The Mandeville That Almost Was...

STORY LIZ GENEST SMITH PHOTOS JERRY COTTRELL

As of this writing, the debate over a proposed development for the western edge of Mandeville’s lakefront rages on. It’s basically been raging for almost a decade now, never really reaching any permanent resolution, but merely enduring endless fits and starts, getting quashed, then changing in name, size and composition before roaring back to life to frustrate both sides for another day.

Will there ever be an outcome that makes everyone happy? Doubtful. Am I going to register an opinion on the subject? Not on your life! I’m only here to offer a little historic perspective on how impassioned clashes over the town’s shoreline go way, way back.

When Bernard de Marigny de Mandeville founded this quaint little burg almost 200 years ago, he was adamant about preserving the natural, park-like beauty of its lakefront. By the looks of things today, it certainly seems like he got his way. But, if you were to step back in time, there was a period when it looked very different. I wonder how Bernard and today’s residents would feel about the busy steamer traffic, electric rail car, bath houses, and private and public wharves that kept the lakefront humming during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

All that remains from that era are the gazebo, fountain and a few scattered wooden pylons poking up from the shallow waters just beyond the seawall. Things seem to have reverted to the founder’s original vision. But what if I were to tell you that there once was a development in the works that could have forever changed the local landscape?

Unlike recent development proposals, which focus on residential, commercial and entertainment usage, the Mandeville Harbor project from the 1920s came awfully close to industrializing Mandeville’s lovely shore. An article from a June 1921 edition of the New Orleans Item newspaper explained:

“Within a few short months, the great work of dredging out the Bayou Castaign and basin for big passenger ships, repairing the streets and mending the gap in the long sea-wall will begin. All the talk is of the future and of the three factories that are soon to be built.”

Did the word “factories” send a chill up your spine, like it did mine? Stick around.

Bayou Castaign is one of several different spellings I came across for our present day Bayou Castine, located at the eastern edge of the historic lakefront. It’s currently the site of the playground and beach, Pontchartrain Yacht Club, boat launch and marina, all of which exist in near-perfect harmony with both the historic residential neighborhood to the west and protected wild wetlands of Fontainebleau State Park on the opposite side of the bayou.

In addition to a sawmill, lumber planing mill and the three aforementioned factories, this plan called for berths for yachts along the seawall, a widening and straightening of the bayou and docks that could handle both passenger and freight vessels from New Orleans and beyond.

According to several newspaper and trade magazine reports, the wheels were in motion with one man, in particular, leading the charge. Not much is known of his formative years, but George E. Reine, Sr., packed a lot into the final two decades of his 49ish years on Earth. Census records from 1900 show that at age 26, he and a partner were running a bar on Tchoupitoulas Street in New Orleans. One can only imagine how colorful that must have been, serving and cavorting with the kinds of characters who worked and lurked down by those busy MIssissippi River docks! He must’ve finally gotten his fill of this raucous scene, as between 1903 and 1907, he married and had two daughters, then promptly moved to Mandeville alone in 1908, where he ran a general store on Girod Street.

In addition to inexplicably separating from his wife and children, he apparently ran into some financial trouble and declared bankruptcy that same year. Things turned around over the next few years, however, as he managed to get remarried and start a new family, become a correspondent for the Times-Picayune newspaper and get elected to the city council. At some point, he took ownership of a chunk of family-owned land, mainly concentrated in the area between the yacht club and marina. He formed the Mandeville Harbor Improvement Company, Inc., in 1920 and launched a plan to build his mills, provide land for factories and petition the city to create a harbor and infrastructure to support the new industrial area.

Despite several news reports that made it sound like a done-deal (does that sound familiar?), all was not smooth sailing for the avid yachtsman and entrepreneur. There seems to have been a miniscule but mighty minority of citizens who filed suit to stop the development, and city officials decided they wanted the mills and factories built before they would commit any funds or manpower in support of the project.

By all accounts, George was undeterred, but it’s possible that all the personal and professional upheaval and strain of those last 15 years took a serious toll on him. A few short months after a January 1923 news clipping in a trade journal announced that he had started construction on his sawmill while awaiting an imminent decision from the Supreme Court on the fate of the harbor, Mr. Reine died of apparent heart disease.

What was the court’s ruling? No clue. I enlisted the help of researchers at the St. Tammany Public Library and Clerk of Courts, but none of us could find a shred of additional information on the harbor project. It seems to have died along with its primary champion. Likewise, we couldn’t find any information on the exact location or even proof that the sawmill ever existed, other than a couple of records that say his widow “operated Bayou Castin sawmill” (yet another spelling) after his death.

There’s a tiny deadend street that carries the name Reine in the vicinity, and one street away, there’s a large, mostly undeveloped parcel of land along the bayou, but no proof that it was the site of a sawmill. The only solid reports or images of a sawmill in Mandeville that we could find refer to the Poitevent and Favre Lumber Company, which according to a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers report from 1996, closed in 1925 and was eventually replaced by the Mariner’s Village condominium complex adjacent to the Causeway Toll Plaza.

It’s worth noting that two years before Reine’s death, The Southern Lumberman trade publication ran a brief mention of the project under the heading: “Mandeville may become a seaport.” It announced that a representative of the behemoth Great Southern Lumber Company, who owned “the world’s largest sawmill” in Bogalusa, along with many other business entities, was inspecting the bayou along with George, but it was never mentioned again. It stands to reason that support from such a huge outfit would’ve surely greased the wheels for the harbor development. But, perhaps the lawsuit and appeals process slowed down the progress just long enough for the lumber giant to recognize that the Louisiana lumber boom was grinding to a halt, thanks to the decimation of the state’s pine forests. Like Poitevent and Favre, most of the sawmills in the region closed within the next few years.

Was the loss of the lumber giant’s support what inspired George to build his own sawmill and fight for the project alone?

Was it the Supreme Court’s decision that killed the project? Or was the protracted battle over George’s estate an indication that his heirs had no interest in seeing his dream brought to fruition? No one knows. But, the mere prospect of this development has plagued me ever since I read about it. What would Mandeville look like if it had moved forward?

Neither Reine’s sawmill, nor the lumber planing mill he also planned to build, would have survived for very long with the lumber industry’s looming downturn, but it still leaves a lot of unknowns about the aforementioned factories. It’s impossible to know if their proximity to the historic district would’ve changed its complexion over the years. And when you start factoring in not just the actual facilities, but the parking lots, loading docks on both land and water and new access roads, it’s hard to estimate the size and scale of their footprints.

How far up the bayou and east into the wetlands would this development have reached? Would the factories and housing for their employees have sprawled into what is now Fontainebleau State Park, Northlake Nature Center and/or Pelican Park? Could the current two-lane Highway 190 have handled all the additional employee and trucking traffic?

For help in painting a realistic picture of the impact this might’ve had on the environment and general integrity of the area, I reached out to multiple local and state officials and agencies, but no one wanted to touch this with a ten-foot pole. Because they simply didn’t want to speculate? Or because it might be too closely associated with the current lakefront development debate? It’s yet another mystery we may never solve.

Left to my own imagination, I initially conjured up a toxic hellscape of apocalyptic proportions, but I decided to apply a little logic and common sense to conceptualize some reasonable, albeit amateurishly derived scenarios.

In scenario one, the factories don’t survive the Great Depression and are left to fall into disrepair and forever rot away in this rather obscure location. In scenario two, the abandoned factory buildings are eventually repurposed into retro-themed housing or retail buildings, which could be kind of cool in theory, but still robs the area of much of its natural beauty. In scenario three, the factories either survive the Great Depression, or are eventually acquired by other manufacturers when the economy turns around, creating a busy industrial corridor that spews waste into the local air, water and soil. Yes, that’s the toxic hellscape I spoke of, but environmental awareness wouldn’t come into vogue for another 50 years, so is it that far off the mark?

I suppose there’s a scenario where the factories fail and the abandoned buildings are eventually dismantled, allowing responsible homeowners, boaters and mother nature to reclaim the land and make it pretty much what it is today. But, who really knows?

The bottomline is, there’s no way to know how the Mandeville Harbor project would’ve changed the town and region, but you can rest assured that countless traffic, economic and environmental studies didn’t factor into the decision-making process. The New Orleans Item article from 1921 starkly stated that the harbor project meant “progress, nothing else.”

So, while everyone is understandably exhausted by the ongoing tug-of-war over the current development project, and there’s simply no way that any single outcome will please everyone, years of debate and revisions to the plans at least prove that an abundance of clear-eyed caution and consideration are being poured into it. That’s the real definition of progress, in my book.