Category Archives: Local History

This Forgotten Valley

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That in this blighted landscape there are still places of settled beauty is a comfort: a chance to glimpse what went before and could be again. Yet it is also sad—that the occasion of removing oneself from an anywhere to a somewhere should be so jolting as to be noticeable; that the simple absence of suburbs, strip malls, check-cashing joints, derelict commercial ventures, new fast-food emporia serving up empty calories for the lost, the bloated, and the lonely, before those buildings too slough off into the accumulating mire of abandoned infrastructure on the edges is somehow distinctive.

On this morning I am in my truck driving on a remote road in another state on my way to pick up ewe lambs earmarked to become next year’s breeding ewes. The valley, not the vertical, winding, densely wooded path I expected, is everything one would not imagine so close to the heart of empire. Now, I’m not going to name this forgotten valley, because it deserves privacy. Of course it is not inconceivable that some AI algorithm or, more likely, a real estate developer is already mining the coordinates to bring this place into the commercial fold of modern capital, thus ruining it forever.

This forgotten valley is a working valley. It is not the preserve of the newly arrived affluent in gated enclaves, who provide gainful employment to the natives by allowing them to scrub their toilets and polish their antiques. Nope, this is the genuine somewhere, a rare gem just a few inches on the map from D.C., that expanding Borg cluster of the soulless, the clueless, the grifters, and the grafters. So just in case this valley remains off their maps, let us keep it hidden, mum’s the word, ok?

This valley consists of open, gently rolling hills. Up to five miles across, it is protected by steep forested ridges on either side. Every few miles I pass through a compact hamlet, and for the last hour and a half to my destination I do not spot a single fast-food restaurant or—and this is more tragically impressive—a dollar store. There are plenty of family diners, small-time tractor dealers, and a scattering of feedstores. Although primarily a valley of crops and livestock, there are also active signs of small quarrying. I see none of the usual small prefabricated factories that so often dot a rural landscape.

The housing stock is mostly modest older ranchers and the classic T-shaped farmhouse so prevalent in the East, a few mobile homes, but to my relief, no McMansions.  A handful of pre-Civil War homes of stone, set back in groves of oaks, signals an agrarian prosperity both past and present. There are even a few water mills that, although no longer in service, are nicely kept up, perhaps awaiting the day in a future low-tech world when reuse makes sense. This is not an empty valley—homes, both clustered and isolated, are to be seen for the full length of my drive—but no strip mall architecture assaults me as I approach and leave each community. While a few farms advertise places to stay, and many promote eggs, produce, and hay for sale, nothing signals the desperation of the developer to sell both virtue and heritage.

At my destination, a slightly stooped nonagenarian in overalls greets me in a pickup by his mailbox. His son is busy in a field spreading manure with a tractor; his grandson is in Pennsylvania dropping off lambs. I trail the old man in my truck as we bump along to where his son is working. Once the son is collected, I follow behind, down a good mile of a family road with half a dozen homes belonging to the three generations who work the 500-acre farm, before arriving at a barn next to a formerly fine brick two-story, now unoccupied and crumbling. The son tells me it is the family home, built in 1833 after the clan had settled in this valley.

A few more minutes of introduction, and we turn our attention to the ewe lambs for sale. I select four chunky four-month-olds to bring home. We load the lambs, exchange cash, and say our goodbyes. I turn to retrace the hour-and-a-half drive through this lovely, remote somewhere valley and then embark on another five hours of interstate, cheek by jowl with too many others driving to anywhere. Finally, a little after seven in the evening, stiff of neck following a total of twelve hours on the road, I pull onto the gravel driveway of our farm. Cindy is waiting for me in the dark by the mailbox.

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For those of you who listen to podcasts, I have been interviewed on a couple over the past few months (promoting my book). The experience of being asked questions and having to respond on the spot is certainly an interesting and new one for me. It has taught me that I’m better at coming up with an answer after a few days of mulling it over. Alas, that is not the format on offer.

A one-and-a-half-hour interaction with two hosts (Josh and Jason) of the Doomer Optimism podcast: youtube.com/watch?v=MIhsXKq0ZzY

A thirty-minute Q&A with John Murdock of the Brass Spittoon podcast: frontporchrepublic.com/2024/01/brian-miller-on-kayaking-with-lambs/ (Link is near the bottom.)

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Reading this weekend: Death Comes for the Archbishop (W. Cather), a slow, evenly paced novel in which nothing much happens but a man’s life. And—I’m just guessing here, having the last third yet to finish—it might just end with his death.

A Good Woman

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July, 1920

In 1920, in July of that year, if you had stood in my grandfather’s rice fields in South Louisiana and chanced to gaze overhead at the blue summer skies, they would have been clear of contrails. This was only the dawning of the aviation age. Jet travel was another generation, and a world war, into the future. The Spanish flu pandemic was only a year past. In downtown Crowley the livery stables did a strong business renting horses and buggies. Elderly Confederate soldiers were still a part of everyday family life, and former slaves still walked about and indeed worked in the homes of that small city. This was the world Marjorie Jo Yeomans was born into, the eldest of three daughters, the youngest of whom was my mother.

When someone lives more than a hundred years, it nonetheless can come as a shock, as it did for me, to receive the call of her passing. Aunt Jo was the memory keeper for our family, the one who knew the scallywags in our closet and their stories. Her historical memory among family members was legend. Her own past as a member of the editorial staff of The Papers of Andrew Johnson; as a wife, mother, and grandmother; a teacher of history; a lifelong member of both the UDC and DAR as well as a committed believer in the social gospel — all prepared her for a life that served as an active witness to a century she both bridged and transcended. (She earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in history and was proud of the fact that she was the first woman at her undergraduate college to receive history honors.)

My aunt taught me several important life lessons. Not object lessons but ones taught by example, with humor and a keen intelligence. The most important is that life is not black or white; it is instead shaded in gray. Which means that those we love or admire, past or present, have feet of clay. To expect otherwise is a delusion and a snare. Accepting that truth brings peace.

I began this remembrance hoping to share more of my aunt’s life history: she was a woman both ordinary and remarkable. Yet that is not what matters here; you really do not need to know those details. What matters is that you make the effort to know and care for the people in your life, to discover the shared threads of family and culture, to appreciate the fullness of the story you are a part of each day. Not to be surprised by the fault lines in a life, but to embrace the full artistry of that imperfect creation.

Having said that, I will leave you with this one memory: In the spring of 2010, I drove Aunt Jo to a veteran’s center in a last effort by her to get my uncle quality care at an affordable rate. After being told the facility was full, we sat with the director in a neat and sterile office and tried to find out what if anything we could do. My aunt laid out before the director my uncle’s discharge records from the bomber crew he served on while stationed in England during World War II. Page after page carefully preserved a view of his life from that world now vanished. When finally it became clear that there was no help to be had for my uncle, we stood to leave. My aunt turned to the director one last time and said, “But he is such a good man.”

July, 2020

When Marjorie Jo Yeomans turned 100 this past July under blue Tennessee skies, contrails were once again absent and another pandemic was once again loose on the land. A small group of family, restricted in number and contact, joined her in celebrating her birthday. My aunt lived another six months, until this past Monday, when she died in her sleep. As I reflect on her life, I think back to her words about her husband, and I can also say with confidence that she, my mother’s sister, was a good woman. And she was loved. That is more than enough.

Going Home: a 2006 journey

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In 2006 I went home to Louisiana to visit family. The drive down culminated in my account of the damage wreaked the year before by Hurricane Rita, which was recounted in Remembering Rita. For a variety of reasons, almost all to do with Covid-19, I have been unable to travel south this year, so I am revisiting the 2006 trip, if not in body then in spirit. Grab yourself a cup of café au lait and a couple of beignets and come along for the ride.

Roadside attractions

April 18, 2006 (from my farm journals)

Forty minutes west of Jackson, Mississippi, and I’m pulling off in Vicksburg, a town so angry at the outcome of the War Between the States that its residents refused to celebrate July 4th until the 1950s. I’d love to have heard the debate among the city fathers when they had to choose, at the height of the Cold War, between endorsing the Union or being branded as Communists. It’s time for lunch, so I head to a favorite tamale stand, only to find it’s gone out of business after 40 years. I shake my head at the impermanence of life and settle for a bowl of dirty rice at Popeyes.

Back on I-20 I cross the bridge over the Mississippi, my plan being to head up to Poverty Point. A national historic site of earthen walls and mounds, it was built between 1750-1100 BC. Little is known of the advanced native civilization that did the building, but a huge amount of organization and energy were expended to create the settlement. And the fact that it was done during the Bronze Age makes it of even more interest. As I get closer to the site, I’m running late, so I leave the interstate on Route 577 at Waverly and travel on south. I know I am firmly back on native soil when 50 yards from the interstate lies a dead armadillo smack center of the road.

Driving alongside Bayou Macon, I watch as the land spreads out on my left, completely flat for miles on end. Few houses dot this almost-Midwestern landscape. I pass only a handful of cars and tractors before breezing through Warsaw, chiefly notable for one house, one church, and a roofless school whose remains of a sign reads “War­— School.” Ten miles farther down the road is a small metal shack with no windows, four pickups outside, and a Miller beer sign on the front door. I’m four miles from the nearest house, many more from the next town, and I’ve discovered the local watering hole. I drive on.

My road runs out in Crowville, Zip code 71230. I turn onto Highway 17 and pass on through. Besides the post office, there is a hardware store, a feed-and-seed, and, improbably, an upholsterer. Crowville consists of well-maintained brick ranchers and seems prosperous, and the Midwestern feel continues. The towns in this area of Louisiana are compact. The streets end in cotton, soybean, or cornfields. The land is too useful for strip malls.

Another 15 miles and I hit Winnsboro and take a left onto Highway 15. Seat of Franklin Parish, Winnsboro has the air of importance that county and parish seats exhibit. An attractive Confederate memorial sits on the courthouse lawn, broad shade trees line streets with solid-looking homes, and azaleas the size of minibuses bloom in front yards. Outside the town stands a convention center–size building that houses a mega-church called the Water of Life. The congregation apparently espouses a brand of Christianity so neutered that the stained-glass door features not a cross but a river.

The road continues to Sicily Island in Catahoula Parish, a poor town of 500 for which the main sign of prosperity is one house with a new tin roof. Groups of kids hang out in the road dressed in hip-hop attire. They look sullen, free of any irony in adopting an urban culture when Vidalia, a town of 10,000, is an hour away. Such are the benefits of global culture. A building labeled “The Jail” in hand-painted letters — is this real or a joke? — lies at the single intersection. This is the unvarnished poverty of the end-of-the-road, no-hope variety.

On down the way is a gas station, no paved parking lot, just dirt all the way to the pumps. A sign is posted out front for lunch plates of crawfish and liver. I stop for second lunch. (Fortunately the choices advertised are not combined.)

Soon I pass the last cotton gin company, “Deer Creek, producer owned,” and I leave the Delta landscape behind.

The drive over a drawbridge at the Ouachita signals my arrival in the central-river parishes. Screened porches become the norm. I see a little of the north-central pine barrens appear and then as quickly vanish as the land becomes dominated by water. Small, neat fields of crops bordered by levees running in all directions contain the dozens of rivers, bayous, and creeks of this region. But seeing that glimpse of the pine forests that dominate in Winn, Caldwell, and the parishes farther north, I’m reminded of a favorite uncle, Al. He was riding through this area with my great-uncle Burl (husband of my great-aunt Ruby) on a business trip in the 1950s. After a day of driving among the endless rolling pine forests, Uncle Burl said, “This land is good for growing only two crops, pine trees and babies.”

Some of the latter are my kin, I reflect, as I arrive in Pineville for the night.

I’ll continue this trip next week. In the meantime, better find yourself a cold Dixie longneck, because it is only going to get hotter and muggier as we drive deeper south.

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Reading this weekend: Polybius: The histories. Book six, in this work, is the text that influenced the Founders in constructing our constitution. 

Small Town Resilience (a repeat)

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We have spent a busy weekend making mead, bottling some older mead, butchering chickens, harvesting produce, and preparing to harvest apples and pears. So, I’ll leave you with this older piece on a different kind of resilience.

The aftermath of butchering chickens.

Last week a colleague spent three hours advancing 15 miles in the cancerous landscape of Atlanta.

Around the same time, I was commuting in central Missouri down a two-lane highway through a largely depopulated land of corn and beef cattle ornamented with the occasional red-brick one-room schoolhouse sitting in a grove of trees. The schoolhouses, long empty, were universally well kept, no broken windows, grass mowed—buildings cared for symbolic of the hope or expectation that they might once again serve a purpose.

The housing stock was older, yet well cared for and solid. But it was a lonely landscape of older couples and few children. I drove past the occasional activity of men in distant fields loading hay onto trailers using tractors built to accomplish much, the work done with such little effort as would have stunned even their grandfathers. Little effort and fewer people, freeing up the children and grandchildren to follow the classic road to town and city, a well-worn path since the ancient world, but one accelerated by our fossil-fueled innovations.

I stopped for the night in Boonville, Missouri, on the banks of the Missouri River. Boonville is not a prosperous town. Its trail of empty strip mall architecture dribbles from the outer fringe of the town’s core to the interstate, signaling a raising of the drawbridge, a calculated retreat against a yet unacknowledged enemy. But the core is still vibrant with neighborhoods, small-town hardware and furniture stores, plumbing and electrical businesses, an elegant restored hotel, a diner, and a bar and grill.

That evening I walked from the old hotel to the bar and grill, a place called Maggie’s, for dinner. The Midwest small-town bar and grill is unique. It is the genuine third place Ray Oldenburg spoke about. Warm and friendly, with people of all ages and classes: farmers, workers and professionals, town and country, producer and consumer. These gathering spots are spread across the agricultural heartland. They are the glue to the community, providing face-to-face time between neighbors. Time not gained in a traffic jam.

I am not naively asserting a rural idyll, without strife, tension, unemployment, severed families and the ills of too much idle time. Yet the small town is fundamentally more resilient, resilient because of its smallness and its proximity to productive land. Rural communities, with their face-to-face interactions, have provided the template for human existence for the past thousands of years.

Communities within a megacity are a mere echo of that life. They can nourish and sustain in the ascendancy, but their larger host survives only as wealth is pumped in from the outside world. When the pump is turned off, the decline is inevitable and rapid. Consider Rome, from a city of a million to a village of thousands in the space of mere generations. Or the specter of Detroit, reduced by half in one generation.

Perhaps these Boonvilles, these freshly painted one-room schoolhouses, these Midwestern pubs are the starter-cultures for the wort, the yeast for the fermentation required to restart the small farm, small-town life, a way to redirect the human trajectory from the cancerous growth to the healthy organism, from the complex to the comprehensible?

The cities like Atlanta in our landscape offer nothing but a promise of continued sprawl, congestion, and three hours and 15 miles stalled in the present. And if history is the judge, they offer us nothing in their inevitable decline.

For all the problems in that rural Missouri landscape, it is still one of latent hope. The problems it faces are fundamentally local and scalable. And if the survival of our future allowed bets, mine would be on the Boonvilles and rural counties in this land.

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Reading this weekend (2019): Underland (Macfarlane) and iGen (Twenge). The former is another terrific read by the author of The Old Ways (among others). And, the latter is a data driven survey of the generation that has grown up with the i-phone (be afraid, be very afraid).

Remembering Rita (September 24th, 2005): part 3 of going home

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This account is copied, as written, from my journal of a trip home in April 2006. These are the observations six-months after the storm.

Hurricane Rita: 2005 track

The Ruby Tuesday closes every day at two in the afternoon because there are not enough workers. Most of the apartment buildings in Lake Charles are closed pending repairs. All the fast food signs are gone. It is six-months since Hurricane Rita hit and the casinos are up and running for the Texans looking for the good life, even if that good life is arrears in rent.

Dad and I left town at eight in the morning heading down LA 27 out of Calcasieu Parish for a tour of Cameron Parish. If the damage in Calcasieu is readily apparent, Cameron is a different planet. Hackberry, the last town before the parish line, and the Catholic church looks like an open-air pavilion. The east side is missing, scooped out like a melon.

Crossing the intracoastal we stop and inspect a construction project dad is working. At this juncture in our trip the devastation becomes complete. Cars stand on end in canals. Mattresses are suspended in branches of Live Oak trees. Houses rest a mile out in the marsh or prairie. Whole commercial buildings blown astride the highway have been bulldozed into the adjoining ditches. Shrimp boats and oil tenders lay at crazy angles on dry land. A coke machine, upright and ready for customers rests on a clump of sawgrass fifty yards from the road. Every line of trees is packed with fragments of lumber and personal belongings. Mile after mile, nothing is left, and nothing changes.

The prairie and marsh grasses are dead, killed by the surge of saltwater. The roads are packed with dump trucks and commercial traffic. The sides of the road are equally packed with families fishing or netting crabs. Life goes on.

Holly Beach on the coast is vacant of any surviving structure. We drove through a few miles of neatly laid out streets with drives leading to concrete slabs. Often a couple of cinderblocks are used to prop up an American flag. No debris clean up was needed. The hurricane blew the town twenty miles and scattered it among the marsh. One elderly woman (it was reported) found her home fourteen miles away with all the family pictures in place on the walls.

Driving the coastal road, we arrived in Cameron, the parish seat, after a wait for a ferry across the Calcasieu River. Cameron had one structure survive, the courthouse. A few well-made brick homes initially appeared to have survived. Closer inspection showed the interior gutted by the surge and the telltale eastern side shorn away.

Everywhere we looked the landscape was dotted with debris. As we exited Cameron the debris from the town had been piled twenty feet high and covered an area of several football fields.

A few miles on and more concrete slabs indicated the small town of Creole. Home of the Tarpon Freezo, where we often stopped for malts after a days fishing in the Gulf. Oak Grove, two miles south, was the same, wiped clean. As was Grand Chenier, twelve miles east.

We turned around and drove back to Lake Charles.

Be appreciative of what you have.