The Southwest Louisiana Historical Association's Newsletter

Imperial Calcasieu Notes

September 2005 Vol. 9 No.4 Kathie Bordelon, Editor

October Meeting

The Southwest Louisiana Historical Association will hold its next meeting on Monday, October 17, 2005, at 7:00 p.m. in the SWLA Genealogical Library at 411 Pujo Street. The speaker will be Cyndi Brame, who will discuss the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Mrs. Brame’s presentation will center on her handmade quilt which represents Lewis and Clark’s: “Amazing Adventure.” Each block on the quilt illustrates some facet of their journey across North America. Joe Brame, Cyndi’s husband, will read selections from the Lewis and Clark journals that further define the quilt blocks. Please plan on attending and bringing friends to witness this “amazing” creation!

July Meeting Report

Members of the Historical Association met on Monday, July 18, 2005, at the South Beauregard Museum in Longville, LA, to unveil the Longville historical marker. Nell Hayes, President of the Historical Association, served as hostess for the occasion. After Nell welcomed all the guests, the pastor of the Longville First Baptist Church led the invocation. Following the pledge of allegiance, Joe V. Warren, President of the South Beauregard Museum, thanked the Association for providing the marker which was placed in front of the museum.

Pati Threatt presented the text of the marker which consisted of a brief history of the Long-Bell Lumber Company, the founder of Longville. Members had the opportunity to tour the museum either before or after the luncheon, graciously provided by the citizens of Longville.

The Beauregard Parish Sheriff’s Office served hamburgers and hot dogs courtesy of their “War Wagon.” Delicious! The First Baptist Church served red beans and rice and dessert. Fabulous! Over 80 people were in attendance at this festive occasion. If you missed it - you missed out!

McNeese Encyclopedia

The McNeese Archives has created an electronic encyclopedia of information about McNeese State University. The MSU Encyclopedia consists of entries on topics relating to MSU, such as Joli Blon, “Rowdy,” campus buildings, individuals, etc. Each entry consists of a short paragraph and, where appropriate, cross-references and pointers to additional information.

The bulk of the information needed for the Encyclopedia came from the Archives Department’s extensive vertical files. The vertical files mainly contain clippings and ephemera collected by the Archivist, Kathie Bordelon, in the twenty-five year history of the Archives Department. The vertical files, arranged by subject, hold a wealth of information about MSU and Southwest Louisiana.

Through the years, the Archives Department has gained a reputation, both on campus and off, as the primary contact for questions about the history of the university and the community. The Archives staff uses the vertical files on a daily basis for both short answers and as a starting point for more detailed research. By distilling the information about MSU contained in the vertical files and presenting it on the web, the Archives can share its knowledge with the entire world without physical and temporal limitations.

The Encyclopedia is available from the Archives Department website at library.mcneese.edu/depts/archive . Funds for a student worker for the MSU Encyclopedia were furnished through a gaming grant.

Nominating Committee Needed

Please call Nell Hayes if you would like to volunteer to serve on the Nominating Committee. The Historical Association will need new officers in the Spring to take over several of the offices which are becoming vacant.

Please consider becoming an officer. Don’t wait to be called! Volunteer today!

What’s Happening at the McNeese Archives?

The archivists at McNeese, Kathie Bordelon and Pati Threatt, are training a brand new crop of student workers. We have two students from Turkey, two from Hornbeck, and two from the Lake Charles area. We are fortunate to have two volunteers: Henry Doiron, who has been a volunteer in the archives for a number of years, and Mrs. Jocelyn Rees, a new volunteer who is a retired math education teacher from McNeese. We are very happy with all our student workers and hope that, after training, they will be with us until they leave McNeese.

We have received one blessing directly attributable to Hurricane Katrina. Sister Helen Fontenot and Sister Barbara Dupuis, library director and archivist, respectively, from Holy Cross College in New Orleans, have volunteered to work in our archives several mornings a week. They have been displaced from their own institution as the college buildings have been turned over to the New York Fire Department volunteers who have come to New Orleans to help with recovery efforts. We are very happy to have our two new volunteers, but of course, regret the circumstances leading to them being in Lake Charles. Sister Helen received her EDS from McNeese in 1977.

Kathie is traveling to Maryland in October to participate in a joint meeting of the Federalsburg Historical Society and the Caroline County Historical Society. John McNeese spent several years of his life in this area of the Eastern Shore and descendants of the family he lived with are still in the area. Members of those societies will present papers on McNeese’s life in the area and on his experiences in the Civil War, especially the Battle of Gettysburg. Kathie will talk about McNeese in Texas and Louisiana. This is a wonderful opportunity and Kathie is very much looking forward to the trip. Imagine! Maryland in October!

Gingham Ladies Appeal for Chair!

Elaine Cameron has resigned as chair of the Gingham Ladies after serving in this capacity for many years. Thank you, Elaine! She asks that anyone interested in taking over this position please contact her.

The Gingham Ladies are an auxiliary of the Historical Association who serve as volunteer hostesses at various community events such as the Palm Sunday Home Tour and the Lake Charles Little Theatre productions. They have been performing this function since 1976, and we certainly don’t want the tradition to stop. A recent influx of new members is keeping the organization energized, but they do need someone to accept the position of chair.

Maude Reid’s Double Life of Public Service

By Robert Benoit

There was once a time, way back before World War I, when Calcasieu Parish children were not routinely immunized against dreaded diseases and area mothers were not provided with baby wellness information, and poor children did not receive good, healthy lunches at school. But all of these things and many more were changed when the parish hired Maude Reid as its first public health nurse.

Miss Reid was born in 1882 in Lake Charles, right in the middle of a legendary family of Southwest Louisiana sheriffs and public servants. Her father was David John “Kinney” Reid, Jr., who served five non-consecutive terms as sheriff of Calcasieu Parish. Her mother was May Helm Reid, who taught school in Leesburg (now Cameron) in the 1870s. Before Maud Reid’s birth, her grandfather, David John Reid, Sr., and his brother (John Reid) and her uncle (Alexander L. Reid) had also served as sheriff of Calcasieu Parish. After them and her father, her nephew, Henry A. Reid, and his son, Henry A. “Ham” Reid, Jr., would also serve as sheriff of Calcasieu Parish.

Being born into a family such as hers kept young Maude in the public spotlight while she was growing up. In a wonderful old photo of the Lake Charles Grand Volunteer Fire Companies Parade on July 4,1889, she is barely visible as she served at tender age of seven as the queen of the parade. Her carriage for this occasion was the Phoenix Volunteer Fire Company’s hook-and-ladder wagon pulled by a beautiful team of matched horses. The parade route was north on Ryan Street, which at that time was still a dirt thoroughfare.

After this auspicious entrance into public life, she was educated in Lake Charles public schools. She then attended and graduated from Bellevue Hospital’s School of Nursing in New York City, followed by college study and degrees in social work and public health from the University of Virginia.

With the completion of her normal education, she returned to Lake Charles where she became Calcasieu Parish’s first public health nurse. She would serve in this position for over 32 years, during which she introduced a whole list of firsts that benefitted the lives of her constituents, their families, and generations yet unborn. Among other accomplishments in Calcasieu public health, Miss Reid is credited with introducing smallpox and diphtheria immunizations, starting the first baby wellness clinics, organizing a free dental program for needy children, starting the first free lunch programs in the public schools for needy children, and helping to organize a clinic for crippled children. Of course, while she was doing all these “firsts”, she was also carrying on her routine duties in public health.

In appreciation of her work, after her retirement she was awarded a silver loving cup by the community for a career of “distinguished service” and a plaque by the medical community for her work in public health.

Maude Reid’s achievements in public health are legendary, but they represent only half of life’s work. The other half (her service as Lake Charles’ self-appointed, pioneer local historian) is in many ways just as remarkable as all of her work in public health.

For about 50 years prior to her death in 1978, Miss Reid spent countless hundreds of hours putting together what have come to be known as “The Maude Reid Scrapbooks.” In these volumes, which are now a major source of information for students and scholars of Lake Charles history, she surrounded her collected photos, newspaper clippings and documents of local history with thousands of her own words in handwritten and typed comments, explanations, anecdotes and mini-essays about the people, events and places that she wanted future generations to know about and appreciate when the information that was then available to her would be lost forever if she didn’t record it.

When asked many years ago about how she got started a Lake Charles’ self-appointed historian, she replied “Oh my. It was in the 1920s when the late Dr. Gordon Holcombe received a letter from the late Dr. Rudolph Matas of New Orleans, requesting material of this area for a medical history he was writing. I was a Red Cross public health worker, and I had every opportunity to travel about and ask many questions. [And] this was the beginning of my active interest [in local history.]”

Her active interest, which turned into a passion, eventually resulted in the creation of 20 huge volumes that are large enough and thick enough to be compared in some ways to John J. Audubon’s famous “Elephant” bird folios. They are now preserved in the Archives and Special Collections Department of McNeese State University.

Maude Reid, the pioneer Calcasieu public health nurse and passionate Lake Charles historian, died at her home, 1604 Alvin St., on September 10, 1978, at he age of 96. Her funeral was held in the Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd, a church that her mother had helped found in 1886. She is buried in Graceland Cemetery in Lake Charles.

Miss Zena Thomson

By Robert Benoit

Scattered among the cemeteries of Southwest Louisiana are the graves of many interesting former teachers. One of these graves is that of Darling Zena Thomson. It is located in Orange Grove Cemetery. Miss Thomson died in 1950 at age 79.

Zena Thomson taught school for a number of years beginning in 1896 at old Lake Charles Central High School. A small woman, her photo can be seen in the school¹s faculty picture of 1899-1900.

Miss Thomson was born in Champagne, Ill., and received her early education in Ames, Iowa, where her father, Alexander Thomson, taught engineering. In 1884 her father moved his family to Lake Charles at the request of Jabez B. Watkins, her mother’s brother, so that he could take charge of the engineering projects on Watkins’ 1.2 million acre land purchase in Calcasieu and Cameron parishes.

After arriving in Lake Charles, one of Miss Thomson¹s first public appearances was in the spring of 1885 when she accompanied her father, mother, sister, Uncle Jabez and 21 newspaper writers from all over the country on a widely publicized trip down the Calcasieu River to view Watkins¹ huge land purchase. This trip was the beginning of a campaign that eventually brought hundreds of Midwestern immigrant families into the area.

After this Miss Thomson went back north to attend college at the University of Michigan where she received a degree in 1890. Then she returned to Lake Charles to live with her parents in a large house (no longer there) on the corner of Broad and Common streets before taking a teaching job offered to her by Calcasieu Superintendent John McNeese.

Before World War I Miss Thomson gave up teaching for a few years to devote her time to charity work and social activities. Then she returned to teaching again in 1919 for four more years, after which she worked in insurance, in a bank, did more charity work and continued her hobby of working with horses at which she was said to be an expert.

In the fall of 1949 when I met her, Miss Thomson was a little 78-year-old lady living all alone in her home on Prien Lake. She had no close relatives and very few contacts with the outside world other than some friends, her male cook who lived nearby, and my friend, who was hired to sleep in her house at night so that she would not be completely alone.

At that time I was still in high school, and my friend, who had already graduated, occasionally invited me to stay with him in Miss Thomson’s house, which I enjoyed doing because it gave me an opportunity to stay out late. On these nights we would stop at Tom & Mac’s and Fred’s drive-ins, cruise up and down Ryan Street and then head out to Prien Lake to Miss Thomson’s.

On our arrival we were always expected to go in and speak with her no matter how late it was, if her light was on, which it nearly always was.

What I remember best of these visits is being greeted by a friendly, very rumpled-appearing little lady sitting on the side of a bed filled with books. There were books everywhere - in tall stacks on the floor, on chairs -everywhere in fact except for a narrow swath down one side of the bed where she slept. During these late night visits Miss Thomson always seemed glad to see us and anxious to talk; although, possibly because of the age gap, our conversations usually didn’t last very long and consisted of her asking questions and our providing answers as best we could.

Over a number of visits she asked about our school, our parents, our siblings, what we wanted to accomplish in life, the books we liked to read - almost anything she could think of to engage us in polite conversation. Then, when she was satisfied that we didn’t have anything more to contribute, she allowed us to exit to our bedroom next to a screened-in porch.

One day in May of 1950, about six or seven months after my first visit, my friend told me that Miss Thomson had died that afternoon of a heart attack. Her obituary listed no close relatives.

Half a century ago when Miss Thomson was asking us all of those questions, I don’t think I ever asked her a single one. As luck would have it, today I can think of a number of them.

I would like to ask her about her Uncle Jabez, the great land entrepreneur; about her father’s work laying out a railroad from Lake Charles to Kansas City and opening the Cameron marsh to industry and navigation and about John McNeese and Old Central High School. . . just for starters.

Unfortunately, these questions have come to me 54 years too late.

More Stories from Old Imperial Calcasieu

Good news! The new Mike Jones book will be available soon! This compilation of Mike’s historical articles (1990-2004) from the American Press will be hardbound and indexed. You may recall that the Historical Association printed Mike’s previous articles (1979-1989) in three volumes and these were a phenomenal success as a fund raiser. We hope this volume will be also. We plan to have it ready by September in time for Christmas. If you’d like to reserve your copy, or several, please call Kathie (475-5734) or print and mail a reservation form here. Cost has not been determined at this time, but will probably be around $25.

Announcements

Dues are now payable for 2005. Please send your check for $10/individual or $15/couple to George Ann Benoit.

The dates for the next SWLA Historical Association meetings are:

October 17, 2005. Speaker: Cyndi Brame

January 23, 2006. Speaker: Col. (Ret.) Donald Ladner

April 24, 2006. Speaker: C. J. Christ

The Southwest Louisiana Historical Association relies on its members to contribute ideas for publications and historical markers, speakers for our meetings, and other projects. Please let us know if you have any suggestions.

Webmaster: pthreatt@mcneese.edu