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Home Sweet Batture
REPURPOSED TREASURES STYLE A LEVEE-DWELLER’S HAND-CRAFTED HOMESTEAD Story by Mary Ann Sternberg • Photos by Brei Olivier
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New Orleans—is a hidden landscape, a neighborhood between the inside of the levee and wherever the water happens to be. Forget riverside low and highrise buildings; these structures (called camps, though ten of the twelve are primary dwellings) sit atop piers or pilings, offering a rare unimpeded, eye-level panorama of the ever-changing river. A native Virginian whose New Orleans careers included school teacher and culture writer, Fry is one of these “batture dwellers”—a term historically applied to the people who have lived in this 140-year-old community on the banks of the Mississippi (“River Rats” was the pejorative name.). The settlements began in shantyboats, but camps were first identified as early as 1895, according to a local newspaper article headlined “Shantytown by the Riverside.” Fry’s lifestyle
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acon Fry’s view from his front deck is frequently of gargantuan freighters hlooming in the middle of the Mississippi River, sending wake crashing into his front yard like surf. The blare of a towboat’s horn sings in the wind and powerboats push past in slow motion with block-long barge cargoes. Eagles soar, a beaver swims past, and sunsets are framed by the inky geometry of the distant Huey P. Long Bridge. For thirty-six years, Fry has resided on one of the twelve lots grandfathered in at the Southport Colony located on the river’s Carrollton Bend, and the local road, used exclusively by bicyclists and colony residents, is the levee top. The colony— which exists on the Mississippi River batture in Jefferson, right on the Orleans line near the end of Oak Street in uptown
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carries on the colorful tradition of the batture dwellers, a history filled with memorable characters, Louisiana politics, and river lore—all of which he weaves into his 2021 memoir, They Called Us River Rats. For it, he interviewed neighbors who’d been on the batture for years before he arrived, burrowed in archives, and amassed a trove of tales about the people, the place, and how he fit right in. It’s the kind of book he likes to read: “at the intersection of people and place” and took him almost twenty years to complete. In the October 24, 1937 edition of the Sunday Item Tribune, a visitor to the area observed that “A man can build himself a home for nothing more than the cost of a few nails … if he has a skiff and patience … there’s a little settlement of such homes, built mostly from lumber sal-
vaged from the river…” Today, because of the tenets of river control, only the twelve dwellings at Southport remain from the hundreds previously situated along the New Orleans banks. No longer beyond the reach of government and utility companies and mere yards to nearby shops and restaurants on the landside of the levee, the community nevertheless retains a kind of frontier existence. Fry has lived in three different Southport camps. The first: a rental called The Shack, which he serendipitously found after living landside for two years. It boasted no electricity or glassed windows. Later, he bought Shoe’s Camp (his now-longtime home) for seven thousand dollars. He remembers that river water sometimes squirted through the flooring. When he decided to jack up the structure and repair the problem, keeping Shoe’s very rustic aesthetic, the house fell off the jack; so, he temporarily moved into the abandoned structure next door while completing a rebuild he hadn’t anticipated. Some of the pilings currently under Fry’s home were found on his section of the batture, having washed down from destroyed piers at 9 Mile Point; others were collected from a telephone company “boneyard”; they raise the height of his camp to a couple of feet below the crown of the levee. When the river is low, his batture is open and dry enough to plant a garden, graze his goats, pick wild blackberries. In high water, the Mississippi rages and sprawls toward the levee, occasionally surrounding the house and decks with swirling muddy water. His connection to the levee top is a boardwalk of planks recycled from Shoe’s original structure, complete with a handrail of sturdy ship’s rope that washed up onto his batture. “I love to repurpose free materials,” Fry admitted with obvious delight. This, combined with a boyhood love of the Rappahannock River in Virginia, is part of what pulled him toward the Mississippi, where he could create a lifestyle perfectly suited to this place. The walkway from the levee also accommodates two sheds—one for his goats and another for his refrigerator, washer, dryer, tools, and paints. The appliances are outside because Fry doesn’t like humming or whirring noises in his space. That also means no air conditioning, but he swears “there’s always a cooling breeze from the river” coming through open doors and windows. He
