations to come. After Hurricane Rita flooded the early nineteenth-century house at Cypremort with four feet of muddy water from Vermilion Bay, the Council undertook the formidable task of renovating the Burguières ancestral home. To protect it from future floods, the house was raised ten feet above the reclaimed marshland. It now towers over the cane fields, safe from hurricane surges. It is an apt symbol of the revitalization of both the family and the business. The Council, under the direction of Philip’s daughter, Emily Burguières Dalicandro, created a Constitution of the J. M. Burguières

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11.6 Jules Rhum, appellation d’Origine Louisa-Cypremort, St. Mary Parish, Louisiana. Great effort went into the design of the label, which was critical as a representation of the family, evoking the history of Jules M. Burguières Sr., the source of his success, and his family. The stars symbolize Jules’s children. Burguières Family Collection, Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Louisiana at Lafayette

Family. According to the document, the family seeks “to achieve an appropriate balance of monetary, personal and family values for the descendants of Jules Martial Burguières and to enhance and preserve those values in perpetuity.” The Burguières’ “Core Family Values” include “honesty, integrity . . . a high regard for the rights and opinions of our fellow man,” religion and spirituality, education, and “good judgment and commitment in all we undertake.” The Constitution also includes visions for the future of both the family and the company and highlights the need to preserve and commemorate the past.23 The J. M. Burguières Constitution goes beyond the individual, the family, and the business to include South Louisiana culture and traditions. Accordingly, family members should “be ready to act in any movement for the uplifting of humanity or for the advancement of the

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11.7 Susanne Cambre Dwyer, current president of the J. M. Burguières Company, 2011. Burguières Family Collection, Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Louisiana at Lafayette

material interests of the communities in which we live.” Good character, philanthropy, and commitment to each other and their communities form the basis of their identity. Out of respect for their venerable ancestry, they will conduct themselves “with the humility that characterized Jules Martial Burguières Sr.’s early life after the Civil War.”24 The Council has hosted family gatherings, including a blessing celebration after the completion of the work on the Cypremort house and summer socials. In the recent past, family members have been treated to a steamboat ride on the Mississippi River, a private tour of the salt mine at Côte Blanche, and a picnic under the oaks at the JMB Company office in Franklin. The family has also begun producing a private-label rum named Jules as a tangible expression of the Burguières identity. These efforts demonstrate that the individuals are part of a cohesive unit revitalized by recalling their collective past.25 In 1851, twenty years after arriving in Louisiana, Eugène D. Burguières, French merchant and progenitor of the Louisiana House of Burguières, planted the first Burguières sugarcane crop on leased land in the hinterland of Chacahoula, Terrebonne Parish. Although floodwaters destroyed his entire crop, he persevered. In 1877, his son, Jules, purchased Cypremort Plantation. By the time of his death twenty-two years later, Jules was a millionaire, living among other sugar and cotton barons in the Garden District of New Orleans. Though he had great success and his vision was far-reaching, he could not have imagined the personal

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and business empire that would result a century later. He could not have foreseen that in 2010, his great-great-great-granddaughter, Susanne Cambre Dwyer, would become the first woman to stand at the helm of the family company and that his family would remain united through bonds of blood and business.

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Epilogue We cannot destroy kindred: our chains stretch a little sometimes, but they never break. —Marquise de Sévigné

The House That Sugarcane Built is a story with many beginnings and many endings. It is also circular, as each new generation of the Burguières family devised new ideas to cope with a changing world. From eighteenth-century France to nineteenth-century Louisiana; through the Civil War and Reconstruction; through the turn of a new century, the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, and two world wars; through the decline of an agricultural economy, booms and busts in the oil and gas industry, and into the twenty-first century, tempus fugit—time flies. The company has kept the family together, and the family has kept the company together. They are, in fact, one. Sometimes that symbiosis is a well-greased, efficient engine, sometimes it is an idle motor, and at other times it is a broken-down machine with parts that do not fit together and resist repair. Despite its imperfections, the family and the company have become inseparable—an anomaly in the modern business world. Vestiges of family and business history remain in the vine-choked ruins of what was once the great Cypremort sugar mill, the crumbling foundation of the swinging bridge, the old railroad lines over which millions of tons of cane were transported to the world outside the plantation. But much more of that history can be found in places and institutions that remain vital more than a century later: the grove of ancient moss-covered oaks and the plantation house; the J. M. Burguières Company office; and even St. Helen’s Cemetery. They stand in defiance of time and nature yet remind us of our mortality. The cemetery’s yellow wildflowers have roots that grow down toward the graves as well as 179

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E.1 Harvest at Florence Plantation, 2006. Burguières Family Collection, Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Louisiana at Lafayette

petals that reach toward the sun, the very epitome of rebirth. The thick rows of bright green cane encircling the cemetery confirm the cycle of life—birth, death, resurrection—as it is played out in nature and in humans. As soon as one crop is harvested, another is planted. That crop grows to maturity and is harvested, and then a new one is planted. And on and on it goes, bearing out William Faulkner’s famous truth about time: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Signs of rebirth abound in this story. The restored Cypremort Plantation house has withstood countless hurricanes and floods. New Orleans, ravaged and wrecked by Hurricane Katrina, is once again revived. And the J. M. Burguières Company has endured lean times and family strife and been rejuvenated. Cypremort, the city, and the company, like the phoenix, rise again. Though we carry the past within us, human nature moves us to cling to tangible relics of our forebears. A grandson carries the gold pocket watch that belonged to both his grandfather and father, worn every day of their adult lives. The engraved initials on its cover have not been marred by time. Wedding gowns and veils are passed down to

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granddaughters; delicate china and engraved silverware grace the tables of third-generation descendants; faded family letters, photographs, and postcards from Europe are carefully protected to preserve what time would otherwise steal. The nineteenth-century medals awarded to Dr. Edouard Burguières and the Bible given to Marie Corinne by Jules M. Burguières Sr. after the death of one of their children are treasured and guarded closely by the family. The delicately carved bed on which Marie Corinne gave birth to many of her children has been returned to its original home at Cypremort Plantation. Two church bells, one donated by Jules M. Burguières Sr. and the other by Aglaé Burguières, continue to toll. Cousins share old photographs. Granddaughters move into what had been their grandparents’ home in New Orleans, the city that holds their hearts. The past remains in the present. The past is also kept alive through tradition, meaningful practices repeated in each generation to carry forth their identity and values. Burguières daughters still attend Sacred Heart Academy, following in the footsteps of their mothers, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers. Four generations of male Burguières have belonged to the Boston Club in New Orleans. The House That Sugarcane Built is also a testament to the family’s courage to examine the past to better know and understand the present. This book is a monument that says, “We Were Here, 1650–2013.” Memories reside in dusty scrapbooks, in stories handed down from generation to generation, in values, in traditions, and in heirlooms. In the end, memory is stronger than death.

(Research by Leila M. Bristow and Anne Morddell 2013)

Appendix 1 Genealogy

Four Generations of the French Burguières, Descendants of Jean Louis Burguières (Research by Leila M. Bristow and Anne Morddell 2013)

1 Jean Louis Burguières b: 18 Oct 1763, d: 02 Nov 1844 + Pauline Catherine Michelle Lallemand b: 23 Feb 1785, m: 14 Sep 1802, d: 17 Nov 1842 ..2 Pierre Guillaume Edouard Burguières b: 19 Mar 1803, d: 16 Apr 1891 + Charlotte Eléanor Barbier b: poss 14 Oct 1803, m: Bef. 1836, d: 06 Oct 1875 ..2 Denis Eugène Burguières b: 18 Jun 1804, d: 1876 + Marie Marianne Verret b: 06 Sep 1812, m: 25 Jul 1837, d: 05 Jan 1883 (See Louisiana report) ..2 Edouard Edmond Burguières, MD b: 03 Feb 1814, d: 09 Jun 1883 + Marie Mathilde Onésime Bourdin b: Abt. 1818, m: 14 Sep 1843, d: 07 Mar 1888 .....3 Edouard Pascal Burguières b: 03 Aug 1844, d: 02 Nov 1901 + Emma Alexandrine Vieilh de Boisjoslin b: 08 Jul 1837, m: 19 Jan 1889, d: Aft. 1901 .....3 Henri François Burguières b: 21 Aug 1846, d: Aft. 1901 + Angelina Lucia Nunziata Bonesi b: 11 Jun 1855, m: 30 Sep 1880, d: Aft. 1901 ........4 Robert Henri Louis Burguières b: 29 Aug 1876, d: 09 Sep 1959 ........4 Emma Marie Mathilde Burguières b: 21 Dec 1877, d: Aft. 1911 + Dr. Luigi Oltolina b: 1879, m: 16 Jan 1911, d: Aft. 1946 ........4 Alice Henriette Thérèse Burguières b: 22 Jan 1879, d: Aft. 1901 ........4 Mathilde Burguières b: 13 May 1884, d: Aft. 1901 ........4 Edouard Burguières b: 09 Jun 1887, d: Aft. 1901 ..2 Philippe Julien Burguières b: 19 May 1816, d: 13 Nov 1897 + Mary Ann Robbins b: Abt. 1821, m: 23 Nov 1834, d: 06 Jun 1842; + Louisa Nowers b: 23 Jan 1813, m: 21 Jun 1845, d: 07 Jul 1882; + Tryphena Cleare b: Abt. 1856, m: 09 Aug 1883, d: 16 Jun 1934 + Catherine Sidonne b: Abt. 1786, d: Aft. 1846, m: None found ..2 Jacques Adrien Sidonne b: 15 Oct 1821, d: 15 Sep 1845

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..2 Pauline Adrienne Sidonne b: 10 Jul 1825 in Paris, d: 06 Mar 1900 + Eugène Victor Marie Saussine b: 30 Dec 1818, m: 14 Jan 1846, d: 06 Nov 1868 .....3 Marie Léonie Henriette Saussine b: 17 Aug 1847, d: 01 May 1928 in 7e + Emile Louis Perreau b: 08 Dec 1835, m: 10 Aug 1865, d: 02 Mar 1902 ........4 Louis Marie Perreau b: 14 Jun 1866, d: 08 Jul 1909 ........4 Alexandre “Henri” Marie Perreau-Saussine b: 04 Nov 1870 in Paris, d: 14 Dec 1960 + Marie Pauline Dupont b: 19 Sep 1874, m: 19 Nov 1894, d: 02 Jan 1954 ........4 Marie “Berthe” Perreau b: 20 Oct 1874, d: 04 Feb 1960 + Augustin Louis René Salleron b: 20 Aug 1859, m: 22 Mar 1897, d: 01 Dec 1942 ........4 Georges Marie Perreau b: 02 Feb 1880, d: 11 Jun 1918 .....3 Marie Eugénie Pauline “Emilie” Saussine b: 02 Nov 1848, d: 22 May 1912

Five Generations of the Louisiana Burguières Descendants of Eugène Denis (born Denis Eugène) Burguières & Marie Marianne Verret Delaporte (Research by Leila M. Bristow and Anne Morddell 2013)

1 Eugène Denis Burguières b: 18 Jun 1804, d: 1876 + Marie Marianne Verret b: 06 Sep 1812, m: 25 Jul 1837, d: 05 Jan 1883 ..2 Ernest Denis Burguières b: 12 Jun 1838, d: 20 Oct 1878 + Algae Bonvillain b: 13 Aug 1836, m: 26 Jul 1858, d: 04 Nov 1904 .....3 Cecile Marie Burguières b: 14 Jul 1859, d: 10 Nov 1884 + Leufroy Pierre Patout b: 01 Nov 1856, m: 09 Feb 1880, d: 07 Dec 1901 ........4 Cecile Marie Patout b: 1881, d: 21 Jun 1936 + Robert Leo Brown b: Jul 1880, d: 1960 ...........5 Robert Leo Brown Jr. b: 10 Aug 1919, d: 16 Aug 1995 + Rubye Evelyn Davis b: 09 Mar 1905, m: 20 Apr 1947, d: 29 Nov 1988 ...........5 Aglae M. Brown b: 14 Feb 1904, d: 09 Sep 1992 ........4 Isidore Patout b: 20 Oct 1883, d: 24 Nov 1883 .....3 Ernestine Louisiana Burguières b: 25 Apr 1861, d: 14 Jan 1944 + Francois Camille “Frank” Viguerie Sr. b: 11 Feb 1856, m: 13 Jan 1885, d: 15 May 1919 ........4 Frank Camille Viguerie Jr. b: 21 Nov 1885, d: 19 Jun 1939 + Genevieve Marie Verret b: 30 Sep 1894, m: 10 Jan 1912, d: 17 May 1968 ...........5 Roland Raphael Viguerie b: 21 Oct 1912, d: 22 Oct 1983 + Gladys Austin Funk b: 30 Jan 1924, m: 08 Jul 1942, d: 25 May 2013 ...........5 Francis Camille Viguerie b: 07 Sep 1914, d: 15 Jul 1992 + Clara Funk m: 08 Jul 1942 ...........5 Curtis Waldo Viguerie b: 07 Mar 1917, d: 23 May 1995 + Lorena Chapman m: 07 Jul 1942 ...........5 Wanda Marie Viguerie + Andrew Mckay Bailey b: 14 Jun 1926, m: 18 Apr 1948, d: 15 May 1992 ...........5 Genevieve Marie Viguerie b: 20 Nov 1928 + Ferdinand Petitfils b: 20 Nov 1928 ........4 Ernest Denis Viguerie b: May 1887, d: 01 Jun 1964 ........4 Rose Mary Viguerie b: 05 Jun 1889, d: 15 Jul 1995 + Harry F. Dolan MD

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...........5 Gloria Dolan + Edward A. Rogers MD b: 11 May 1917, m: 08 Jul 1942, d: 21 Jul 2005 ...........5 Joan Marie Dolan b: 11 Aug 1924, d: 04 May 1993 + Kmetz ...........5 Francis X. “Frank” Dolan b: 04 Nov 1925, d: 17 Feb 1999 ........4 John Pierre Viguerie b: 17 Oct 1891, d: 1950 ........4 Rosa Marie Viguerie b: 08 Jun 1893, d: 1972 + Arthur Bradlee Hunt Sr. b: 29 Jan 1876, d: 08 Dec 1951 ...........5 Dorothy Barbara Hunt b: 16 Feb 1919, d: 17 Nov 2013 + Edward Cuyler Applegate b: 11 Dec 1899, d: 01 Feb 1974; + William Fendall Pennebaker ...........5 Arthur Bradlee Hunt Jr. b: 14 Aug 1920, d: 21 Nov 1944 ........4 Duke Joseph Viguerie b: 28 May 1896, d: 15 Jun 1972 + Lottie Chaisson b: 06 Jun 1894, d: 10 Feb 1999 ...........5 Lorraine Louisiana Viguerie b: 14 Apr 1921, d: 14 Sep 2007 ...........5 Bettie Viguerie b: Abt. 1929 ...........5 Duke Joseph Viguerie Jr. b: Sep 1923, d: 22 Nov 1923 ...........5 James Duke Viguerie b: 15 Dec 1924, d: 09 Jan 1953 ........4 Earl Clifford Joseph Viguerie b: 11 Aug 1902, d: 18 Jan 2003 + Mattie Oglesby b: 27 May 1908, d: 02 Apr 1999 .....3 Marguerite Brigitte Burguières b: 04 Nov 1862, d: 05 Nov 1944 + James Buchanan Brown b: 08 Feb 1857, m: 01 May 1879, d: 10 Feb 1938 ........4 Ernest Brown b: Abt. 1879 ........4 Robert Leo Brown b: Jul 1880, d: 1960 + Cecile Marie Patout b: 1881, d: 21 Jun 1936 ...........5 Robert Leo Brown Jr. b: 10 Aug 1919, d: 16 Aug 1995 + Rubye Evelyn Davis b: 09 Mar 1905, m: 20 Apr 1947, d: 29 Nov 1988 ...........5 Aglae M. Brown b: 14 Feb 1904, d: 09 Sep 1992 ........4 Joseph Clifford Brown b: 10 Jul 1883, d: 23 Jun 1935 + Florence b: Abt. 1894 ........4 James Ernest Brown b: 19 Feb 1886, d: May 1891 ........4 Annette Brown b: Abt. 1890 ........4 Helen Brown b: Abt. 1897 .....3 Robert Burguières b: 20 Oct 1864 .....3 Joseph Ernest Burguières b: 24 Apr 1866 .....3 Marie Annette Burguières b: 10 Aug 1868, d: 13 Aug 1956 + Theophile Pierre Caillouet b: 23 May 1859, m: 08 Feb 1888, d: 05 Jan 1898 ........4 Caillouet b: 21 Nov 1888, d: 21 Nov 1888 ........4 Pauline Marie “Sister Mary Consuela” Caillouet b: 29 Jul 1890, d: 19 Jun 1986 ........4 Cecile Marie Caillouet b: 17 Sep 1891, d: 13 Aug 1990 ........4 Olive Marie Caillouet b: 03 Dec 1893, d: Aug 1986 ........4 Marie Mabel Caillouet b: 22 Jul 1895, d: 22 Mar 1953 ........4 Annette Marie Caillouet b: 18 Apr 1898, d: 25 Feb 1900 .....3 Alice Burguières b: 03 May 1871, d: 29 Dec 1941 + Joseph Marie Francois Cyrille Dupont b: 30 Nov 1863, m: 28 Apr 1889, d: 01 Nov 1929 ........4 Ernest Denis Dupont b: 30 Jun 1890, d: Apr 1973 + Yvette Louise St. Martin b: 06 Apr 1898, m: 03 Jun 1919, d: 15 Apr 1974 ...........5 Jules St. Martin Dupont b: 03 Oct 1921, d: 12 Jan 2007 + Louise Moore Munson m: 1951

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...........5 Donald Ernest Dupont b: 02 May 1920, d: 27 Oct 1971 + Mary Joyce Begue b: 1926, m: 16 Feb 1951 ...........5 Yvette Dupont b: 26 Dec 1927, d: 31 Dec 1973 + Carl James Dicharry b: 26 Jan 1923, d: 03 Aug 2009 ........4 Lawrence Hubbard Dupont Sr b: 22 Dec 1891, d: 05 Mar 1955 + Grace Parkes ...........5 Lawrence Hubbard Dupont Jr ...........5 Cyrille Dupont ...........5 Unknown Dupont + H. Durst III ........4 John Marie Dupont Sr b: 10 May 1894, d: 30 May 1961 + Odette Marie Foret b: 05 Aug 1895, d: 02 Nov 1989 ...........5 John Marie Dupont Jr ...........5 Joseph Benton Dupont ...........5 Marie Elise Dupont b: 1918, d: 10 Dec 1934 ...........5 Henry James Dupont b: 26 Jun 1925, d: 07 Apr 1995 + Verna Marie Frost b: 22 Apr 1927, d: 18 Jul 2007 ........4 Joseph Cyrille “JC” Dupont Jr b: 1902, d: 31 Dec 1950 + Violet Lotka ...........5 Joseph Cyrille “JC” Dupont III + Margaret Rosemunde Robinett m: 12 Oct 1957 ...........5 Mary Alice Dupont ...........5 Suzanne Dupont .....3 Lufroy Joseph Burguières b: 29 Jul 1874, d: 21 Feb 1929 + Anna Suberbielle b: Nov 1874, m: 1895, d: 15 Nov 1940 ........4 Marie Odetta Burguières b: 21 May 1896, d: 09 Feb 1971 + Grover Ernest Mouton b: 23 Jul 1894, m: 25 Oct 1916, d: 06 Sep 1968 ...........5 Leufroy Burguières Mouton b: 23 Jul 1917, d: 21 Jan 2002 + Doris Jeanne Shockley ...........5 Grover Ernest Mouton Jr b: 21 Mar 1919, d: 17 Jun 1994 + Elaine Berchman Mouton b: 20 Dec 1919, d: 06 May 2005 .....3 Marie Aglae Burguières b: 15 Nov 1876, d: Nov 1972 + Alcide Joseph Bonvillain b: 10 Nov 1873, m: 09 Sep 1896, d: 08 Feb 1937 ........4 William Henry Bonvillain b: 29 Jun 1898, d: 11 Oct 1898 ........4 Marie Louisa “Fanny” Bonvillain b: 16 Jun 1899, d: 26 Mar 1990 ........4 Marie Elise Bonvillain b: 30 May 1900, d: 28 Nov 1984 ........4 Alphonse Joseph Bonvillain b: 01 Mar 1905, d: 05 Mar 1973 ..2 Lucien Auguste Burguières b: 12 Jun 1838; Twin brother of Ernest Denis, d: 20 Jun 1838 ..2 Camilla Pauline Burguières b: 25 Apr 1840, d: 28 Jan 1896 + Alphonse Bonvillain b: 24 Nov 1834, m: 28 Sep 1858, d: 25 Feb 1890 .....3 Elmire Marie Bonvillain b: 23 Sep 1859, d: 15 Jan 1960 .....3 Alphonse Arthur Bonvillain b: 17 Jan 1862, d: 24 Nov 1944 + Marie Elmire Noveret b: 11 Aug 1866, m: 14 Jun 1887, d: 11 Aug 1894 ........4 Marie Euphemie Bonvillain b: 06 Aug 1888, d: 01 Sep 1896 ........4 Sidney Alphonse Bonvillain b: 06 Jan 1890, d: 28 May 1976 + Mary Anne Jacobi b: 05 Dec 1885, m: 04 Feb 1918, d: 02 Nov 1960 ...........5 Walter Earle Bonvillain b: 11 Apr 1909, d: 30 Mar 1982 + Alice Laura Hampel b: 09 Jan 1915, d: 11 Nov 1991

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........4 Elmire Philomene Bonvillain b: 23 Jun 1891, d: Nov 1978 ........4 Charles Noveret Bonvillain b: Aug 1893, d: 1950 + Cecile Cora Marie Noveret b: 31 Jan 1868, m: 14 Oct 1895, d: 07 Mar 1963 ........4 Gracieuse Marie Bonvillain b: 05 Aug 1897, d: Apr 1977 ........4 Arthur Rivers Bonvillain b: 30 Oct 1900, d: 24 Nov 1904 .....3 Marguerite Flavia Bonvillain b: 25 Oct 1863, d: Feb 1940 + Joseph Louis Duhart b: 24 Mar 1845, m: 01 May 1882, d: 29 Jun 1907 ........4 Jeanne Roberta Duhart b: Feb 1883, d: 09 Aug 1899 .....3 Felix Alfred Bonvillain b: 12 Dec 1865, d: 05 Mar 1946 + Alice Lelia “Valerie” Daigle b: 01 Nov 1871, m: 23 Jun 1898, d: 30 Jun 1940 ........4 Elizabeth Bergeron Bonvillain b: 1905, Adopted .....3 Martial (Marshall) Joseph Bonvillain b: 15 Oct 1868, d: 17 Oct 1918 .....3 Joseph Lufroi Bonvillain b: 03 Feb 1871, d: 24 Jun 1872 .....3 Alcide Joseph Bonvillain b: 10 Nov 1873, d: 08 Feb 1937 + Marie Aglae Burguières b: 15 Nov 1876, m: 09 Sep 1896, d: Nov 1972 ........4 William Henry Bonvillain b: 29 Jun 1898, d: 11 Oct 1898 ........4 Marie Louisa “Fanny” Bonvillain b: 16 Jun 1899, d: 26 Mar 1990 ........4 Marie Elise Bonvillain b: 30 May 1900, d: 28 Nov 1984 ........4 Alphonse Joseph Bonvillain b: 01 Mar 1905, d: 05 Mar 1973 .....3 Bertha Cora Bonvillain b: 22 Mar 1876, d: 1877 ..2 Jacqueline Annette Burguières b: 30 May 1842 ..2 Marguerite Nadege Burguières b: 11 Sep 1845, d: 14 Apr 1936 + Alphonse Augustave Theriot b: 04 Feb 1839, m: 16 Nov 1865, d: 10 Dec 1923 .....3 Laura Marie Theriot b: 07 May 1867, d: 28 Jun 1960 + Eugene Pierre Fields Jr. b: Abt. 1867, m: 27 Jan 1887, d: Abt. 1895 .........4 Eugenie Laura “Jenny” “Sister St. Marie” Fields b: Dec 1888 d: Aft 1960 .....+ James Charles Dupre b: Dec 1868, m: 16 Feb 1900, d: 01 Apr 1920 .....3 Eloi Denis Theriot b: 28 Apr 1868, d: 24 Jan 1936 + Marie Louise Decourt b: Feb 1879, m: 1897 ........4 Mercedes Theriot b: 03 Oct 1898 ........4 Marguerite Theriot b: 24 Sep 1901, d: 1979 + Sam Biggs .....+ Marie-Aglae Theriot b: 11 Apr 1890, m: 28 Feb 1906, d: 25 Dec 1969 ........4 Lucille Rosa Theriot b: 18 Feb 1908, d: 12 Sep 1993 + Robert Melancon m: 17 Feb 1934 ........4 Edward Dennis Theriot b: 04 Jun 1911, d: 03 Nov 1997 + Buelah Wells Pace b: 1911, m: 05 Feb 1932, d: 1998 ...........5 Edward Dennis Theriot + Lee Francis Day m: 27 Aug 1962 ...........5 Donald Charles Theriot ........4 Marie Louise Theriot b: Jan 1914, d: Dec 1916 .....3 Alfred Joseph Theriot b: 09 Dec 1869, d: 15 Aug 1938 + Leah Champagne b: 1871, m: 1892, d: 06 Jan 1960 ........4 Oliva (Oliver) Joseph Theriot b: 24 May 1894, d: 24 Oct 1973 + Alice Ordoyne b: 22 Jan 1898, d: 04 Dec 1967 ...........5 Herman Theriot

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........4 Jules Theriot b: 1895 ........4 Sidney Pierre Theriot b: 29 Oct 1896, d: 25 Apr 1952 + Lucille Cheramie b: 22 Mar 1904, m: 01 Jun 1921, d: 17 Sep 1973 ...........5 Elma Mary Theriot b: 04 Jan 1924, d: 30 Aug 2003 + Johnny P. Folse b: 06 Feb 1919, d: 16 Aug 2009 ........4 Edward “Eddie” Theriot b: 1900 ........4 Adney Theriot b: 1902 ........4 Sidonia Theriot b: 1903 ........4 Hilde J. Theriot b: 13 Aug 1906, d: 19 Nov 1971 + Lucille Hebert ........4 Marie Theriot b: 1908 ........4 Blanche Ann Theriot b: 22 Feb 1909, d: 02 Feb 1985 + Amedee Francois Gervais b: 06 Apr 1907, d: 14 Jul 1965 ...........5 Murphy Andrew Gervais b: 12 Sep 1942, d: 01 Jan 1943 ...........5 Douglas James Gervais b: 06 Aug 1951, d: 10 Jul 1996 ...........5 Franklin Joseph Gervais ...........5 David Junius Gervais ...........5 Norman Peter Gervais ...........5 Amedee John Gervais ...........5 Leroy Michael Gervais ...........5 Gerald Paul Gervais ...........5 Evelyn Ann Gervais + Richardson ...........5 Gloria Mary Gervais + Bergeron ...........5 Catherine Joyce Gervais + Reason ...........5 Gail Marie Gervais + Acosta ...........5 Cynthia Ann Gervais + Hyllberg .....3 Corrine Anne Theriot b: 12 Feb 1872, d: 25 Aug 1932 + Francis “Frank” Maurice Bodin b: 22 Sep 1868, m: 24 Apr 1895, d: 26 Apr 1964 ........4 Stella Isabel Bodin b: 22 Sep 1897, d: 04 May 1898 ........4 Corinne Marie Bodin b: 23 Sep 1896, d: 15 Jul 1997 + Henry Dreyer b: Abt. 1897 ...........5 Stella Dreyer b: 17 Aug 1924, d: 10 Jun 2002 + P. Leonce Richard b: 20 Nov 1920 ........4 Camille Bodin b: 03 Aug 1903, d: Jan 1977 + Marie b: Abt. 1901 ........4 Margaret Bodin b: 25 Nov 1904, d: Nov 1994 + Henry Francis “Harry” Magoon Sr. b: 18 Jan 1897, d: 05 Sep 1973 ...........5 Henry Francis “Harry” Magoon Jr. b: 10 Jun 1923, d: 17 Jun 1993 + Harriet Jenkins m: 15 Dec 1945 ........4 Anna May Bodin b: 10 Aug 1906, d: 03 Aug 1970 + Joseph Dubois ........4 Sadie Marie Bodin b: 04 Feb 1911, d: 07 Jan 1993 + Robert Emmet Powers b: 21 Mar 1912, d: 26 Mar 1967 ...........5 Paul Emmett Powers b: 1936 + Hazel m: 14 Nov 1959 ...........5 Dale Maurice Powers b: 25 Dec 1942, d: 13 Nov 2009 + Joyce Dearing b: Abt. 1931, m: 08 Nov 1974 ........4 Harold J. Bodin b: 30 Jan 1914, d: 08 Jan 1972

Appendix 1: Genealogy

189

........4 Frank Maurice Bodin Jr. b: 28 Dec 1916, d: 10 Aug 1993 .....3 Marie Nadege Theriot b: 22 May 1873, d: 22 Feb 1968 + Clerville Louis Butaud b: 07 Sep 1870, m: 04 Aug 1897 ........4 Eugene Theriot Butaud b: 10 Nov 1898, d: 18 Aug 1996 + Myrtle Agnes Hoffman b: 10 Nov 1901, d: 04 Mar 1991 ...........5 Mary Sandra Butaud b: 1934 + Sidney Bernard Lewis; + Donald Rowland; + Aubrey Spell ...........5 Sylvia Jean Butaud b: 1940 + W. Robert Pattison, Jr b: 1940 ........4 Marie Blanche Cornelia Butaud b: 06 Oct 1900, d: 05 May 1989 + Woodrow Kloor ...........5 Charles Kloor + Frank E. Howard ........4 Marguerite Ezell Butaud b: 22 Dec 1903, d: 24 Mar 1993 + Percy Marvins Lyons Sr.; + Clarence H. Colman ........4 Marie Nadege Butaud b: 04 May 1906, d: 16 Nov 1990 + John Cyril Hanafy b: 08 Dec 1904, m: 13 Apr 1931, d: 26 Aug 1958 ........4 Louis Henri Butaud b: 06 Aug 1906, d: Dec 1906 ........4 Paul Van Butaud b: 04 Apr 1909, d: 06 Oct 2001 + Margaret Sewe d: 12 Mar 1990 ...........5 Mary Margaret Butaud ...........5 Paula Butaud ........4 Louis Clerville Butaud Sr. b: 11 Jun 1913, d: 26 Aug 1992 + Louetta Gossen b: 04 Oct 1917, d: 09 Nov 2001 ...........5 Louis Clerville Butaud Jr. ...........5 Eugene (Gene) Butaud ...........5 Steve V. Butaud .....3 Alphonse Auguste Theriot b: 31 Jan 1875, d: 01 Nov 1939 + Hèloise Aime Halbert m: 20 Apr 1898 ........4 Howard Joseph Theriot b: 27 May 1900 ........4 Harold Augustus Theriot b: 1903, d: Jan 1982 ........4 Lucille Theriot ........4 Eloise Theriot ........4 Joseph Theriot ........4 Robert E. Theriot ........4 Albert F. Theriot .....3 May Marquerite Theriot b: 26 Nov 1876, d: Oct 1973 + Bernard Levy b: 1868, m: 25 Aug 1903 ........4 Leah Juliette Levy d: 03 May 1905 ........4 Nathan Albert Levy b: 19 Sep 1905, d: Jan 1990 + Helen Opal Payne b: 09 Dec 1908, d: Sep 1984 ........4 May Marguerite Levy b: 18 Jul 1908, d: 31 Mar 2006 + Adolph Judson Poche Sr. m: 29 Jun 1933, d: 12 Jan 1956 ...........5 Adolph Judson Poche Jr. ...........5 May Marguerite Poche ........4 Nell Mary Levy b: 20 May 1910, d: 30 Oct 2002 + Gladney Thompson Ardoin b: 11 Nov 1909, m: 03 Jun 1931, d: 17 Sep 1982

190

Appendix 1: Genealogy

...........5 Nancy Nell Ardoin + Max Hamelin ........4 Ruth Mary Levy b: 09 Nov 1912, d: 06 Jun 1994 + Ralph Ronald Longman Sr. b: 04 Oct 1918, m: 18 Oct 1941, d: 19 Dec 1988 ...........5 Ralph Ronald Longman Jr. + Martha Arcement ........4 Bernice Levy b: 1919, d: 05 May 1920 .....3 Ernest Robert Theriot b: 28 Oct 1878, d: 06 May 1967 + Ada Marguerite Richard b: 21 Mar 1884, m: 29 Jul 1903, d: 03 Dec 1952 ........4 Marguerite Theriot b: 10 Apr 1904, d: 10 Apr 1904 ........4 Pauline Louise Theriot b: 31 May 1907, d: 08 Mar 2002 + Francis Quentin Jones b: 20 Feb 1908, m: 14 Jun 1930, d: 13 Mar 1995 ...........5 Quinton Ernest Jones Sr. b: 07 Jul 1931, d: 05 Sep 2002 + Christine Marie Saia b: 15 Sep 1930, m: 14 Oct 1951, d: 12 Jul 2010; + Betty Oliver ........4 Ernest Robert Theriot Jr. b: 12 Dec 1908, d: 30 Nov 1982 + Vilma Jessie Rhodes b: 30 Aug 1908, d: 21 Dec 1986 ...........5 Ernest Robert Theriot III + Gloria Chatelaine; + Janet ........4 Ada Lolita Theriot b: 28 Jun 1910, d: 11 Sep 1995 + Leon Gary Sr. b: 27 Jul 1912, m: 15 Feb 1936, d: 05 Dec 2000 ...........5 Leon Gary Jr + Virginia Rhea Jones m: 24 Aug 1963 ...........5 Don Leon Gary b: 07 Oct 1942, d: 29 Jun 2010 + Barbara Luke m: 03 Aug 1968 ...........5 Lolita Marguerite “Girlie” Gary + John Park Braud Jr. m: 19 Dec 1964 .....3 Louise Alice Theriot b: 09 Oct 1880, d: 05 May 1968 + Thomas George Duhon b: 10 Aug 1879, d: 11 Mar 1957 ........4 Lee Thomas Duhon Sr. b: 28 Mar 1904, d: 02 Jul 1964 + Agnes Mary Melling b: 11 Sep 1906, d: 21 Jun 2002 ...........5 Lee Thomas Duhon Jr b: 17 Jan 1931, d: 18 Apr 1973 ........4 Roy Elie Duhon Sr. b: 29 Mar 1909, d: 01 Aug 1973 + Helen Priscilla Harvey b: 27 Apr 1913, d: 26 Sep 1998 ...........5 Roy Elie Duhon Jr. + Marjorie Louise Meador m: 22 Nov 1975 ...........5 Margaret Eileen Duhon + John Edward Fitzpatrick Jr m: 27 May 1967 ...........5 James E. Duhon ...........5 Joy Duhon + D. Bell .....3 Sanchez Theriot b: Sep 1881 .....3 Clothilde Therese Theriot b: 04 Sep 1882, d: 07 Apr 1973 + Nicholas Lucian “Dudsie” Melancon b: 08 Jan 1879, m: 25 Jul 1900, d: 11 Dec 1943 ........4 Lionel Prescott Melancon b: 24 Apr 1902, d: 17 Sep 1970 + Elma Florence Seffel b: 31 May 1901, d: 19 Nov 1969 ...........5 Lionel Prescott Melancon b: 20 Jan 1927 + Linda Roberts ...........5 Theriot Simon Melancon b: 02 Dec 1929, d: 02 May 1979 + Barbara R. b: 30 May 1935, d: 02 Jul 2001 ...........5 Ernest Lee Melancon b: 26 Apr 1932, d: 13 Jan 1988 ...........5 Robert Jospeh Melancon b: 14 Mar 1934 ........4 Mildred Viola Melancon b: 16 Feb 1904, d: 30 Nov 1993 + John Weldon Long b: 06 Feb 1900, m: 22 May 1924, d: 17 Nov 1977

Appendix 1: Genealogy

191

...........5 John Weldon Long Jr. b: 11 Feb 1925, d: 27 Nov 2002 + Martha b: 1927 ...........5 Katherine Theresa Long b: 20 Oct 1928, d: 20 Feb 1984 + Leo Huerkamp b: 17 Mar 1925, d: 07 Aug 1992 ...........5 Thomas Joseph Long b: 24 Oct 1929 + Sue Marie Isphording b: 05 Aug 1929, m: 04 Oct 1952, d: 29 Dec 1984:+ Maridot Barton m: Sep 1987 ........4 Joseph Malcom “Toby” Melancon b: 02 May 1909, d: 02 Oct 1975 ........4 Nichols Lucien “Nippy” Melancon Jr. b: 04 Nov 1911, d: 05 May 1995 + Helen Evelyn Greger b: 28 Oct 1918, d: 24 Apr 2005 ...........5 Nichols Lucien Melancon III b: 25 Mar 1936 ........4 Nydise Ursula “DeDe” Melancon b: 11 Mar 1914, d: 26 May 2004 + John Duchouquette b: 1915, d: 1985 ...........5 Nydise Ursula Duchouquette b: 25 Feb 1935 + Milton Vincent House b: 19 Jul 1925, d: 22 Dec 2007 ...........5 Jeanne Carol Duchouquette ........4 Jessica Marie Melancon b: 24 Sep 1916, d: 31 Aug 2000 + George Eugene Espersen b: 17 Jul 1915, m: 05 Jun 1935, d: Jul 1986 ...........5 George Eugene Espersen Jr ...........5 Paul Herbert Espersen ...........5 Charles Joseph Espersen ...........5 Carol Anne Espersen ...........5 Yvette Marie Espersen + Andrew B. Delosua b: 1918, m: 16 Dec 1988 ........4 Barbara Marie Melancon b: 17 Aug 1919, d: 29 Mar 2012 + Theodore Franklin “Ted” Douthitt Sr b: 12 Jul 1912, m: 17 Oct 1941, d: 29 Jun 1986 ...........5 Theodore Franklin Douthitt Jr ...........5 John Scott Douthitt ........4 Andrew Melancon b: 16 Nov 1922, d: 27 Aug 2009 + Jane C. Hanigan b: 1925, m: 1946 ...........5 Linda Marie Melancon ...........5 Mary Katherine Melancon + Shirley b: 1933, m: 01 Jan 1974 ........4 Margaret Nadje Burguières Melancon b: 18 Oct 1924, d: 07 Jun 2011 + George Walter Arnold Jr. b: 26 Jul 1921, d: 08 Aug 1977 ...........5 George Walter Arnold Jr b: 04 Jul 1944, d: 12 Dec 1989 ...........5 Nicki Irene Arnold ...........5 Dee Ann Arnold .....3 Alice Josephine Theriot b: 03 Oct 1884; Twin sister of Albert, d: 18 Jun 1964 + Robert F. Derouen MD b: Abt. 1867, d: 08 Nov 1958 .....3 Albert Raoul Theriot b: 03 Oct 1884, d: 07 Dec 1885 .....3 Florence Pauline Theriot b: 18 May 1886, d: 20 Dec 1957 ..2 Marie Annette Burguières b: 17 Dec 1847, d: 23 Jun 1932 + Abraham Brown b: Abt. 1847, m: 1869, d: 03 Apr 1919 .....3 Marie Elmire Brown b: 05 Mar 1871, d: 28 Mar 1905 + Gustave M. Junca b: 03 Jan 1862, m: 27 Aug 1891, d: 19 Jul 1941 ........4 Joseph Lee Junca b: 04 Jul 1892, d: 05 Dec 1895

192

Appendix 1: Genealogy

........4 Marie Ada Myrtle Junca b: 07 Mar 1894, d: 1965 + Sebastian Patout b: 24 Sep 1888, d: 07 Jun 1942 ...........5 Allen James Patout b: 02 Dec 1921, d: 25 May 1976 ........4 Inez Junca b: 03 Feb 1895 + Joseph Corzat ...........5 Inez Corzat ...........5 Heloise Corzat ........4 Agnes Bernadette Junca b: 03 Feb 1895 ........4 Marie Corine Junca b: 28 Jan 1897, d: 25 Apr 1995 + Robert Eaton Guilbeau b: 12 Feb 1890, d: 12 Jul 1947 ...........5 Hugh Francis Guilbeau b: 29 Mar 1918, d: 26 Mar 2006 + Constance Betty Jane Hoffpauir b: 02 Aug 1920, m: 19 Jul 1941, d: 28 Aug 2011 ...........5 Lee Junca Guilbeau b: 01 Jul 1919, d: 24 Dec 1980 ........4 Hugh Anthony Junca b: 18 Aug 1898, d: 09 Jan 1955 + Rosa Landry b: 1902, d: 25 May 1947 ...........5 Rose Mary Junca b: Abt. 1923 ...........5 Barbara G. Junca b: 03 Aug 1930, d: 27 Dec 2009 + Ronald Hale ...........5 Harold Junca + Olive Olivier ........4 Rene Marie Junca b: 05 Feb 1900, d: 20 Nov 1989 + Lucy E b: Abt. 1912; + Eugenie Marie Luke b: 02 Dec 1902, d: 24 Aug 1964 .....3 Annette Brown b: Abt. 1872 .....3 Ida Brown b: Jan 1873, d: 20 Nov 1931 + Florent Fortier b: Apr 1873, m: 1897, d: 16 May 1941 ........4 Florence Marie “Florrie” Fortier b: 22 Jan 1899, d: 28 Nov 1997 + Edward Peter LaSalle b: 13 Oct 1894, m: 15 Apr 1921, d: 15 May 1975 ...........5 Catherine Marie LaSalle b: 03 Jan 1922 ...........5 Edward Allen LaSalle b: 22 Jan 1923, d: 03 Aug 1990 + Virginia Margaret Roane b: 10 Jan 1925, d: 16 Jan 1995 ........4 Brown Abraham Fortier Sr. b: 31 Jul 1901, d: 04 Jun 1982 + Leita “Lee Lee” de Gravelle b: 24 Sep 1899, d: 26 Feb 1991 ........4 Louis Joseph Fortier b: 16 Apr 1904, d: 11 Jun 1971 + Dorothea C. Barnard b: 09 Apr 1904, d: 27 Aug 1990 ........4 Eugene “Gene” Fortier b: 03 Feb 1907, d: Nov 1982 ........4 Ida Marie Fortier b: 29 Mar 1911, d: 15 Sep 2000 ........4 Jonette Fortier b: 11 Dec. 1914 + Marion T. Lanscaster b: 20 Dec 1911, d: Jan 1994 ........4 Karl A. Fortier Sr. b: 08 Feb 1916, d: 09 Dec 2010 + Rose Thibeaux b: 23 Feb 1916, d: 23 Jan 2009 .....3 William Denis Brown b: 24 Dec 1876, d: 01 Mar 1951 + Narcissa Patten Williams b: 16 Jan 1872, d: 28 Nov 1951 ........4 Annette Matilda Brown b: 14 Oct 1901, d: 11 Nov 1992 + Charles Rupert Evans b: 27 Dec 1897, d: 21 Sep 1981 ........4 Joseph P. Brown b: 1903 ........4 William H. Brown b: 1907

Appendix 1: Genealogy

193

........4 Owen S. Brown b: 1910 ........4 Narcisse G. Brown b: Abt. 1913 ........4 Ellen M. Brown b: Abt. 1914 ........4 Robecker E. Brown b: Abt. 1915 .....3 John Brown b: Abt. 1879 .....3 Louise Brown b: 14 Dec 1880, d: 23 Aug 1982 + Pierre Louis Carriere b: Abt. 1881, m: 1907, d: 04 Nov 1967 .....3 Camille Peter Brown, MD b: 16 Jul 1885, d: 06 Sep 1936 + Alice Sanford b: Abt. 1895 .....3 Frank Brown b: 05 Jan 1888 .....3 Burguières Eugene “Buss” Brown b: 15 Sep 1890, d: 09 Sep 1948 + Ruth Hammond b: Abt. 1900, m: Oct 1917 ..2 Jules Martial Burguières Sr. b: 17 Apr 1850, d: 01 Oct 1899 + Marie Corinne Patout b: 15 Oct 1852, m: 21 Apr 1873, d: 20 Feb 1890 .....3 Denis Philip Joseph Burguières Sr. b: 03 Jul 1874, d: 30 Dec 1936 + Marie Alice Broussard b: 06 Jun 1872, m: 29 Jun 1898, d: 07 Dec 1937 ........4 Juanita Marguerite Burguières b: 14 Feb 1900, d: 14 Oct 1927 ........4 Denis Philip Joseph Burguières Jr. b: 23 Sep 1901, d: 02 Aug 1976 + Emma Louise LeBlanc b: 11 Jun 1909, m: 15 Jun 1937, d: 04 Aug 1986 ...........5 Denise Alice Louise Burguières + Robert N. “Bob” Hein b: 09 Nov 1938, d: 20 Oct 2013 ...........5 Philip Joseph Burguières + Cheryl Courrege b: 23 Aug 1944, m: 21 Aug 1965, d: 09 May 2005; + Alice Louise Harcrow ........4 Albert Leo Marius Burguières b: 02 Feb 1903, d: 30 Nov 1956 + Stella Knight b: 24 Jun 1901, d: 05 Nov 1985 ........4 Elise Yvonne Burguières b: 12 Sep 1904, d: 01 Oct 1957 + Lt. Cdr. Harold Stedman Bavin (Royal Navy) b: Jun 1883, m: 26 Jun 1940, d: 24 Feb 1966 ........4 Edward Edmond “Ed” Burguières b: 05 Jan 1906, d: 03 Jan 1981 + Mary Ellen Bell b: 02 Jan 1913, d: 04 Feb 1975 ...........5 William Edward “Bill” Burguières + Margaret Dosier ...........5 Robert Naylor “Bob” Burguières + Mary Ann Moss ...........5 Albert Naylor “Al” Burguières + Jerry Lynn Fontenot; + Gwendolyn Ann Lancon b: 25 Sep 1950, d: 19 Jan 2011 ........+ Caroline Wolfe b: 02 Sep 1907, d: 01 Mar 1951; + Elsie Thomas b: 10 Nov 1915, d: 16 Feb 2007 ........4 Jules Martial Burguières b: 18 Oct 1907, d: 23 Jun 1965 + Elodie Marie Bergeron b: 25 Jan 1911, d: 13 Feb 2004 ...........5 Barbara Nannette Burguières b: 23 Aug 1930, d: 11 May 2005 + Edward Joseph Mire Jr. b: 22 Nov 1927, d: 24 Aug 2003 ...........5 Dolores Burguières b: 11 Oct 1932, d: 04 Aug 2013 + Charles Edward McCurley b: 05 Sep 1932, d: 05 Oct 1963; + Carol Joseph “C.J.” LeBlanc b: 08 Nov 1934, d: 19 May 2009 ...........5 Patricia Burguières + Arthur Joseph “Art” Fernandez Jr. ...........5 Gail Burguières + Ronald Charles “Ron” Cambre

194

Appendix 1: Genealogy

...........5 Josie Helen Burguières b: 08 Jan 1939, d: 18 Sep 2012 + John Raymond Moreau ...........5 Peggy Burguières b: 28 Oct 1945, d: 25 Jun 1989 + Waldo James “Beau” Baudouin Jr. ........4 Alice Burguières b: 29 Dec 1909, d: 19 Jan 2002 + John Oestmann Walker b: 09 Apr 1910, m: 04 Jun 1947, d: 01 Apr 1992 ...........5 Sheila Walker + Michael “Mike” Young ........4 Joseph Eugene Burguières b: 05 Sep 1911, d: 31 Mar 1989 + Irma L. Nicholas b: 24 Dec 1910, m: 14 Oct 1940, d: 04 Mar 1989 .....3 Joseph Eugene Burguières b: 16 Mar 1876, d: 24 Aug 1911 + Laura Fauntleroy b: Abt. 1875, m: 11 Apr 1907, d: 25 Aug 1908 ........4 Joseph “Joe” Burguières Jr. b: Aug 1908, d: Aug 1908 .....3 Marie Louise Burguières b: 18 Jul 1878, d: 19 Jun 1972 + John Quintain “Quint” Syme b: 07 Apr 1869, m: 23 Feb 1906, d: 26 Jan 1931 ........4 Arthur Melville Quintain Syme b: 08 Apr 1896; Son of Fanny Cochrane (Pitts) Syme; Stepson of Marie Louise, d: 24 May 1965 + Lillian J. Hunt b: 17 Aug 1897, d: 24 Dec 1992 ........4 Marie Louise Syme b: 02 Dec 1906, d: 03 Dec 2000 + Everett C. Verbeck (also Ver Beck) b: 19 Jun 1891, d: 06 Apr 1982 .....3 Florence Clothilde Burguières b: 10 Dec 1880, d: 06 Sep 1936 .....3 Jules Martial Burguières Jr. b: 10 Feb 1882, d: 07 Sep 1960 .....3 Ernest Felix Burguières b: 24 Aug 1883, d: 19 May 1884 .....3 Ernest Aloysius Burguières Sr. b: 11 Apr 1885, d: 29 May 1959 + Isabella Moore b: 10 Mar 1896, m: 18 Aug 1917, d: 21 Mar 1979 ........4 Ernest Aloysius “Bubbie” Burguières Jr. b: 25 May 1918, d: 08 Dec 1983 + Virginea Russell b: 30 Jun 1921, m: 20 Oct 1948, d: 10 Apr 2006 ...........5 Ernest Aloysius “Skipper” Burguières III + Dorothy Winn Venable ...........5 Holly Isabel Burguières + Gordon Phelps Kelley Jr.; + Daniel Francis Gluibizzi ........4 Isabella Moore “Cherie” Burguières b: 21 Aug 1921, d: 18 Feb 1923 ........4 Leila Moore Marie Burguières b: 15 Aug 1924, d: 29 Apr 1925 ........4 Joan Burguières b: 22 Jul 1926, d: 21 Jul 2013 + William Perry Brown III b: 27 Mar 1924, m: 22 Jan 1947, d: 19 Dec 2004 ...........5 William Perry “Pepper” Brown IV b: 29 Oct 1947, d: 04 Feb 2008 ...........5 Francis Scott Brown + Martha Allison ...........5 Kemper Williams Brown + Elizabeth McClatchey ........4 Marie Robin Burguières + Dr. Otis Allen Bristow Jr. b: 05 Nov 1930, m: 27 Dec 1956, d: 31 Dec 2005 ...........5 Leila Marie Bristow + Donald Damon Hines ...........5 Otis Allen Bristow III + Wendy Jo Dunbar ...........5 Marie Robin Bristow + John Thomas White .....3 Henry Isidore Aloysius Burguières Sr. b: 11 Feb 1887, d: 18 Jun 1938 + Sarah Hyams “Sallie” Trufant b: 01 May 1890, m: 27 Dec 1910, d: 24 Nov 1972 ........4 Marie Alice Burguières b: 19 Jan 1912, d: 29 Sep 2000 + Clarence Cecil Kammer b: 18 Oct 1911, m: 06 Oct 1934 d: 07 Sep 1953

Appendix 1: Genealogy

195

...........5 Martial Burguières Kammer b: 28 Jul 1935, d: 05 Feb 2006 + Jane Lucille Ivey ........+ Percy DuBose Saint b: 16 Jun 1908, m: 13 Oct 1962, d: Jan 1974 .........4 Sally Hyams Burguières b: 11 May 1914, d: 15 Dec 1977 + Oliver James Reiss Jr. b: 18 Aug 1911, m: 14 Jun 1939, d: 13 Oct 1982 ...........5 Oliver James “OJ” Reiss + Joyce Catherine Simmons; + Sally Lynn Riggs ........4 Henry Isidore Aloysius Burguières, Jr. b: 14 May 1915, d: 14 Jul 2002 ........4 Samuel Adams Trufant Burguières, Sr. b: 30 Sep 1916, d: 20 Jan 1986 + Gertrude Reynaud b: 23 May 1918, m: 12 Jan 1944, d: 28 Feb 2006 ...........5 Samuel Adams Trufant Burguières, Jr. + Beryl Elizabeth Hoffman; + Antoinette “Nettie” Higgins ...........5 Thomas Henry Burguières MD + Janice Marino ...........5 Gertrude Reynaud Burguières + Robert Allen Cullen; + Dale R. Pfost ........4 Chapman Hyams “Bunny” Burguières Sr. b: 18 Sep 1918, d: 01 Jun 1994 + Eunice Miguez b: 21 Nov 1929, d: 18 Apr 2004 ...........5 Chapman Hyams “Bobby” Burguières Jr. + Linda Sue Greene ........+ Mae Ruth Theriot b: 03 May 1921, m: Abt. 1941, d: 12 Jan 1999 ........4 John Berchman “Jack” Burguières Sr. b: 19 Jul 1922, d: 01 Dec 2004 + Dorothy Middleton b: 02 Oct 1924, m: 16 Oct 1944, d: 17 Apr 1993 ...........5 John Berchman Burguières Jr. ...........5 Sallie Louise Burguières + Philip Dietz ...........5 Dorothy Anne Burguières ...........5 Elizabeth “Betty” Burguières + Brian Thomas Moore ...........5 Frederick Charles Burguières + Sheldon Elizabeth “Shelley” Prichard ...........5 Suzanne Burguières + Jeffrey Hale .....3 Charles Patout Burguières b: 07 Oct 1888, d: 23 Dec 1985 + Lilla Elizabeth Withnell b: 04 Aug 1887, m: 07 Jul 1910, d: 23 Nov 1987 .........4 Lilla Withnell “Pat” Burguières b: 24 Jan 1912, d: 11 Aug 1981 + Leopold “Lee” Munsell Leike b: 01 Dec 1906, m: 28 Dec 1937, d: Apr 1986 ...........5 Charles Arthur “Dick” Leike + Jo Anne Carlton ...........5 Lillamaud Munsell Leike + William Michael “Bill” Hammond Sr. ........4 Charles Patout Burguières Jr. b: 08 Sep 1913, d: 15 Jul 1989 ........4 Antoine Pierre Burguières b: 29 May 1915, d: 29 Feb 1988 + Elaine Marie Fortier b: 06 Jan 1918, m: 11 Apr 1942, d: 18 Apr 1993; ...........5 Glenn Edward Burguières b: Abt. 1946, d: 19 Sep 1972 ........+ Angelica Antonieta Garcia b: 26 Mar 1914, d: 12 Jul 2002 ...........5 Charlene H. Bolinger (stepdaughter of Antoine) ........4 John Paul Joseph Burguières b: 30 Jun 1917, d: 12 Jan 2005 ........4 Gregory Joseph Marie Burguières b: 13 Mar 1921, d: 12 Jun 1987 + Gladys Marie Robichaux b: 17 Oct 1919, d: 09 Aug 1998; + Dorothy Cummings b: 28 Mar 1929, m: 26 Oct 1974, d: 12 Jul 1995 ........4 Marie Corinne Patout Burguières b: 06 Nov 1924, d: 25 Apr 2000 + Cornelius Thomas “Neal” Ducey Sr. b: 31 Aug 1919, m: 08 Oct 1943, d: 28 Jun 2011

196

Appendix 1: Genealogy

...........5 Cornelius Thomas Ducey Jr. + Barbara Connelly ...........5 Mary Elizabeth Lilla-Withnell “Cherie” Ducey + James Farley Gilbert Jr. ...........5 Gregory Joseph Ducey + Yvonne Grantham ...........5 Charles Patout Ducey + Dian Davidson ...........5 Marie Barat Duchesne “Missy” Ducey + Ronald D. Godi ...........5 Timothy Lowndes Ducey Sr. + Carol Josberger ........4 Marie Barat Duchesne Burguières b: 19 Sep 1926, d: 05 Apr 2003 + O’Neill Louis Pollingue Jr. m: 27 Dec 1943 ...........5 O’Neill Pollingue III + Lynne Stinchcomb ...........5 Marie Lucile Withnell Pollingue + James Randolph Lathrop ...........5 Marie Barat Duchesne Pollingue + Richard Kibbe Leefe ...........5 Marie Michele Pollingue + Kevin Patrick Reed ........4 William Withnell Burguières b: 16 Feb 1930, d: 18 Oct 1995 + Patricia Marie Sens b: 08 Apr 1930, m: 30 Jan 1953, d: 09 Feb 2000 ...........5 William W. Withnell Burguières Jr. ...........5 Dionne Therese. Burguières ...........5 Paul Sens Burguières .....3 Marie Corinne Burguières b: 29 Jan 1890, d: 14 Mar 1890 ..+ Ida Laperle Broussard b: 01 Aug 1868, m: 13 Apr 1891, d: 17 Oct 1948 .....3 Inez Ernestine Burguières b: 28 Aug 1892, d: 02 Feb 1965 + Phillip Huddleston Williams b: 01 Oct 1877, m: 31 Aug 1915, d: 23 Jun 1945; Leopold Dunbar “Dunnie” Christ b: 22 Sep 1896, m: 05 Oct 1926, d: 01 Feb 1960 ........4 Helen Dunbar Christ + Henry Honor St. Paul Jr. m: 12 Nov 1949 ...........5 Julie Dunbar St. Paul + Richard Stroman Harris ...........5 Henry Honore St. Paul III + Jennifer Camille Puckett ...........5 Lisa Allain St. Paul + Richard Morton Hudson ...........5 Dunbar Strange St. Paul + Katharine Parker Salmon ...........5 Armand Christ St. Paul + Jeanne Marie Hattier ...........5 Rene Cooper St. Paul + Sarah Hamilton ...........5 Corinne Christ “Coco” St. Paul + Todd Bennett Johnson ...........5 Cort Russell St. Paul + Ingrid Wallace ........4 Ernestine Inez “Kiki” Christ + Victor William Ulrich b: 20 Feb 1924, m: 08 Feb 1969, d: 05 Feb 1993 ...........5 Charlotte Burguières Ulrich + Michael Anthony Schillaci ...........5 William Dunbar Ulrich + Stephanie Veronica Fuqua ........4 Marion Moore Christ + Joseph Frederick Clerc b: 23 Aug 1924, m: 13 Feb 1954, d: 21 Dec 1987 ..........5 Catherine Christ Clerc + Frederick Leitz Eagan, Jr. ........+ Robert L. “Bobby” Simpson b: 04 Sep 1929, m: 1998, d: 23 Feb 2000 ..2 Leufroy Burguières b: 20 Apr 1852, d: 26 Jan 1892 + Elodie Bonin b: 05 Aug 1840, m: 30 Dec 1885, d: 02 Jul 1928

Appendix 2 Patents

197

198

Appendix 2. Patents

Appendix 2. Patents

199

200

Appendix 2. Patents

Appendix 2. Patents

201

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Appendix 3 J. M. Burguières Company Boards of Directors, 1901–2012

March 15, 1901–January 28, 1907

Denis P. J. Burguières, President Joseph E. Burguières, Vice President/Treasurer Jules M. Burguières Jr., Secretary

January 28, 1907–June 18, 1907

Denis P. J. Burguières , President Joseph E. Burguières Jules M. Burguières Jr., Vice President/Treasurer Ernest A. Burguières, Secretary

June 18, 1907–August 26, 1911

Denis P. J. Burguières, President Joseph E. Burguières, Vice President* Ernest A. Burguières, Secretary Jules M. Burguières Jr., Treasurer *Died August 26, 1911

August 27, 1911–December 18, 1911 Denis P. J. Burguières, President Ernest A. Burguières, Secretary Jules M. Burguières Jr., Treasurer

December 18, 1911–March 13, 1931 Denis P. J. Burguières, President Jules M. Burguières Jr., Vice President Ernest A. Burguières, Treasurer Henry I. Burguières, Secretary

203

204

Appendix 3. J. M. Burguières Company Boards of Directors, 1901–2012

March 13, 1931–November 12, 1931 Denis P. J. Burguières, President Ernest A. Burguières, Treasurer Henry I. Burguières, Secretary Jules M. Burguières Jr.

November 12, 1931–December 30, 1936 Denis P. J. Burguières, President* Jules M. Burguières Jr., Vice President Ernest A. Burguières, Treasurer Henry I. Burguières, Secretary *Died December 30, 1936

December 30, 1936–June 18, 1938

Jules M. Burguières Jr., Vice President Ernest A. Burguières, Treasurer Henry I. Burguières, Secretary* *Died June 8, 1938

June 18, 1938–August 16, 1938

Jules M. Burguières Jr., Vice President Ernest A. Burguières, Treasurer

August 16, 1938–March 23, 1944

Jules M. Burguières Jr., Vice President Ernest A. Burguières, Treasurer Albert L. Burguières

March 23, 1944–July 15, 1948

Jules M. Burguières Jr., Vice President Ernest A. Burguières, Treasurer

July 15, 1948–May 29, 1959

Jules M. Burguières Jr., Vice President Ernest A. Burguières, Treasurer* Henry I. Burguières Jr., Secretary *Died May 29, 1959

May 29, 1959–October 12, 1959

Jules M. Burguières Jr., Vice President Henry I. Burguières Jr., Secretary

Appendix 3. J. M. Burguières Company Boards of Directors, 1901–2012

October 12, 1959–September 7, 1960 Jules M. Burguières Jr., Vice President* Henry I. Burguières Jr., Secretary Edward E. Burguières *Died September 7, 1960

September 7, 1960–January 4, 1961 Henry I. Burguières Jr., Secretary Edward E. Burguières

January 4, 1961–December 5, 1961 Henry I. Burguières Jr., Secretary Edward E. Burguières Joan Burguières Brown

December 5, 1961–February 6, 1962

Edward E. Burguières, Manager Henry I. Burguières Jr., Secretary/Treasurer Joan Burguières Brown

February 6, 1962–October 29, 1962 Edward E. Burguières, Vice President Henry I. Burguières Jr., Secretary Joan Burguières Brown, Treasurer

October 29, 1962–March 15, 1963

Abner E. Hughes, Chair Edward E. Burguières, President C. Patout Burguières, Vice President Samuel T. Burguières Sr., Treasurer Marie Louise Burguières Syme, Secretary

March 15, 1963–January 27, 1964

Abner E. Hughes, Chair Edward E. Burguières, President C. Patout Burguières, Vice President Samuel T. Burguières Sr., Treasurer Marie Louise Burguières Syme, Secretary Ernest A. Burguières Jr. Marion C. Clerc

205

206

Appendix 3. J. M. Burguières Company Boards of Directors, 1901–2012

January 27, 1964–January 31, 1966

Abner E. Hughes, Chair Edward E. Burguières, President C. Patout Burguières, Vice President Samuel T. Burguières Sr., Secretary Marie Louise Burguières Syme, Treasurer Ernest A. Burguières Jr. Marion C. Clerc

January 31, 1966–January 29, 1968

Abner E. Hughes, Chair Edward E. Burguières, President C. Patout Burguières, Vice President Samuel T. Burguières Sr., Secretary Ernest A. Burguières Jr., Treasurer Marie Louise Verbeck Marion C. Clerc

January 29, 1968–January 31, 1972

Abner E. Hughes, Chair Edward E. Burguières, President C. Patout Burguières, Vice President Samuel T. Burguières Sr., Secretary Ernest A. Burguières Jr., Treasurer Marie Louise Verbeck, Assistant Treasurer Marion C. Clerc, Assistant Secretary

January 31, 1972–January 29, 1973

Abner E. Hughes, Chair Edward E. Burguières, President Marie Louise Verbeck, Vice President Samuel T. Burguières Sr., Secretary Marion C. Clerc, Treasurer Ernest A. Burguières Jr. Barat B. Pollingue

January 29, 1973–January 28, 1974

Abner E. Hughes, Chair Edward E. Burguières, President Marie Louise Verbeck, Vice President Samuel T. Burguières Sr., Secretary Ernest A. Burguières Jr., Treasurer Marion C. Clerc Barat B. Pollingue

Appendix 3. J. M. Burguières Company Boards of Directors, 1901–2012

January 28, 1974–January 27, 1975

Abner E. Hughes, Chair Edward E. Burguières, President Marie Louise Verbeck, Vice President Samuel T. Burguières Sr., Secretary Ernest A. Burguières Jr., Treasurer Marion C. Clerc C. Patout Burguières

January 27, 1975–January 30, 1978

Abner E. Hughes, Chair Edward E. Burguières, President Marie Louise Verbeck, Vice President Samuel T. Burguières Sr., Secretary Ernest A. Burguières Jr., Treasurer Marion C. Clerc

January 30, 1978–January 29, 1979

Abner E. Hughes, Chair/Vice President Edward E. Burguières, President Samuel T. Burguières Sr. Marion C. Clerc, Secretary Philip J. Burguières, Treasurer Ronald C. Cambre Ernest A. Burguières III

January 29, 1979–September 21, 1979

Abner E. Hughes, Chair Edward E. Burguières, President Philip J. Burguières, Vice President Ronald C. Cambre, Treasurer Samuel T. Burguières Sr., Secretary Ernest A. Burguières III William S. Patout III

September 21, 1979–January 28, 1980

Abner E. Hughes, Chair Edward E. Burguières, President* Philip J. Burguières, Vice President Ronald C. Cambre, Treasurer Samuel T. Burguières Sr., Secretary Ernest A. Burguières III

207

208

Appendix 3. J. M. Burguières Company Boards of Directors, 1901–2012

William S. Patout III Cornelius T. Ducey Jr. *Resigned as director on September 21, 1979, but remained president until January 28, 1980

January 28, 1980–January 26, 1981 Ronald C. Cambre, President Philip J. Burguières, Vice President Cornelius T. Ducey Jr., Secretary William S. Patout III Robert Peyroux, Treasurer

January 26, 1981–January 22, 1996 Philip J. Burguières, Chair Ronald C. Cambre, President Cornelius T. Ducey Jr., Secretary Albert N. Burguières, Treasurer Samuel T. Burguières Jr. William Perry Brown III Richard H. Leike

January 22, 1996–January 27, 1997 Philip J. Burguières, Chair Ronald C. Cambre, President Richard Leefe, Secretary Albert N. Burguières Samuel T. Burguières Jr., Treasurer William Perry Brown III Richard Leike

January 27, 1997–February 18, 2006 Philip J. Burguières, Chair Ronald C. Cambre, President Richard Leefe, Secretary Albert N. Burguières Samuel T. Burguières Jr., Treasurer William Perry Brown III Richard Leike Ernest Burguières III

Appendix 3. J. M. Burguières Company Boards of Directors, 1901–2012

February 18, 2006–February 10, 2007 Philip J. Burguières, Chair Ronald C. Cambre, President Samuel T. Burguières Jr., Treasurer William Perry Brown III Richard Leike

February 10, 2007–February 4, 2008 Philip J. Burguières, Chair Ronald C. Cambre, President William Perry Brown III, Secretary* Samuel T. Burguières Jr., Treasurer Richard Leike *Died February 4, 2008

February 4, 2008–March 28, 2009

Philip J. Burguières, Chair Ronald C. Cambre, President* Samuel T. Burguières Jr., Treasurer Richard Leike *Elected President Emeritus for Life, March 28, 2009

March 28, 2009–March 20, 2010 Philip J. Burguières, Chair Susanne Cambre, President Samuel T. Burguières Jr., Treasurer Richard Leike Doug Burguières, Secretary

March 20, 2010–February 25, 2012

Philip J. Burguières, Chair* Susanne Cambre, President Samuel T. Burguières Jr., Treasurer Doug Burguières, Secretary Robert Gorman Dale Pfost *Elected Chair Emeritus for Life on February 25, 2012

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Appendix 3. J. M. Burguières Company Boards of Directors, 1901–2012

February 25, 2012–Present

Susanne Cambre, Chair Glenn Vice, President* Samuel T. Burguières Jr., Treasurer Doug Burguières, Secretary Dale Pfost Robert Gorman Emily Burguières Dalicandro *Not a director but named president on February 25, 2012

Appendix 4 J. M. Burguières Family Councils, 2005–2013

2005–2007 Family Council (appointed by the J. M. Burguières Company Board of Directors) Susanne Cambre Dwyer, Denis Line, Chair Oliver James Reiss, Henry Line Anne Burguières Rappold, Henry Line Michele Pollingue Reed, Patout Line Doug Burguières, Denis Line Emily Burguières, Denis Line

2007–2009 Family Council (appointed by the J. M. Burguières Company Board of Directors) Susanne Cambre Dwyer, Denis Line, Chair Emily Burguières Dalicandro, Denis Line Oliver James Reiss, Henry Line Anne Burguières Rappold, Henry Line

2009–2010 Family Council (appointed by the J. M. Burguières Company Board of Directors) Leila Bristow, Ernest Line, Co-Chair Emily Burguières Dalicandro, Denis Line, Co-Chair Oliver James Reiss, Henry Line Anne Burguières Rappold, Henry Line Robert Gorman, Patout Line

2010–2012 Family Council (first elected council) Leila Bristow, Ernest Line, Chair Lillamaud Hammond, Patout Line, Deputy Chair Val Burguières, Denis Line Oliver James Reiss, Henry Line

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212

Appendix 4. J. M. Burguières Family Councils, 2005–2013

Charlotte Ulrich Schillaci, Inez Line Missy Ducey Godi, At Large Gertrude Pfost, At Large

2012–2013 Family Council

Lillamaud Hammond, Patout Line, Chair Leila Bristow, Ernest Line, Deputy Chair Val Miro-Quesada Burguières, Denis Line Oliver James Reiss, Henry Line Charlotte Ulrich, Inez Line Rick Burguières, At Large Missy Ducey Godi, At Large

Notes Abbreviations BFC Burguières Family Collection, Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Louisiana at Lafayette FBT Franklin Banner-Tribune JMB Minutes Minutes, J. M. Burguières Company Meeting, J. M. Burguières Company Headquarters, Franklin, La. LLMVC Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, Hill Memorial Library, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge LPSM Louisiana Planter and Sugar Manufacturer NOTP New Orleans Times-Picayune SMCR St. Mary Parish Conveyance Records, St. Mary Parish Courthouse, Franklin, La. TBCR Terrebonne Parish Conveyance Records, Terrebonne Parish Courthouse, Houma, La. TBCS Terrebonne Parish Civil Suits and Probate Records, Terrebonne Parish Courthouse, Houma, La.

Chapter 1 1. Francois Giordan and Gabriel-Jacques Laisné de Villévêque were the French promoters of the colonization effort. But in June 1830, five months before Eugène and Denis left France, Giordan had already abandoned the settlement and returned to France. Even Giordan’s replacement had left the colonists to fend for themselves. The failure of the colonization effort was both a tragedy and an embarrassment for France and Mexico. By April 6, 1831, the government of Veracruz rescinded the sale of the property. Back in France, Villévêque and Giordan were sued for fraud, having attracted 649 men, women, and children under false pretenses. In July 1831, a French ship, La Dore, was sent to rescue the remaining French settlers, who were brought to Havana and New Orleans and either remained there or boarded another ship heading back to France (Demard, Emigration Française, 21–78).

213

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2. Ibid. 3. Brasseaux, “French Immigration,” 350–56. 4. Twain, Life on the Mississippi, 37. 5. Brasseaux, “French Immigration,” 331, 325. 6. For more information on the Acadians, see Brasseaux, Founding of New Acadia; Brasseaux, French, Cajun, Créole, Houma; Ancelet, Edwards, and Pitre, Cajun Country; Hudson, Acadian Diaspora. 7. Brasseaux, “French Immigration,” 331. 8. Cable, Grandissimes, 132. 9. Brasseaux, “French Immigration,” 323–24; Tinker, Bibliography, 350, 353–54; Richard Bienvenu, “Enduring French Contribution,” 351–53; Cable, Grandissimes, 48. 10. Brasseaux, “French Immigration,” 323–24; Brasseaux, Founding of New Acadia. 11. Sparks, Memories of Fifty Years, chapter 26. 12. Brasseaux, interview; Augustin, History of Yellow Fever, 65. 13. Brasseaux, “French Immigration,” 344–45. 14. Saxon, Old Louisiana, 65. 15. Johnson, Birth of the Modern, 209–11; Wade, Sugar Dynasty, 25; Colonel Claudius F. Le Grand, April 19, 1836, qtd. in Saxon, Old Louisiana, 133–36. 16. Brasseaux, interview. According to passenger records of the schooner Jane, which transported Burguières and Lalande from Veracruz to New Orleans, Assumption Parish was their final destination. 17. U.S. Census, 1850. Descendants of Camille Léon Lalande and Josephine Emélie Lalande are still living in Louisiana today. 18. Genealogist Anne Morddel researched the French genealogy of the Burguières in the Parish of Saint-Francois de Fonneuve Registers, the Parish of Saint-Jacques in Montauban Registers, and the Registres Paroissiaux et État Civil, Archives Départementales de Tarnet-Garonne, Montauban, France. More information on the Burguières can be found at www.jmbfamilies.com, www.jmburguieres.com, and www.ssltllc.com. 19. Durant and Durant, Age of Reason Begins, 367; Guizot and Guizot de Witt, History of France, 4:21; Baird, Huguenots and the Revocation, 2:143–46; Félice, History of the Protestants of France, 245–46, 277. 20. Jordan Kellman to author, January 22, 2013. 21. Landes, Bankers and Pashas, 112; Guerville, New Egypt, 96–97. Edouard’s grandchildren, Roberto Burguières and Mathilde Burguières Ortalani, both of Italy, willed their grandfather’s collection of medals to the Louisiana Burguières, and Mathilde’s widower, Luigi Ortalani, delivered them to Jules M. Burguières Jr. and Ernest A. Burguières Sr. at Cypremort Plantation (Leila Marie Bristow, interview).

Chapter 2

1. Brasseaux and Fontenot, Steamboats, 17. 2. Twain, Life on the Mississippi, 174; Thorpe, “Remembrances,” 40. 3. Wes David to author, June 10, 2008.

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4. Heitman, Modernization, 10; Sitterson, Sugar Country, 3; Wade, Sugar Dynasty, 11. James McCoy qtd. in Follett, Sugar Masters, 23. 5. Heitman, Modernization, 8–9. 6. Brasseaux and Fontenot, Steamboats, 37; “Louisiana Sugar,” De Bow’s Review, January 1846, 55; Follett, Sugar Masters, 23. 7. Wurzlow, I Dug up Houma, 3:111, 1:45. Houma was founded in 1834 by Hubert Madison Belanger and Richard H. Grinage. It was part of the Joseph Hache Grant bought by Brigitte Belanger Thibodaux in 1828. 8. Ibid., 1:45. 9. Ibid., 3:1–4; Succession of William King, TBCS, Book G, no. 74, January 27, 1840; Succession of Caleb Watkins, TBCS, no. 76, October 14, 1840; Wurzlow, I Dug up Houma 3:109. The Succession of Jacques Verret, TBCS, lists sixty dollars payable to Eugène Burguières, schoolmaster, for tutoring services. 10. Wurzlow, I Dug up Houma, 3:109. 11. Ibid. 12. TBCR “G,” 7/1228, 480; Wurzlow, I Dug up Houma, 3:109. In 1839, Eugène purchased seven arpents on the right bank of Bayou Terrebonne, plus eight arpents on the left bank (TBCR “H” 201, 7/1402). Between 1866 and 1870, he bought three lots in Houma in a succession of sales. In 1870, Eugène Burguières bought nine arpents along Bayou Terrebonne from his son, Ernest Denis, along with all the buildings and improvements, for three thousand dollars cash (TBCR “Z” 294, 20/3871). In 1872, Eugène purchased at a sheriff ’s sale two lots owned by his brothers-in-law, Adolphe and Auguste Verret. 13. Wurzlow, I Dug up Houma, 3:109; http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry. com/~susanacm/verret2.html (accessed January 15, 2013). 14. Wurzlow, I Dug up Houma, 3:108. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid., 51. 19. Another connection between the Patouts and the Burguières was the 1880 marriage of Marie Corinne’s brother, Leufroy Patout, to Cecile Burguières, the daughter of Ernest Denis and Aglaé B. Burguières (Wade, Sugar Dynasty, 175). 20. Wurzlow, I Dug up Houma, 3:76–77. 21. Dennis Theriot to author, November 5, 2009. 22. Conover, Descendants, 254; Acadians Who Found Refuge. 23. Gertrude Reynaud Burguières, interview. 24. Richardson, “Teche Country,” 596; Grummond, “Social History,” 33. 25. For more information on Louisiana cuisine, see Marcelle Bienvenu, Brasseaux, and Brasseaux, Stir the Pot; Gutierrez, Cajun Foodways. 26. Wurzlow, I Dug up Houma, 3:52. 27. Marcelle Bienvenu, Brasseaux, and Brasseaux, Stir the Pot, 70. 28. Wurzlow, I Dug up Houma, 3:52.

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29. Ibid. 30. Ancelet, Edwards, and Pitre, Cajun Country, 84; Onebane, “Voices of Pointe Noire.” 31. Ernest Denis Burguières to Alice Burguières, March 1901, Jules M. Burguières Papers, LLMVC. 32. Onebane, “Voices of Pointe Noire.”

Chapter 3

1. Sparks, Memories of Fifty Years, 382–83. 2. U.S. Census, 1840, 1850; Historical Census Browser, 2004, http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/ collections/stats/histcensus/index.html (accessed January 1, 2010). 3. U.S. Census, 1850, Terrebonne Parish. 4. Pierce, “Historical and Statistical Collections,” 606; Wurzlow, I Dug up Houma, 3:109. Many of the Burguières, including Eugène and Marie Marianne, were married, baptized, and buried in the St. France de Sales Church and Cemetery. The first St. Francis de Sales Church, made of brick in Romanesque style, was built in 1848 and was destroyed by a hurricane in 1926. It was rebuilt in French Gothic style, and in 1977, St. Francis de Sales was elevated to the dignity of a cathedral (http://www.stfrancisdesaleshouma.org/History.html [accessed September 7, 2013]). 5. Follett, Sugar Masters, 21. 6. Beverly Broussard, “St. Mary Farmers Often Led Louisiana in Sugar Cane Cultivation,” Franklin Banner-Tribune clipping, 1976, BFC; Grummond, “Social History,” 25. 7. Sitterson, Sugar Country, 70; Wade, Sugar Dynasty, 34. 8. LPSM, January 25, 1899, 54; Follett, Sugar Masters, 22. 9. Moses Liddell to John R. Liddell, July 29, 1845, Moses and St. John Richardson Liddell Family Papers, LLMVC; Follett, Sugar Masters, 28. 10. Olmsted, Journey, 2:318–19; Follett, Sugar Masters, 28, 29; Conrad, “Some Observations,” 46–47. 11. Brasseaux and Fontenot, Steamboats, 70; Broussard, History, 157–58. 12. Cabildo: Antebellum Louisiana Agrarian Life. 13. Pierce, “Historical and Statistical Collections,” 609. 14. TBCR “O,” 188, 13/2349, “P,” 138, 13/2437; Wurzlow, I Dug up Houma, 3:111; Champomier, Statement, 1853–54; Follett, Sugar Masters, 22. 15. Champomier, Statement, 1853–54, 1854–55. 16. Wade, Sugar Dynasty, 60; Champomier, Statement, 1855–56; Follett, Sugar Masters, 43. 17. Champomier, Statement, 1856–57; Wade, Sugar Dynasty, 60. See also Dixon, Last Days. Last Island is only now beginning to reappear above the surface of the water as a consequence of coastal restoration efforts. See also Hearn, Chita. 18. Thomas Jefferson to John Holmes, April 22, 1820, in Jefferson, Works, 12:159. 19. Grummond, “Social History,” 26–27; U.S. Census, 1850, Terrebonne Parish, La., Slave Schedule; U.S. Census, 1860, Terrebonne Parish, La., Slave Schedule. 20. H. Arsonaux to M. Marianne Verret, TBCR, “P,” 13/2437, 138. 21. Terrebonne Parish Petition, TBCS, March 8, 1858; TBCR, April 1859.

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22. U.S. Census, 1860, Slave Schedule, Terrebonne Parish, La. 23. Historical Census Browser, 2004, http://mapserver.lib.virginia.edu/collections/ (accessed September 12, 2012); Follett, Sugar Masters, 24–25; John Merriman to F. D. Richardson, November 11, 1840, Weeks Family Papers, LLMVC. 24. Franklin Planters’ Banner, May 17, 1851, July–August 1852; Wade, Sugar Dynasty, 56. 25. Follett, Sugar Masters, 22–23; Sitterson, Sugar Country, 138. 26. U.S. Census, 1860, Terrebonne Parish, La. 27. “Perambulator,” “Attakapas-Boeuf Letter,” LPSM, September 6, 1890, 54; Rothfeder, McIlhenny’s Gold, 30. 28. Sitterson, Sugar Country, 215; Edmonds, Yankee Autumn, 74. 29. Alfred C. Weeks to John Moore, January 13, 1864, Weeks Family Papers. 30. Abbott, History, 2:305; Wurzlow, I Dug up Houma, 3:108. 31. Edmonds, Yankee Autumn, 57. 32. Bond, Maryland Bride, 41; Edmonds, Yankee Autumn, 55. 33. Wade, Sugar Dynasty, 71–72; “Reclamation de Madame Veuve Patout,” Patout v. U.S., French, and American Claims Commission, George P. Broussard Family Papers, New Iberia, La.; Wade, “Justice Delayed.” 34. Sitterson, Sugar Country, 226. 35. Ibid.; “Perambulator,” “Attakapas-Boeuf Letter,” LPSM, September 6, 1890, 54; LPSM, July 28, 1888, 35. 36. Sitterson, Sugar Country, 305; Plantation Diary, December 30, 1872, Andrew McCollam Papers, #449, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; New Iberia Louisiana Sugar Bowl, February 13, 1873. 37. Edmonds, Yankee Autumn, 61. 38. Sitterson, Sugar Country, 394, 320. 39. LPSM, July 14, 1888. 40. Taylor Beattie, Diary, June 9, 1865, qtd. in Sitterson, Sugar Country, 231; Thibodaux Sentinel, November 4, 1865; A. Franklin Pugh, Diary, October 9, 1864, qtd. in Sitterson, Sugar Country, 218. 41. Augustin, History of Yellow Fever, 844–90; Wade, Sugar Dynasty, 83. 42. Bernard, Tabasco, 30. 43. TBCR “P,” 11/327, February 24, 1868; TBCR “P,” 11/329; William S. Patout III, interview. Henry Colar, a former laborer at Cypremort Plantation, still lives in his father’s house, which was originally located at Cypremort (Henry Colar, interview). 44. TBCR “Y,” 172; TBCR “Z,” 29, 20/3871; TBCR “Z,” 414, 20/3917; Wurzlow, I Dug up Houma, 3:111. E. D. bought the Terrebonne Parish property from the estate of L. Lagrange for $430. 45. J. M. Burguières and Ernest Denis Burguières from Alphonse Bonvillain, SMCR, “R,” 12535, 342; St. Mary Parish Mortgage Book 25, 15/681, 192, St. Mary Parish Courthouse, Franklin, La.; SMCR, “S,” 476, 13/205. 46. Follett, Documenting Louisiana Sugar; “The Louisiana Planters’ Association,” LPSM, December 12, 1903. James B. Brown was the son of Siméon B. and Almira Stoufflet Brown,

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natives of Germany. James began work at the plantation at the age of twenty-one as an overseer and eventually became president of the Mrs. E. D. Burguières Planting Company. In 1887, he became the overseer of the Ivanhoe Plantation and lived there with his family (Perrin, Southwest Louisiana, 361, 362). 47. Wanda Viguerie Bailey, interview; Earl M. Bailey, interview; Lois Hebert Luke to author, 2006. At the turn of twentieth century, the bell served more than religious purposes. It was also a means of communication in the rural countryside. A fire was announced with a loud clanging, while a death in the area was broadcast by a tolling—eight times for a man, six times for a woman, and three times for a child. Men working in the fields and women busy with their chores stopped work to count the tolls. Children rushed to the church to get the news (Bourg, interview). Jules Burguières donated the land and an eight-hundredpound bronze bell for St. Helen’s Church (SMCR, “Z,” 774, no., 1896, August 1, 1890). That bell is now located at the Catholic church in Baldwin.

Chapter 4 1. U.S. Census, 1870; Urdang, Timetables, 229. 2. Heitmann, Modernization, 25–48. 3. U.S. Department of the Treasury, Bureau of Statistics, World’s Sugar Production, 2589. 4. Baton Rouge Daily State, October 2, 1899. 5. Dennett, Louisiana as It Is, 226. 6. Ibid., 208. 7. TBCR “Z” 643, M12/2961, 643–44. 8. Wade, Sugar Dynasty, 141; Ripley, Slaves and Freedmen, 59. 9. Wade, Sugar Dynasty, 45. Wade’s book is a detailed history of the Patout family. Siméon’s descendants have kept the family sugarcane business, M. A. Patout and Son, alive into the twenty-first century. 10. Jules Burguières to Marie Corinne Patout, October 4, 1872, February 4, 1873, BFC. 11. Ibid., [ca. March 1873]. Writing to Marie Corinne on March 12, 1873 (BFC), Jules described his efforts to select groomsmen, suggesting his younger brother, Leufroy, Ernest Bodin, and Frank Viguerie. 12. LPSM, April 13, 1889, 180; Wade, Sugar Dynasty, 176–77. 13. Jules Burguières to Marie Corinne Patout Burguières, July 23, 1874, BFC. 14. LPSM, March 8, 1890, 154; Wade, Sugar Dynasty, 125. 15. Jerome Dupont to Leila Marie Bristow, December 24, 2010, in possession of author. 16. Wade, Sugar Dynasty, 110–11. The Burguières subsequently sold Cherry Grove to E. D. Guidry, who was not within the extended family, but it returned to the fold in 1916, when members of the Patout family bought it from the Guidry heirs for sixteen thousand dollars (Guiberteau, interview). 17. Sitterson, Sugar Country, 305; Succession of Jules M. Burguières Sr., Orleans Parish, La., no. 60,450, October 13, 1899, Orleans Parish Courthouse, New Orleans; SMCR, “LL,” March 21, 1901, 637.

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18. SMCR, 6 “C,” 419, 68,371; Dennett, Louisiana as It Is, 214. Jules subsequently bought E. D.’s half interest and became the sole owner of Cypremort Plantation. 19. Perrin, Southwest Louisiana, 12, 18. The other two portages were Portage Sauvage and Portage Guidry. 20. William F. Weeks to John Moore, December 24, 1858, Weeks Family Papers, LLMVC; Follett, Sugar Masters, 15; John Moore to Mrs. Joseph Snyder, October 11, 1866, http://shadowsontheteche.wordpress.com/history/the-civil-war/after-the-war/; Shadows-on-the-Teche. 21. LPSM, August 18, 1888, 73; Wade, Sugar Dynasty, 132–33; Louisiana Sugar Bowl, 1877; Laurent Bouchereau, Statement, 1868–77. 22. SMCR “N,” 34, no. 14597, November 19, 1881. 23. Succession of Marie Marianne Burguières, TBCS, August 8, 1883. Viguerie appraised the Burguières’ residence tract at nine hundred dollars and other land Eugène owned at six hundred dollars. Jules retained his parents’ house until 1894, when Clifford Percival Smith purchased it. Smith, a successful lumberman and real estate agent, eventually moved the Burguières’ home to the side of the lot and built a grand Queen Anne–style manor on the property at 501 E. Park Street, which is now on the National Register of Historic Places. For information on the C. P. Smith family, see Smith and Portré-Bobinski, Southern NeoColonial Home, 57. 24. Perrin, Southwest Louisiana, 360; LPSM, November 9, 1889, 295. 25. LPSM, November 16, 1889, 304; Follet, Documenting Sugar. 26. More than a century later, after the Florence Plantation home had been deserted for ten years, the J. M. Burguières Company donated the historic house to the Franklin Office of Tourism to serve as the centerpiece for a Civil War Museum along Irish Bend Road, the site of a significant battle. The home was lifted off its foundation, placed atop a truck, and transported to the Port of West St. Mary, where it was loaded onto a barge for the journey to its new location. To date, the museum has not been established, and the house remains vacant and overgrown with vegetation (“Museum House Begins Journey,” FBT, November 3, 1999, 1). 27. “How to Work Cane,” LPSM, April 14, 1900, 60. 28. LPSM, September 4, 1893. 29. Ibid., March 8, 1890, 5. 30. Joan Burguières Brown, interview; Wade, Sugar Dynasty, 176. The body of Marie Corinne Patout Burguières was subsequently moved to the Burguières’ family cemetery at Florence Plantation.

Chapter 5 1. City of New Orleans, 14. 2. Wurzlow, I Dug up Houma, 3:110. 3. Alcée Bouchereau, Statements, 1893–94. 4. Sitterson, Sugar Country, 303; Broussard genealogy at www.ancestry.com; Brasseaux, interview.

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5. NOTP, August 21, 1877. 6. Spring Hill College. 7. Sparks, Memories of Fifty Years, 372. 8. Ibid. 9. Richard Bienvenu, “Enduring French Contribution,” 353–54; Tinker, Bibliography, 281. 10. See Bernard, Cajuns; Ancelet, Edwards, and Pitre, Cajun Country. 11. Dennis Theriot to author, April 22, 2007; Cable, Grandissimes, 253, 303. 12. Burke, “Garden District Study Report,” 13. 13. New Orleans Daily Delta clipping, 1847, BFC; Burke, “Garden District Study Report,” 17. 14. Richard Bienvenu, “Enduring French Contribution,” 352, 353; Dizikes, Opera in America, 26. 15. City of New Orleans, 96. 16. In 1870, Jefferson built a Victorian plantation, replete with gingerbread trim around the porch that surrounded the house. The home was located near Cypremort, and Jefferson used it as a retreat where he could rest, hunt, and fish. Now known as Jefferson Island, it is the site of the twenty-acre Rip Van Winkle Gardens. It is likely that the Burguières knew the famous actor (Wurzlow, I Dug up Houma, 3:94). 17. Boston Club Pamphlet in possession of author; “Best of New Orleans.” Jules’s six sons and many of their descendants, as well as the male members of the families into which his children and grandchildren married, later became Boston Club members. 18. Mardi Gras, www.novareinna.com/festive/krewes.html (accessed February 4, 2005). 19. Miceli, Pickwick Club, 1–2;. Hearn, Historical Sketchbook, 97–98; New Orleans Gambit Weekly, September 3, 2003. White was one of the best men at Ernest A. Burguières Sr.’s wedding. 20. Hearn, Historical Sketchbook, 99. 21. LPSM, June 24, 1893, 388; New York Times, May 18, 1895; Spring Hill College to author, March 27, 2006. 22. Heitmann, Modernization, 89; Wade, Sugar Dynasty, 175; LPSM, October 7, 1899. 23. Moore, Louisianians and Their State, 71; Centennial Celebration, 41. Levert and his family lived near Jules and Ida in the Garden District, and Levert’s children attended Spring Hill College with Jules’s sons. 24. Prichard, “Routine,” 176–77. 25. William P. Miles, Diary, October 19, 1885, qtd. in Sitterson, Sugar Country, 304; Heitmann, Modernization, 165, 304. 26. Heitmann, Modernization, 191. 27. Annual Cyclopedia of Insurance, 565; Brasseaux and Fontenot, Steamboats, 128; Sitterson, Sugar Country, 339. In the 1896 Louisiana gubernatorial election, Pharr ran as a Republican-Populist fusion candidate, narrowly losing to Henry Foster in a hotly contested election marred by rumors of fraud. 28. Alcée Bouchereau, Statements, 1878–1917.

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29. City of New Orleans, 96; New Orleans Daily States, October 2, 1899. The factory had thirteen centrifugals, three large vacuum pans, and massive railroad tanks for distribution. 30. Broussard, History, 26. 31. Heitmann, Modernization, 69, 90–91; Sugar at LSU. 32. Heitmann, Modernization, 75–76. 33. Sitterson, Sugar Country, 255–56; Sugar at LSU. Jules M. Burguières Jr. later graduated from the Sugar Experiment Station. 34. Heitmann, Modernization, 248; Imperial Sugar Company, http://www.imperialsugar. com/fw/main/Dixie_Crystals-928.html (accessed March 2008); N. O. Republican Printing Co. to J. Jacobs and Co., April 10, 1895, qtd. in Sitterson, Sugar Country, 338–39. 35. LPSM, February 1, 1890, 69. 36. Iberia Parish Conveyance Records, New Iberia, La.; JMB Minutes, August 2, 1896; Modern Planter 41 (1911): 3; Wade, Sugar Dynasty, 214; Blackburn, “Burguières Family.” 37. “Turpin Tyne,” LPSM, March 13, 1890, 4. 38. LPSM, December 23, 1899. 39. Unidentified newspaper clipping, BFC; Alice Burguières Walker to Denise Burguières Hein, July 31, 1981, BFC; Sheila Walker to Denise Burguières, March 15, 1999, BFC; New York Times, July 7, 1898. According to their published wedding announcement, Denis P. J. and Alice were leaving for Paris on July 5, but this information may well have been inaccurate, or the couple may have changed their plans after hearing that the ship had gone down. 40. Follett, Documenting Louisiana Sugar. 41. LPSM, July 1, September 2, 1899. 42. Fortier, Louisiana, 1:360; New Orleans Daily States, October 2, 1899; Davis, Story of Louisiana, n.p.; undated clipping, New Orleans Times-Democrat, BFC.

Chapter 6 1. Bill Elzey, “Paper Tells Story of Life-Saver, Thirty-Eight-Year-Old Fisherman,” Houma Today, November 30, 2011; Wurzlow, I Dug up Houma, 1:94–96. 2. Sitterson, Sugar Country, 300–302; Heitmann, Modernization, 251. 3. FBT, July 10, 1952; Sitterson, Sugar Country, 343, 341. 4. Spring Hill College Records, 1905, 149, 1930, 127; Gertrude Reynaud Burguières, interview; Davis, Story of Louisiana, 213. Jules also attended Jefferson College, a Catholic college in Convent, Louisiana, originally run by the Marist Fathers and Georgetown University (NOTP, September 8, 1960). 5. Last Will and Testament of Jules M. Burguières Sr., May 10, 1899, in Succession of Jules M. Burguières Sr. 6. Ibid. 7. Ida Broussard Burguières v. Succession of Jules M. Burguières, 28 So. 883 (La. S. Ct. 1900), no. 13,586; Ernest A. Burguières III to author, September 23, 2008.

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8. Succession of Jules M. Burguières Sr.; Clerc, interview; St. Paul, interview. 9. J. M. Burguières Articles of Incorporation, March 5, 1901, in Succession of Jules M. Burguières Sr. 10. JMB Minutes, March 15, 1901. 11. Ibid. 12. Gertrude Reynaud Burguières, interview. 13. Iberia Parish Conveyance Records, New Iberia, La.; Guiberteau, interview; LPSM, December 14, 1907, 381; Dennett, Louisiana as It Is, 98. 14. SMCR, “TT,” 18, no. 34,708, April 20, 1905; JMB Minutes, March 15, 1905. Lone Magnolia was also known as Lone Star Plantation and was one of the Savent M. Swenson properties purchased from Emile Prevost in 1866 (Guiberteau, interview). Archaeologists subsequently discovered prehistoric artifacts and remnants of slave quarters at North Bend Plantation. 15. The stockholders were J. B. Levert, with 474 shares at one hundred dollars each; J. A. Levert, 1 share; Stubbs, 50 shares; S. Palfrey, 50 shares; Denis P. J. Burguières, 175 shares; Jules M. Burguières Jr., 125 shares ( JMB Minutes, March 7, 1905). 16. JMB Minutes, March 7, 1905; SMCR, “ZZ,” no. 38,519, 554. 17. JMB Minutes, March 3, 1906. 18. “Rivers and Harbors,” Washington Post, January 15, 1906; LPSM, March 16, 1907, 163. 19. Kansas City Star, April 12, 1907; NOTP, August 27, 1908. 20. NOTP, August 27, 1908. 21. Sitterson, Sugar Country, 343. 22. JMB Minutes, March 10, 1907; Guiberteau, interview. Some of the factory machinery went to Cypremort, and some was sold piecemeal. 23. Wade, Sugar Dynasty, 214; Modern Sugar Planter 41 (1911): 3; Orleans Parish Conveyance Records, Book ZZ, 554, February 1, 1910, Orleans Parish Courthouse, New Orleans. 24. LPSM, December 24, 1910, 412, January 14, 1911, 77, 29; Wade, Sugar Dynasty, 216. 25. JMB Minutes, May 5, 1911. 26. Ibid. 27. Sitterson, Sugar Country, 344; New Iberia Enterprise, August 17, 1927. The company fought lawsuits for breach of contract for a number of years after the fire (Lozes v. Segura, 52 La. Ann. 1844; 28 So. 249; Segura Realty Company v. Segura Sugar Company, La. 82 So. 634; Robichaux v. Segura Sugar Company, La. 34 So. 744). 28. JMB Minutes, October 1919. 29. Dennett, Louisiana as It Is, 131. 30. JMB Minutes, February 4, 1913. 31. C. Patout Burguières to Jules M. Burguières Jr., May 12, 1913, BFC. 32. Ibid.; JMB Minutes, May 30, 1913. 33. Reed, interview; St. Paul, interview. 34. Centennial Celebration, 41. 35. “1857: Mistick Krewe of Comus Was First Modern Mardi Gras Organization in New Orleans,” NOTP, August 22, 2011.

Notes

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36. Rex. 37. NOTP, March 9, 1924; Rex. Henry and Sallie Burguières’ daughter, Marie Alice, served on the Rex court in 1931. Ernest and Isabella’s daughter, Marie Robin Burguières, served in 1953, and their grandson, Kemper Williams Brown, served in 1977. Catherine Clerc, granddaughter of Inez Burguières, was Queen of the Athenians in 1978. See Rex; NOTP, January 25, 1978, 36. 38. NOTP, April 22, 1938; unidentified newspaper clipping, BFC; New Orleans TimesDemocrat, January 1, 1911. 39. Reed, interview; Richard Leike to author, September 27, 2005. 40. Reed, interview; Richard Leike to author, September 27, 2005. 41. New Orleans Daily Picayune, August 25, 1911, 5. 42. Heitmann, Modernization, 25; Bishop, Theodore Roosevelt, 132–33. The Sugar Trust’s egregious acts went far beyond monopolizing the industry and organizing boycotts. One of Roosevelt’s last efforts as president was to personally supervise a suit against the Sugar Trust for fraudulent evasion of customs duties. By attaching a spring device to the scales at the wharves where imported sugar entered the country, the Trust smuggled millions of tons of raw sugar into the country without paying the duties. The Trust was found guilty in 1909 and fined two million dollars, but the verdict did not stop the oligopoly. 43. Sitterson, Sugar Country, 349–50, 35; Louisiana Planter 68 (1912): 121–22, 53 (1914): 162–63. 44. U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Hearings, July 17, 1911, 1870–71; NOTP, August 26, 1911. 45. U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Hearings, July 17, 1911, 1870–71. 46. Ibid. 47. “Louisiana Planters Lose Able Leader,” New Orleans Daily Picayune, August 25, 1911, 5. In September 1914, the State of Louisiana sued to cancel the Trust’s license to do business in the state. That effort failed, and a year later, Jules Burguières Jr. was still fighting the same battle. Jules ultimately lost his position as a director of the New Orleans Sugar Exchange because of his opposition to the Sugar Trust. Not until World War I did the federal government bring the American Sugar Refining Company under its control. See Sitterson, Sugar Country, 349–53; John Pharr Jr. Diary, 1916, John N. Pharr Family Papers, LLMVC. 48. “Louisiana Planters Lose Able Leader,” New Orleans Daily Picayune, August 25, 1911, 5. 49. Succession of Joseph E. Burguières, Orleans Parish, La., no. 98,040, September 18, 1911, Orleans Parish Courthouse, New Orleans. 50. Jules M. Burguières Jr. to Ernest A. Burguières Sr., February 22, 1915, BFC. 51. NOTP, August 25, 1911.

Chapter 7 1. “The Preparation, Planting, and Cultivation of Sugar,” LPSM, February 21, 1903, 123–24.

224

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2. Sitterson, Sugar Country, 343–45. 3. Ibid., 348; Louisiana Planter 50 (1913): 342–43, 51 (1913): 185, 298. 4. U.S. Court for Eastern District of Louisiana, Docket no. 14921; JMB Minutes, March 19, 1917. 5. JMB Minutes, February 10, 1916, August 9, 1919. 6. Jules M. Burguières Jr. to Ernest A. Burguières Sr., December 11, 1913, BFC. 7. Ibid., September 16, December 6, 13, 1913. 8. Minutes, Special Directors Meeting, J. M. Burguières Company, June 6, 1913, BFC. 9. Ibid., June 30, 1913; Jules M. Burguières Jr. to Ernest A. Burguières Sr., September 19, October 2, 1913, BFC. The Dulac Cypress and Shingle Company, later Dulac Cypress Company, had been owned by the Burguières since 1903. Denis Burguières served as president. 10. JMB Minutes, June 12, 1912. The Garden District property was a square bounded by Howard, Freret, Washington, and Sixth Streets ( JMB Minutes, September 12, 1913). Junca’s lease began on April 18, 1912, and called for him to pay the JMB Company $116.67 per month plus ⅓ of the profits “if managed well.” Apparently, he did manage well, because he had a long career with the Burguières, and his son, Harold Junca, later took over his father’s position. Harold, too, was a “blue ribbon” planter and a skilled politician. Joseph Junca also managed the plantation store ( Junca, interview; Kerne, interview). 11. JMB Minutes, August 12, 1913. 12. Ibid., May 13, 1918, September 23, 1920; Ronald Charles Cambre, interview. 13. Leila Marie Bristow to author, 2005–12; Small Portrait, 5; Martin, John Hardie, 44–45, 109–10. Isabella’s father, Robert Moore, came to New Orleans from Liverpool, England, and inherited the estate of his uncle, also named Robert Moore, who had made millions as an investment banker and stockbroker. In addition to serving as president of his uncle’s firm, the younger Moore became president of the St. Charles Hotel Company. Isabella’s mother, Leila Hardie Moore, was the daughter of John Timmons Hardie, a New Orleans cotton magnate whose father, John Hardie, came to the United States from Scotland and established Thornhill Plantation in Talladega, Alabama. 14. LPSM, February 5, 1916, 90, February 12, 1916, 107; correspondence 1913–15, Jules M. Burguières Papers; Wade, Sugar Dynasty, 247. 15. Ernest A. Burguières to Denis P. J. Burguières, December 30, 1915, Jules M. Burguières Papers; Wade, Sugar Dynasty, 246. 16. Sitterson, Sugar Country, 352. 17. Louisiana Planter 61 (1918): 346; Dalton, Sugar, 34–39. Sitterson, Sugar Country, 353; Follett, Documenting Louisiana Sugar. 18. John Pharr Jr. Diary, 1920, John N. Pharr Family Papers, LLMVC; New Orleans Item, November 29, 1921; Sitterson, Sugar Country, 13, 356, 468. 19. J. M. Burguières Company Income Statement, 1924, BFC. Cypremort produced 6,058 tons (an average of 10.29 tons per acre); Florence produced 5,766.76 tons (8.60 per acre); Inez produced 2720.64 tons (8.46 per acre); North Bend produced 1,618.48 (3.42 per acre); and Midway produced 2,982.41 tons (6.25 per acre).

Notes

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20. Wade, Sugar Dynasty, 268. 21. Sitterson, Sugar Country, 343. 22. LPSM, October 1, 1927, 281, October 8, 1927, 300, November 19, 1927, 411; Gilmore’s Louisiana Sugar Directory, 78; Wade, Sugar Dynasty, 277. 23. Sitterson, Sugar Country, 382. 24. Ibid., 356–57. 25. Wade, Sugar Dynasty, 275. 26. New York Times, May 14, July 9, 1928. 27. NOTP, September 25, 1931. 28. Jules M. Burguières Company Income Statement, 1928–29, BFC. 29. Ibid., 1929–30, BFC. 30. Ibid., 1931, BFC. The note was purchased by the Jules M. Burguières estate (Succession of Jules M. Burguières Jr., no. 6730, September 26, 1960, St. Mary Parish Courthouse, Franklin, La.). 31. Reed, interview. 32. NOTP, June 24, 1930. 33. Blackburn, “Burguières Family.” 34. Gilmore’s Louisiana Sugar Manual, 87–88. 35. NOTP, April 22, 1932. 36. Ibid., April 25, 1932. 37. Ibid., May 3, 1932. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid., June 17, May 5, 1932. 40. Ibid., June 11, 21, January 8, 1932. 41. U.S. Patent Office, Annual Report (1900), Patent no. 631,722; LPSM, August 17, 1907, 102; FBT, July 10, 1952; Automotive Industries, July 4, 1912, 44–45. 42. U.S. Patent Office, Annual Report (1913), Patent no. 1,072,307; LPSM, July 15, 1916, 46–47. 43. U.S. Patent Office Application no. 1,746,190, February 13, 1928; patent received February 4, 1930; serial no. 254,170. 44. Alice Burguières Walker to Denise Burguières Hein, July 31, 1981, BFC. 45. Albert N. Burguières, memoirs, September 3, 2009, BFC; Clerc, interview; St. Paul, interview; Gertrude Reynaud Burguières, interview; Kerne, interview; Junca, interview; Bourg, interview; William Edward Burguières, interview; Robert Burguières, interview; Albert Burguières, interview; Elsie Burguières, interview. 46. Albert N. Burguières, memoirs, September 3, 2009, BFC; Clerc, interview; St. Paul, interview; Gertrude Reynaud Burguières, interview; Kerne, interview; Junca, interview; Bourg, interview; William Edward Burguières, interview; Robert Burguières, interview; Albert Burguières, interview; Elsie Burguières, interview. 47. Obituary, BFC. 48. NOTP, September 16, 1936. 49. William Burguières, interview; death certificate, St. Mary Parish, 16637, February 10, 1937, St. Mary Parish Courthouse, Franklin, La.

226

Notes

Chapter 8 1. Davis, Story of Louisiana, 213; Jules M. Burguières Jr., Some Notes on Florida. 2. Wiles, Cuban Cane Sugar, 76–84. 3. “Self-Preservation in Cuba,” LPSM, October 4, 1913, 233. 4. Jules M. Burguières Jr. to Ernest A. Burguières Sr., September 14, 1909, BFC. 5. “Louisiana Talent to the Front,” LPSM, October 4, 1913, 233–34. In Cuba, the CubanAmerican Company owned the Chaparra refineries and plantations, Constancia, Delicias, San Manuel Tinguaro at Perico, Nuevo Luisa at Jovellanos, Unidad at Ciruentes, Mercedita at Cabanas, and the Cuban Sugar Refinery at Cardenas. In Louisiana, it owned the Colonial Sugar Company (plantation, sugar factory, and refinery) in St. James Parish. 6. Jules M. Burguières Jr. to Ernest A. Burguières Sr., September 16, 1913, BFC. 7. Hanna and Hanna, Lake Okeechobee, 106–7. 8. Ibid., 109; New Orleans Times-Democrat, January 6, 1884. 9. Hanna and Hanna, Lake Okeechobee, 109, 114, 116. 10. Ibid., 95, 57, 103. 11. Ibid., 103. 12. Southern States Land and Timber Company; Hanna and Hanna, Lake Okeechobee, 136, 135. Southern States’s first president was Pearl Wight, a New Orleans businessman and civic leader and one of the organizers of the Whitney Bank. Maurice Stern, a prominent New Orleans insurance executive and philanthropist, served as the company’s treasurer. Board member Edward Wisner, known as the Father of Reclamation, bought and drained more than a million acres of swampland in the Mississippi Delta. Other officers and directors included T. H. McCarthy, vice president; John M. Dresser, secretary; Ira Wight, Pearl Wight’s son; and George A. Hero of Hero Land Company, which had extensive landholdings on the west bank of the Mississippi River in Jefferson Parish. 13. Sitterson, Sugar Country, 361. 14. Hanna and Hanna, Lake Okeechobee, 57, 125–26, 132; Dovell, “Railroads,” 256–57. 15. Hanna and Hanna, Lake Okeechobee, 125–26, 132. 16. Ibid., 132. 17. Sitterson, Sugar Country, 372; Morton D. Winsberg, “South Florida Agriculture,” in South Florida, ed. Boswell, 18–21. 18. Dovell, “History,” 400–401; Sitterson, Sugar Country, 366, 372. 19. George F. Bensel’s Historical Account. 20. Southern States Land and Timber Company; Hope, Loxahatchee Groves’ Yesteryears, 5, 7. 21. West Palm Beach Post, August 31, 1917. 22. Marks, Who Was Who, 54; West Palm Beach Post, September 9, 1917. 23. “Florida Greatest Cattle Country in the World Says Texas Rancher,” West Palm Beach Post, September 9, 1917. In 1957, Bensel bought Loxahatchee Groves from Southern States; a year later, he sold the Groves to Loxahatchee Investments. He served as president of Southern States from 1943 until his death in 1961. Today, residents of Loxahatchee Groves still protect their rural community from the intrusion of development and commercialism.

Notes

227

The official Loxahatchee Groves web site describes the residents as “nonconformists” who live on “large lots with room for nurseries, horse farms, a nudist colony, a goat-cheese dairy and an exotic-animal preserve.” The cement silos that stored cattle feed still stand (Hope, Loxahatchee Groves’ Yesteryears, 25; Marks, Who Was Who, 35; http://www.loxahatcheegrovesfl. gov/Pages/index [accessed November 20, 2013]). 24. Perrine, “Cape Sable,” 182. 25. Ibid., 82, 134. 26. Hanna and Hanna, Lake Okeechobee, 140, 134; Palm Beach Weekly News, March 22, 1912. 27. Hanna and Hanna, Lake Okeechobee, 134. 28. Ibid. 29. Sitterson, Sugar Country, 355. 30. West Palm Beach Post, July 5, 1925; Hanna and Hanna, Lake Okeechobee, 139–51. 31. LPSM, April 9, 1921, 235; Wade, Sugar Dynasty, 266; Dovell, “History,” 405–6; Sitterson, Sugar Country, 367. 32. New Orleans Item clipping, 1925, BFC. 33. Hanna and Hanna, Lake Okeechobee, 136. 34. George F. Bensel’s Historical Account; Hanna and Hanna, Lake Okeechobee, 131. 35. West Palm Beach Post, September 9, 1917; Southern States Land and Timber Company; Marks, Who Was Who, 70. 36. George F. Bensel’s Historical Account; Hanna and Hanna, Lake Okeechobee, 223. 37. The list of buyers of Southern States property is useful for understanding the magnitude of the company’s holdings. Those buyers included the owners of the Florida East Coast Railway Company; Humble Oil; the Methodist Episcopal Church; the Western and Northern Railroad Company; the Brown Company; the Palm Beach Everglades Telephone Company; the Trustees of the Internal Improvement Fund; the Boston Palm Beach Development Company; the City of West Palm Beach; the Board of Commissioners of the Everglades Drainage District; the Loxahatchee Sub-Drainage District; the County of West Palm Beach; the State of Florida; and the New York-Miami Realty Company. In addition, in 1947, Southern States sold approximately fifty-two thousand acres to the Florida Game and Fish Commission, the predecessor of the Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, to create the J. W. Corbett Wildlife Management Area Marsh Restoration. See Hanna and Hanna, Lake Okeechobee, 223–226. 38. Succession of Jules M. Burguières Jr. 39. Vicker, Panic in Paradise, 22. Farmers Central Bank was located on the corner of South Olive Avenue and Evernia Street in a Spanish Colonial building designed by Arthur Harmon, who later designed the Empire State Building. 40. New York Times, March 6, 1929; Mott, Between the Ocean and the Lakes, 47. 41. Peiss, “American Women”; Marie Robin Burguières Bristow, interview. 42. Dobson, Bulls, Bears, Boom, and Bust, 260; West Palm Beach Post, July 1, 1925. 43. Montpelier, Florida’s Heritage, 36; George, “South Florida”; Beattie, Market Crashes. 44. West Palm Beach Post, July 1, 1925; Curl, Palm Beach County, 87; Bamford, Florida History, 69–70.

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45. George F. Bensel’s Historical Account. 46. Wade, Sugar Dynasty, 271, 275; LPSM, October 11, 1924, 296, February 6, 1926, 116. 47. “South Florida Boom and Bust”; West Palm Beach Post, June 1, 2003. 48. U.S. Sugar Corporation. 49. Ibid.; Judy Sanchez to author, April 25, 2006; Hanna and Hanna, Lake Okeechobee, 306–15. 50. Jules M. Burguières Jr., Some Notes on Florida, n.p. 51. Ibid.

Chapter 9 1. Reed, interview. 2. Philip Joseph Burguières, interview. 3. Gertrude Reynaud Burguières, interview; JMB Minutes, April 4, 14, 1939. 4. Gertrude Reynaud Burguières, interview; Leila Marie Bristow to author, December 31, 2012. Jules held the title of vice president and general manager throughout his term, while the position of president remained vacant. However, when loans were made at the Whitney Bank, Jules signed as president of the company ( JMB Minutes, 1936–60). 5. “‘Friends of LSU Library’ Donates Rare Collection,” Baton Rouge Morning Advocate, February 10, 1963; Clerc, interview. Jules’s collection was appraised at ten thousand dollars, purchased by the McIlhenny Company at Jules’s estate auction, and donated to Louisiana State University’s Special Collections at Hill Memorial Library. Jules’s collection included publications on the sugarcane industry in Jamaica, Cuba, Haiti, Guatemala, Barbados, Santo Domingo, and the Philippines as well as other works that reflected his diverse interests: Longfellow’s Evangeline (1897 edition), Charles Dickens’s works (1800s), Milton’s Paradise Lost (1890 edition), and poetry by Coleridge, Thomas Gray, and James Grainger (“The Sugar Cane Poem,” 1766). Jules also acquired travel books such as A Voyage around the World (1780) and histories, including History of the West Indies (1801), A Letter to the Women of England on Slavery in the Southern States of America (1863), and Catechism du Diocese de Nantes (1689). 6. Henry Colar, interview. 7. Blanchard, interview; Kerne, interview; Organelle Borel, interview by Connie Viguerie Durocher, November 24, 2012, courtesy of Connie Viguerie Durocher; Connie Viguerie Durocher to Leila Marie Bristow, November 25, 2012, courtesy of Leila Marie Bristow. 8. Tabb, interview. 9. Ibid.; Junca, interview. 10. Conrad and Lucas, White Gold, 63–73. 11. Ibid. 12. Denise Burguières Hein to author, September 2005; Marie Robin Burguières Bristow, interview.

Notes

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13. J. M. Burguières Company Income Statement, May 31, 1944, BFC; Conrad and Lucas, White Gold, 70. 14. Gilmore’s Louisiana Sugar Manual, 88; FBT, July 10, 1952. 15. FBT, July 10, 1952. 16. Lauret, interview; FBT, July 10, 1952. 17. As of 1944, the company owed Whitney Bank $245,471 plus the crop loan ( J. M. Burguières Company Income Statement, May 31, 1944, BFC). 18. Marie Robin Burguières Bristow, interview; Henry Colar, interview. 19. Davis, Story of Louisiana, 247. Ernest’s widow, Isabella, later had his body moved to a separate in-ground crypt (Leila Marie Bristow to author, December 31, 2012). 20. Bob Angers Jr., “Burguières Dies of Heart Attack during Civic Meet,” FBT, September 8, 1960. 21. Ibid. 22. Junca, interview.

Chapter 10

1. Lansberg, Succeeding Generations, 3. 2. Ronald Charles Cambre to author, 2006. 3. JMB Minutes, March 15, 1963. 4. William Burguières, interview; Robert Burguières, interview; Albert Burguières, interview. In 1930, Ed Burguières married Mary Ellen Bell, the daughter of Charles Arthur Bell, the superintendent of the Morton Salt Company at nearby Weeks Island, and Eva Naylor Bell. In 1952, following his divorce from Mary Ellen, Ed married Elsie Thomas. 5. William Burguières, interview; Robert Burguières, interview; Albert Burguières, interview. 6. Albert Burguières, interview; William Burguières, interview. 7. William Burguières, interview; Philip Joseph Burguières, interview. 8. Ronald Charles Cambre, interview. 9. Last Will and Testament, Jules M. Burguières Jr., May 27, 1959, in Succession of Jules M. Burguières Jr. 10. Philip Joseph Burguières, interview. 11. JMB Company Records, BFC; Succession of Jules M. Burguières Jr.; Succession of Florence C. Burguières, Civil District Court for the Parish of Orleans, State of Louisiana, no. 223-778, October 13, 1937, Orleans Parish Courthouse, New Orleans. 12. Last Will and Testament, Jules M. Burguières Jr. Among other assets, Jules Jr.’s estate consisted of 1,075.13 shares of the JMB Company and 760 shares of Southern States Land and Timber Company. He owned more than twelve hundred acres in Iberia, Terrebonne, Orleans, and St. Bernard Parishes (Succession of Jules M. Burguières Jr.). 13. Dennett, Louisiana as It Is, 28–29; Dawes, “Hot Spicy Island”; “Salt Dome’s High Point Is Sought: Four Wells being Drilled at Côte Blanche in ‘World Cellar,’” NOTP,

230

Notes

November 7, 1921; “The Southern States,” NOTP, March 21, 1893; “Outings in Louisiana: Catharine Cole’s Buggy Ride over Iberia, Parish; the Teche Village of Jeanerette— Factories,” NOTP, September 16, 1888. 14. “Island of Salt Is Located Off Coast; Côte Blanche Virtually Salt,” Daily Herald, September 21, 1921; Broussard, History, 56. 15. NOTP, April 4, 1955; Cote Blanche Salt Mine. Today, Côte Blanche is leased to the North American Salt Company, which extracts ten thousand tons of salt each day. The Island Partnership has received income from millions of tons of salt, and the mine contributes an estimated twenty-five million dollars to the local economy each year. 16. William Burguières, interview, Philip Joseph Burguières, interview; Ronald Charles Cambre, interview. 17. Amendment folio 277 ( JMB Minutes, December 26, 1975); William Burguières, interview, Philip Joseph Burguières, interview; Ronald Charles Cambre, interview. By the end of 1975, the J. M. Burguières Company had subsumed its subsidiary corporations, the Dulac Cypress Company, the Cypremort Sugar Company, and the Bayou Cypremort Company. 18. JMB Minutes, July 11, 1977. 19. Ibid.; Philip Joseph Burguières, interview. 20. Wade, Sugar Dynasty, 347; William Burguières, interview; Robert Burguières, interview; Albert Burguières, interview. 21. Philip Joseph Burguières, interview. 22. Ronald Charles Cambre to author, 2006; Philip Joseph Burguières, interview. 23. Philip Joseph Burguières, interview. 24. JMB Minutes, 1980. 25. Leila Marie Bristow to author, December 31, 2012; Ronald Charles Cambre, interview; William Burguières, interview; Albert Burguières, interview. 26. William Burguières to author, December 20, 2010.

Chapter 11 1. Philip Joseph Burguières, interview. 2. Ibid. 3. Sullivan, “I Didn’t Want to Make Another Mistake,” 226; Philip Joseph Burguières, interview; Kyle Pope, “Burguières Chosen Weatherford Chief,” Houston Chronicle, April 5, 1991; Share, Oil Makers, 201. 4. Philip Joseph Burguières, interview. 5. Ronald Charles Cambre, interview. 6. Philip Joseph Burguières, interview. 7. Ronald Charles Cambre, interview. 8. Philip Joseph Burguières, interview. 9. Ronald Charles Cambre, interview. 10. J. M. Burguières Company Income Statement, 2010, BFC.

Notes

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11. Lauret, interview. Wetland mitigation banking involves creating economic incentives to encourage landowners to restore, create, enhance, and/or preserve wetlands (http://www. ecy.wa.gov/programs/sea/wetlands/mitigation/banking/index.html [accessed November 3, 2013]). 12. Philip Joseph Burguières, interview. 13. Ibid. 14. Southern States Land and Timber Company; Ronald Charles Cambre, interview; Leila Marie Bristow, interview. 15. Southern States Land and Timber Company; Ronald Charles Cambre, interview. 16. Philip Joseph Burguières, interview. 17. Ibid.; Ronald Charles Cambre, interview. 18. JMB Minutes, May 31, 2010. 19. Ronald Charles Cambre to author, June 9, 2011; JMB Minutes, December 31, 1989. 20. Philip Joseph Burguières, interview. 21. JMB Minutes, February 18, 2006. 22. Ernest A. Burguières III, interview. Ernest Burguières III nonetheless believed that Cambre and Philip brought stability to the business and remained committed to the family company. 23. J. M. Burguières Charter, BFC. 24. Ibid. 25. The Family Council included members descended from Henry I. Burguières (Thomas Burguières, Mike Lowe, O. J. Reiss, and Sam Burguières Jr.) as well as descendants of Ernest A. Burguières (Leila Marie Bristow and Ernest Burguières III). Nonfamily members included J. M. Burguières Company office manager Debi Lauret and Harry Smith ( JMB CFO).

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Bibliography Primary Sources

Sugar Industry Publications Bouchereau, Alcée. Bouchereau’s Advance Directory for 1908–09 of the Sugar Manufacturers and Cane Growers of Louisiana. ———. Bouchereau’s Directory for 1912. ———. Bouchereau’s Revised Directory of the Sugar and Sirup Manufacturers, 1909–10. ———. Statements of the Sugar and Rice Crops Made in Louisiana. 1878–1917. Bouchereau, Laurent. Statement of the Sugar and Rice Crops Made in Louisiana. 1868–77. Champomier, P. A. Statement of the Sugar Crop Made in Louisiana. 1844–60, 1868–69. Gilmore Louisiana-Florida Sugar Manual. 1911–29. Gilmore’s Louisiana Sugar Directory. 1928–29. Gilmore’s Louisiana Sugar Manual. 1942–43. Louisiana Planter and Sugar Manufacturer. 1888–1929. Louisiana Sugar Bowl. 1877. The Year Book of the Louisiana Sugar Cane Industry, 1939. New Orleans: Sugar Journal, 1940. Year Book of the Louisiana Sugar Planters’ Association for the Crop Years 1910–1924.

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Terrebonne Parish Courthouse, Houma, La. Civil Suits, Contracts, Conveyances, Maps, Mortgages, Successions. U.S. Bureau of Corporations. Report of the Commissioner of Corporations on the Tobacco Industry. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1909. U.S. Census Bureau. Fifth Census of the United States. 1830. ———. Sixth Census of the United States. 1840. ———. Seventh Census of the United States, 1850. ———. Eighth Census of the United States. 1860. ———. Ninth Census of the United States. 1870. ———. Tenth Census of the United States, 1880. ———. Eleventh Census of the United States. 1890. ———. Twelfth Census of the United States. 1900. ———. Thirteenth Census of the United States. 1910. ———. Fourteenth Census of the United States. 1920. U.S. Congress. House of Representatives. Hearings Held before the Special Committee on Investigation of the American Sugar Refining Co. and Others. 3 vols. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1911. U.S. Department of the Treasury, Bureau of Statistics. The World’s Sugar Production and Consumption: Showing the Statistical Position of Sugar at the Close of the Nineteenth Century. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1902. U.S. Patent Office. Annual Report of the Commissioner of Patents. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, various years.

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Index Page numbers in bold indicate an illustration. Alice B. Plantation, 26–27, 44, 46, 58, 60 American Cane Growers’ Association (ACGA), 79, 104, 111 American Sugar Cane League, 16, 111–12, 140 artesian well, 63

Burguières, Denis P. J., Sr., 65, 67–69, 74, 77, 81, 85–86, 87, 88, 90, 92, 94, 100, 102, 103, 104, 107–9, 113–15, 118–22, 143–45, 150, 154–56, 159 Burguières, Edouard Edmond, 12–13, 181 Burguières, Edward Edmond, 153, 154, 170 Burguières, Ernest Aloysius, III, 155, 161 Burguières, Ernest Aloysius, Jr., 134, 159 Burguières, Ernest Aloysius, Sr., 61, 62, 75, 86, 90, 96, 101, 104–7, 108, 109–13, 115, 116, 117–18, 125, 134–35, 143, 146, 149, 151, 155–56, 167–68, 172–73 Burguières, Ernest D. (E. D.), 23, 26–28, 30–31, 35, 35–36, 37, 39, 41, 43–44, 46, 49, 56, 58, 62 Burguières, Ernestine, 45 Burguières, Eugène Denis, 3, 12, 14–15, 17–20, 22–25, 27–28, 31–32, 35–40, 42, 44, 48, 50, 56, 60, 69, 123, 176 Burguières, Florence Clothilde, 85, 86, 88, 121–22, 150, 156 Burguières, Henry I., 61, 86, 88, 92, 96, 98, 104, 113–14, 146, 148, 150, 153, 155 Burguières, Ida Laperle, 24, 67, 68, 72–73, 75, 85–87, 108, 121, 150 Burguières, Inez, 68, 86, 96, 108, 155–56 Burguières, Isabella Moore, 96, 108, 109, 134 Burguières, Jean Louis, 11–12

Bayou Salé Plantation, 14, 17, 89–93, 105–7, 114, 146, 150 Bensel, George, 129–31, 135–36, 140 Big House at Cypremort Plantation, The. See Cypremort Plantation bonds. See family bonds Boston Club, 73–75, 95, 98, 103, 108, 151, 181 Bristow, Leila, 146, 174 Bristow, Robin Burguières, 151 Broussard, Ida Laperle. See Burguières, Ida L. Broussard, Marie Alice. See Burguières, Marie Alice Burguières, Aglaé Bonvillain, 23, 26–27, 39, 45, 46, 181 Burguières, Alice, 23, 28, 45 Burguières, Annette, 45 Burguières, Charles Patout, 62, 97 Burguières, Cheryl Courrégé, 165 Burguières, Denis P. J., Jr., 159, 163

245

246

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Burguières, Joseph Eugene, 60, 65, 68, 74, 81, 85–86, 87, 88–91, 94, 98–101, 104, 122, 150, 157 Burguières, Jules Martial, Jr., 61, 123, 124–25, 128–29, 131–32, 134, 136–37, 138, 139–44, 145, 146–48, 149, 150–60, 162–63, 167, 170 Burguières, Jules Martial, Sr., 24, 47, 48, 49–53, 55–56, 58–60, 62–70, 72–83, 85–88, 90, 93, 95, 102, 108, 123, 125, 143, 151, 157, 160, 163, 170, 175, 176, 181 Burguières, Laura, 90–91 Burguières, Louise, 85, 157 Burguières, Margaret, 45 Burguières, Marie, 45 Burguières, Marie Alice Broussard, 67–68, 81, 102, 103, 119–20, 122, 155 Burguières, Marie Corrine Patout, 23, 40, 51, 52, 53, 55–56, 60, 65, 67, 86, 88, 101, 107, 181 Burguières, Marie Louise, 60, 75, 77, 84, 85, 86, 88 Burguières, Marie Marianne Verret, 19–20, 21, 22–24, 27, 31, 35, 37–38, 60 Burguières, Mary Elizabeth Lilla Withnell, 97, 98 Burguières, Philip J., 145–46, 156, 159–61, 163, 164, 165–67, 169–74 Burguières, Sallie Trufant, 96, 98, 114 Burguières, Sam, Sr., 155, 160–61 Burguières Cottage, 95 business leaders, 75, 171 Cambre, Ron C., 156, 159–63, 164, 165–70, 172–73 Cape Sable, Florida. See Florida Chamber of Commerce, 138, 151 Cherry Grove Plantation, 56 Civil War, 6, 8, 10, 23–24, 30, 33, 38–39, 41, 47–48, 51, 59, 74, 76–78, 90, 125, 176, 179 Clarifying Cane Juice Settler, 119, 199 class system, 8, 69 Corne, C. L., 119, 150

Côte Blanche Island, 25, 57, 107, 150, 152, 157–58, 162, 167, 176 Cuba, 78, 91, 104–5, 109–10, 112, 123–25, 134 Cypremort Plantation, 16, 24, 56, 57, 58, 60, 62–63, 65, 77–78, 80–81, 92–93, 101–2, 120, 121–22, 143–47, 157, 162, 174, 176, 180–81; The Big House, 119, 120, 121–22, 146, 151, 162; Renovated Cypremort Plantation House, 174 Cypremort Sugar Company, 88, 92, 110, 114, 149, 150–60 Cypremort sugar mill, 114, 115, 122, 147, 160–61, 179 cypress trees, 14–15, 17, 22, 44, 58, 89, 93–94, 98, 104, 106–7, 119–20, 125 Dahlberg, Bror G., 138, 141 Dalicandro, Emily Burguières, 174 Democratic Party, 79, 82, 116–17, 135 diversification, 42, 67, 75, 151, 166 Dwyer, Susanne Cambre, 176–77 economic system, 8, 36, 69 economic turmoil, 4–5 Everglades. See Florida family bonds, 20, 25, 85, 177 family feuds, 29, 171, 173 family generations, 20, 22, 25, 44, 47, 49, 70, 85–86, 108, 145, 151, 153–54, 157, 159, 161, 166, 171, 173–74, 179, 181; third, 150, 181; fourth, 163; fifth, 173 Farmers Central Bank, 138–39, 140 feuds. See family feuds fifth generation. See family generations First National Bank of Franklin, 75, 78 Florence Plantation, 46, 60, 62–63, 67, 77, 82, 121–22, 147, 151–52, 162, 180. See also St. Helen’s Cemetery on Florence Plantation Florida: Cape Sable, 131–32; Everglades, 123, 125–28, 130–33, 135–38, 142; land

Index boom, 132–33, 136; land bust, 141–42; West Palm Beach, 112–13, 127–28, 130, 133–36, 139–41, 146, 168 fourth generation. See family generations France. See Montauban, France Franklin, Louisiana. See Louisiana Garden District (New Orleans, Louisiana), 8, 71–73, 88, 90–91, 107, 114, 176 generations. See family generations Great Depression, 112–13, 117, 141, 145–46, 148, 179 Hammond, Lillamaud Leike, 173 Harcrow, Alice, 165 Hoover, Herbert, 115–18 Houma, Louisiana. See Louisiana Houston Texans (football team), 165 Hughes, Abner E., 154, 170 Hurricane Katrina, 171, 180 Hurricane Rita, 174 hurricanes, 29, 33, 46, 67, 84, 91, 104, 180 industry leaders, 79, 90 Inez Plantation, 56, 57, 77 J. M. Burguières ( JMB) Company, 25, 29, 56, 64, 79–80, 85, 87–88, 90–94, 103–7, 109–10, 113–14, 118, 141, 143–44, 146–60, 163, 165–68, 169, 171, 173–76, 179–80 J. M. Burguières ( JMB) Company Office, 168 J. M. Junca and D. P. J. Burguières Sugar Cane Scraper, 118, 197 Jane, 4 Jules Rhum, 175 Junca, Harold, 148, 152 Junca, Joseph M., 118 Lalande, E. Denis, 3–4 land boom. See Florida

247

land bust. See Florida lawsuits, 128, 154, 157, 159, 170 Lehman, Arthur, 127, 136 Lehman, Herbert H., 127 Lehman Brothers investment bank, 127 Levert, Burguières, and Company, 75, 77, 88–93 Levert, J. B., 67, 75–77, 80, 87, 89–90, 93, 95 Long, Huey P., Jr., 115–18 Louisiana: Franklin, 17, 34, 78, 81, 100, 152, 167–69, 176; Houma, 17–20, 22–23, 27, 31, 38, 40, 42, 44, 46, 49, 51, 55, 60, 100; New Orleans, 3–10, 13–15, 17, 22–23, 25, 28, 30–31, 33–35, 41, 43–44, 47, 49, 54, 59, 66–79, 81–82, 87–88, 90–91, 94–96, 98–106, 108–10, 113–15, 117, 121, 123, 125, 127, 129, 134–35, 139, 146–47, 151, 155, 157–59, 167–68, 171, 176, 180–81; Terrebonne Parish, 9, 14, 17–20, 22–23, 28, 31–32, 34–37, 39–40, 42, 44, 49–51, 67, 70, 75, 79, 83, 93, 104, 107, 111, 176 Louisiana Planters and Sugar Manufacturers Association (LSPA), 78–80, 105 Louisiana Sugar Planters’ Association, 90, 99–100, 103, 111 Love, Bessie, 138 Loxahatchee Groves, 129–31, 136 marketing, 34, 50, 66–67, 75–77, 93, 104, 124, 129, 142 mineral rights, 108, 159, 166, 168–70 Mississippi, Pass Christian, 94–95, 100, 147, 151 molasses, 3, 40, 76–77, 89, 106, 112, 114, 149 Montauban, France, 10–11 New Orleans, Louisiana. See Louisiana North Bend Plantation, 89, 104, 107, 114, 145, 163 North Bend Sugar Refining and Manufacturing Company, 89, 90–93

248

Index

patents, 118–19 Patout, Marie Corrine. See Burguières, Marie Corrine Patout Patout, William (Billy), 44, 160 Pierson, Henry, 170 plantations. See sugar plantations political leaders, 20–21, 23, 66 political parties, 117. See also Democratic Party; Republican Party political system, 36, 69 politics, 7, 31, 71, 77, 111, 115, 118 Prohibition, 137 Reciprocating Sleeve Valve Motor, 118, 198 Renovated Cypremort Plantation House, 174 Republican Party, 79, 115–17, 151 Roaring Twenties, 112, 137, 179 Sacred Heart Academy, 121, 181 salt mining, 24–25, 43, 107, 152, 157–58, 160, 162, 166–67, 176 Shell Oil Company, 158 slavery, 5–6, 8–9, 17, 24, 30–31, 34, 36–43, 47, 59 social change, 137 social hierarchy, 8 Southern States Land and Timber Company, 77, 111, 113, 123, 127, 129–30, 133, 135–36, 138, 141, 153, 166–68, 172 Southern Sugar Company, 130, 136, 138, 141 Spring Hill College, 65, 68, 75, 86, 108–9 St. Helen’s Cemetery on Florence Plantation, 46, 82, 100–101, 121–22, 151, 157, 162, 179. See also Florence Plantation St. Nicholas Catholic Church, 54, 100 Sugar Bowl, 16, 16–17, 26, 30, 41, 102, 123, 134 Sugar Cane Scraper. See J. M. Junca and D. P. J. Burguières Sugar Cane Scraper sugar industry, 17, 31, 35, 37–39, 42–43, 47–48, 50, 60, 63, 66–67, 73, 77–78, 80, 82, 90, 99–100, 104–5, 108–10, 112–13, 118,

124–25, 128, 141–42, 144, 146–48, 151, 166; manufacturing, 48, 78, 80, 110; mills, 17, 24, 35, 46, 58, 84, 88, 102–4, 107, 114–15, 120, 122, 124, 132, 147–48, 160–61, 167, 179; production, 16–17, 32, 34, 50, 55, 66, 75, 93, 104, 111, 113, 118, 129, 141, 167 sugar plantations, 41, 46, 160. See also individual plantations sugar planters, 22, 32–33, 39, 44, 55–56, 62–63, 65, 77, 79–81, 90–91, 98–100, 103–4, 111, 130, 134 sugarcane, 6, 17, 24–25, 28, 31–34, 37, 41, 43, 46–48, 50–51, 56, 58, 64, 79–82, 84, 87, 89, 91, 102, 105, 110, 113, 123, 128–32, 134–35, 141–44, 146–48, 152, 161–62, 166, 176, 179, 181 Syme, Marie Louise Burguières, 155–57 Terrebonne Parish. See Louisiana Texas, 39, 83, 99, 110, 131, 166–67, 169 third generation. See family generations timber, 17, 22, 44, 58–59, 63, 89, 93–95, 104, 106–7, 119 2606 Prytania Street, New Orleans, Louisiana, 72 U.S. Sugar Corporation, 130, 141 West Palm Beach, Florida. See Florida Whitney Bank of New Orleans, 105, 113, 146, 150, 154, 157, 170 World War I, 37, 109, 132–34, 137 World War II, 141, 148