Home Sweet Batture

Home Sweet Batture

Repurposed treasures style a levee-dweller's hand-crafted homestead

Mary Ann Sternberg

Macon Fry’s view from his front deck is frequently of gargantuan freighters looming 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.

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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 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 high-rise 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 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 salvaged 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.

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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.

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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 heats against winter’s chill with a woodburning stove, fed with the almost unlimited supply of driftwood collected on the batture.

The exterior walls of Fry’s camp are barn-red vinyl siding, which hides a previous façade of dark green gravel aggregate roofing, secured with vertically spaced batten board strips. (“That’s the decorative term for tarpaper,” Fry grins.) A pitched metal roof protects his residence from the weather, most of the time.

Inside, his living area exudes a certain simple charm—almost rustic chic, perhaps influenced by an innate aesthetic of his double ancestry of First- Families-of-Virginia. He has an excellent eye, but knows the forefathers might be shocked by his consistent good luck finding architectural furnishings through dumpster diving and curb shopping.

“When I began jacking up my camp,” Fry remembered, “I knew I’d need lumber, doors, windows, etc. So I started accumulating from the river and from trash.” He rescued many of the camp’s doors, windows, and frames from houses being bulldozed near the New Orleans airport and learned how to refinish them. Discarded bleachers from a high school stadium have been restored as his flooring and look almost as vintage and mellow as the wide plank floors of a nineteenth century plantation house.

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Fry’s floor plan is (unwittingly) fashionable: a great room consisting of open kitchen and dining, living, and study areas, plus two individual bedrooms and a bathroom. The master bedroom offers a spectacular view of the river, and he’s building a platform from salvaged wood for the futon in the second bedroom, to assure guests access to a good river view as well. The renovated room is nearly completed after Hurricane Ida felled a tree on top of it a year ago.

His galley kitchen, just to the right of the leveeside entrance, features an early 1950s Chambers gas stove. It’s a handsome appliance, fueled by propane, that looks like a white enamel modern sculpture, decorated with shiny, stainless steel handles and boasting a stone-lined oven and gas burners, able to heat, grill, and griddle.

The kitchen countertops are stone-colored poured concrete, waxed but not polyurethaned. “I like things to look like what they are.” The kitchen cabinets have beadboard doors and bargeboard shelves, compliments of the NCIS film crew that used his house as a set; otherwise, his storage is on open shelving and his cooking pots and pans hang from a wrought iron rack. A vintage Formica dining table has a retro design of scalloped grey and yellow, a thrift shop find many years ago. “I love to entertain,” Fry said.

The living area is banked by windows (salvaged, of course) overlooking the river and is furnished with a comfortable upholstered couch and chairs, as well as hardwood pieces that include a rustic bench the film crews left him, and a found sideboard. Rattan matting covers the great room ceiling, giving a textured finish, and a natural wood ladder rises to a loft Fry uses for storage, or the occasional overnight stay.

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The surfaces and window sills in the living area are exhibit spaces for Fry’s many decorative collections: among them—a box of antique clay pipe shards; artful shapes of driftwood; a metal object that resembles an ancient Celtic cross but is probably a rusted bedspring; an antique bird trap for catching painted buntings. A rustic board above the door to the front deck is inscribed “In Remembrance of Me,” a Fry find from a nearby ditch after Katrina. Just beside it, posed in a large wicker basket, is a collection of driftwood that has washed up on the batture; he found the pieces too attractive to cut up and arranged them to look like a contemporary sculpture.

In his study area, books line the shelves in a handsome pine bookcase Fry rescued from construction debris at the old Allen Elementary School; his desktop is constructed from cypress planks he found on the side of a road. An old pine cabinet, painted white, was pulled from a dumpster; it had obviously been a corner piece because it was missing one end, but boasted original brass pulls and hinges. He stripped it to its natural finish and handcrafted molding to complete its symmetry, transforming it into another storage piece. The beadboard ceiling, beams, and rafters over the study area were all recycled from Shoe’s original camp.

On the front deck are a collection of 1950s metal gliders and chairs Fry found in a dumpster on Oak Street. They’re rusty but comfortable, for hours of river watching or keeping the host company when he grills on the outdoor barbecue pits. “The gliders need work,” Fry acknowledged, but that requires a dry place to properly remove the rust. For now, they work just fine.

“When I built this house,” Fry said thoughtfully, “I never expected to be here this long … political, environmental issues … something would disturb living here.” The next hurricane, an extreme flood. But “I’m emotionally vested, more than invested …” he said. ”I stay here because it’s a place of freedom … represented by open horizons, by sunrises and sunsets, by being on the edge of a very wild place, and living within my modest means.” And he stays because of the pull of the river—a place of movement, of chance, of life. A place still full of surprises.

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There is a new threat that Fry observes: gentrification, which he fears will change the character of the place, making it less affordable, self sufficient, and appreciative of the foraging aesthetic. “Maybe the best thing that could happen for the batture lifestyle would be a great flood, an event that would render the batture less attractive to the martinis-at-sunset crowd!” he said, ironically.

For now, though, Macon Fry continues to be a proud River Rat, living life in the true batture tradition.

Find Frys’s book They Called Us River Rats, at upress.state.ms.us.