Strange True Stories of My Louisiana Ancestors, Part III

PILGRIMAGE TO PLANTATION COUNTRY Story

Parts I and II of Flournoy's "Strange True Stories" series can be found in our April and May 2023 issues, respectively, and on our website at countryroadsmag.com.

It was November 2020, in the thick of a global pandemic and following back-to-back hurricanes, when hI found myself driving through South Louisiana, down I-10, then I-310. On River Road in Destrehan, I stopped to view Hans Geist’s massive “Mile of History” mural spanning the wall outside River Road Market, illustrating 300 years of St. Charles Parish history. I jumped back in my car, proceeding south on Hwy 90 towards Morgan City.

Elevated sections of highway ribboned the damp terrain, preserving the natural beauty of bayous, swamps, and rivers below. I passed a sign for Des Allemands in St. John the Baptist Parish, where Highway 90 parallels the Old Spanish Trail, weaving through craggy cypress trees draped with moss, like shadowy George Rodrigue paintings. I crossed Bayou Lafourche near Raceland and the Atchafalaya River bridge into Berwick before bending north toward Patterson. Along the way, historic markers staked the plantation-dotted landscape, some bearing the names of my ancestors.

They were, after all, why I came. I had followed the spiritual pull to connect to these places that figured so prominently in my lost family history. I wondered if historic markers might be the only thing left to link me here.

My ongoing quest to trace the history of the Charpantiers, who fled the French Revolution and settled along Bayou Teche in St. Mary Parish, now expanded to ancestors throughout South Louisiana, including the “German Coast” of the Mississippi River. In the 1720s, French leaders lured German settlers to Louisiana to help tame the wild, unruly land. Despite severe hardship, the Germans flourished and blended with the French, sprinkling my French line with German names.

Tracing my paternal Planchard/Roussel line through the region, I found several properties once owned by relatives, some still standing. I created a map, intending to visit as many as possible.

Mostly, I wanted to visit the original land where Joseph Charpantier and his wife, Marie Adelaide de Tavanne, (or Alix de Morainville) built their plantation. Researching Attakapas region land grants in the Library of Congress, I stumbled across a rare 1795 map charting planters in the region, and an obscure document referring to “Charpantier’s Bend,” which corresponded with land records for Charpantier Plantation. Magnifying the planter map and turning it sideways, I could barely make out the names of property owners. Then, bam —I spied the name "Charpantier" scrawled at a bend in the river where Bayou Teche meets the Atchafalaya River.

Comparing the bend on the old map with the same location on Google Earth, I zoomed in, searching for houses or businesses—finding nothing, just a vast sea of sugarcane fields stretching for miles, with only one dwelling—a steel fabricating company. The guy who answered the phone told me the land next door might be owned by the Aucoins or Hymels. An online phonebook for Patterson listed several Hymels and Aucoins, but gave no addresses.

Going down the list, I politely relayed my spiel about tracing ancestors again and again. Some assumed I was a scammer or trying to sell something, but after about six calls, I hit pay dirt. Merry Hymel listened patiently before asking, “So wait, you’re who and you want to do what?”

I started over. She seemed to remember mention of the Charpantier Plantation associated with her family’s land, but she didn’t know the history. “I understand,” I conceded. “I only want to walk on my ancestors’ land and maybe take some dirt as a memento. I’m coming through Patterson next week and I need permission to be on the property.” I pictured a shotgun-toting farmer taking aim at me, unleashing a pack of snarling hounds.

“Okay, I guess that’s fine,” she said in a weak voice, still leery.

I hung up feeling like I’d won the lottery. I had. An hour later Hymel called back to say that her family could show get.” She called again the next day with a few names and numbers of residents who would know the history of the area. “Tell them I told you to call.” Hymel also gave me the number for Idlewild Plantation, directly across the bayou from the Hymel property. As luck would have it, Idlewild was already on my planned map, as it was built by my ancestor, Georges Haydel (Heidel).

By the time I called Idlewild, I had repeated my speech so many times I sounded like a robocall, but now I held an ace. “Hi, Merry Hymel gave me your number. I’m researching my family history in St. Mary Parish. My fourth great grand-uncle built Idlewild Plantation, and I’d like to see it when I visit the area next week.” He agreed to meet with me. The trip was on.

Deeper south, the drive started to take on a middle-of-nowhere vibe. I punched in GPS information for Idlewild Plantation on the Lower Atchafalaya River, southeast of Patterson, where I had set up the first appointment of my trip.

Even the GPS screwed up the directions, leading me down a series of deadend roads before I found the quiet treelined lane leading to Idlewild—a classic white-columned raised Greek Revival plantation home, guarded by enormous oaks. When I called the week before, a man who went by the name Captain Caviar (or John Burke, owner of Captain

Caviar Swamp Tours), told me his mother lived at the plantation, so it wasn’t open to the public. “But tell you what, come on by and we’ll give it a try.”

The epitome of a sea-faring captain, with full, graying beard and navy cap, he showed me around his quaint white house on the grounds of the property. Unusual items on the walls and shelves included nutria slat boards used by Acadian fur trappers, and a taxidermy plaque of a Choupique (Shoepick)—a 200-million-year-old species of fish still thriving in the Bayou Teche, which flows about ninety feet from his back porch. Most fishermen consider Choupique a “trash fish,” but Captain regards it as a treasure.

Having grown up traversing the bayou, he discovered that the Choupique’s eggs made delicious caviar. After learning how to harvest and package the eggs, he created the Louisiana Caviar Company in 1986. Area seafood connoisseurs discovered his successful enterprise, including famed New Orleans Chef Emeril Lagasse, whose wife Alden Lovelace bought the company a few years ago along with partners Amy Hollister Wilson and Alison Vega-Knoll.

Now with time on his hands, Captain started a swamp boat tour from his backyard dock, retaining the name “Captain Caviar”.

As he escorted me across the lawn toward his mother’s home, I hooded my eyes to admire a towering live oak, with one grand limb sloping to the grass. Captain nodded, “Yeah, people pull off the road to take photos of our tree all the time.”

When I stepped back to get a photograph, he matter-of-factly stated that the 477-year-old tree is haunted, as is his home and the main plantation house, since long before his family moved there in the ‘70s. A ghost-hunter crew for the Travel Channel’s Ghosts of Morgan City had even allegedly captured an image of a female spirit in the main house, moving across his mother’s dining room.

“We didn’t need anyone to confirm it. We’d seen for ourselves. Others have too,” he said, recounting a crawfish boil when a guest pointed up to a young girl peering out of the top window of Captain’s house. “Everyone saw her. Then she vanished. That’s the attic. No one goes up there.” He said a few psychics and a shaman believe at least three hangings took place from the oak tree. “I’m not surprised, considering the history of the area,” he shrugged.

No telling when or if those hangings occurred, but Burke’s right about the history. In this corner of Louisiana known as the “sugar parishes,” vigilante lynching went on well beyond Reconstruction. From 1877 to 1950, 549 “racial terror lynchings” were reported in Louisiana, the fourth highest rate in the country, according to The Equal Justice Initiative. More than one hundred took place here in sugarcane country, where lynching statistics tell only a fragment of the larger story—starting with the enslaved labor-dependant plantation system itself.

You can’t walk beneath oaks like the one at Idlewild without sensing the weight of history each ring holds. The numbers make it tangible. In 1795, the year Joseph and Adelaide settled on Bayou Teche, Louisiana’s enslaved population numbered less than 20,000. By 1840 it climbed to around 168,000, soaring to more than 331,000 in 1860—rising with the sugar and cotton industry in the region, which made Louisiana’s 22,000plus planter/slaveholders the wealthiest in the nation. The year the Civil War broke out, Louisiana produced about one-sixth of all the cotton grown in the United States and all of the sugar. This is where the planters in my family line made their fortunes.

The high-risk, high-cost business of sugar cultivation did little to deter planters who knew sugarcane’s enormous potential for profits, and the subsequent generational wealth it guaranteed families. They understood the human cost of their business, too, and proceeded regardless. Sugarcane cultivation was brutal, demanding numerous hands to carry out often back-breaking labor. Enslaved families working on cane plantations in Louisiana died at a substantially higher rate than those working in cotton, tobacco, indigo, or rice farms. To keep sugar production going, sugar barons simply replaced the enslaved who succumbed with a steady flow of young Black men coming through the auctions in New Orleans.

Of course, I knew my Louisiana planter ancestors were unapologetic slaveholders, but until I was here, standing on their soil, I had never allowed the horrifying reality of that history to thoroughly wash over me. But here it is, everywhere.

Walking toward the main house, Captain pointed out a rut in the grass, running the length of the lawn. “You’re walking on what was once the Old Spanish Trail.” The system of east-to-west trails dates to the 1600s, when Spain controlled all of Louisiana, and once extended through swamps, deserts, and mountains, linking Florida and California. Confederate and Union troops took this path during the Battle of Bisland. During that campaign, Union General Nathaniel P. Banks used Idlewild for his command post, forcing the Haydel family out. After the war, Union Captain I. D. Seybern, who had served in the vicinity, bought the property. It remained in the Seybern family until the Daniels purchased it in 1977.

My ancestor Georges Haydel (Heidel) had originally built the house for his daughter in 1850. His Heidel ancestors, whose name became Haydel, arrived in Louisiana in the early 1720s. They were among the first to settle the rugged