"East Feliciana, Past and Present", Parts 14-16,  East Feliciana, La.
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Part Fourteen

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"EAST FELICIANA, LOUISIANA, PAST AND PRESENT."

SKETCHES OF THE PIONEERS,

By H. Skipwith
1892
Hopkins Printing Office, 20 & 22 Commercial Place,
New Orleans

PIONEERS OF THE EIGHTH WARD.

When, in 1800, old Leonard Hornsby took passage on a flat
boat and floated out of South Carolina down the head waters
of the Tennessee river and around by the Ohio and Mississippi
to Natchez, with all his father's slaves and herds, his house-
hold and kitchen outfit, his wagons, teams and agricultural
implements, his gunsmith and his one-legged shoemaker, his
big mastiffs, bull dogs and deer hounds, he was tolerably
well equipped to plant and defend and expand an outpost in
the vanguard of civilization, which he did in 1802 in the forks
of Beaver Creek and the Amite river, to which his Anglo-Saxon
love of running waters had attracted him.  This outpost of the
Hornsby's, in 1802, lies in the extreme corner of the Eighth
Ward, and is now the property of Judge W.F. Kernan.  When its
site was selected there were none within hearing of his cock's
crowing for day-break, except the sly, scheming foxes, thirsting
for chanticleer's blood; none to hear the deep-mouthed baying
of his big dogs, except the frightened bears, panthers, wolves
and deer.  No human being was nearer than old Mr. Furlow, a
Georgian, who, with a hermit's love of solitude, had planted
his solitary log cabin on the west side of Hepzibah Creek, about
half a mile below the high hill, out of the sides of which gush
the living waters as fresh and strong and life-giving as those
which gushed from the rocks of Horeb when struck by Aaron's rod.
The place is central and has had many different proprietors after
old Mr. Furlow was put away in his grave.  His immediate successor
was Daniel Eads, of Kentucky, who constructed the first grist
mill just above where Hephzibah Church now stands.  Two other
leaders of Eighth Ward society, Elisha Andrews and Major Doughty,
followed Mr. Eads as proprietors of the Furlow place, and in
1812 or 1814 the Rev. Ezra Courtney, having organized a numerous
Baptist congregation, selected the portion of the place lying
on the east side of the creek for the site of a Baptist house
of worship, to which was given the name of HEPHZIBAH.

Furlow, Eads, Andrews and Doughty, after life's fitful fever,
all sleep quietly in their graves, but the head waters of
Hepzibah Creek still ripple and gurgle joyously by the foot of
holy Hepzibah Church, the congregation of which multiplied
amazingly under the zealous ministrations of its venerable
founder.  It remained a harmonious brotherhood, without any
family jars, except when old Chesley Jackson, one of Hephizbah's
stock-holders, took it into his head to invite a Universalist
named Rogers to preach in Hepbzibah.  This desecration of the
Hephzibah pulpit by an unbaptized heretic who didn't believe n
Sheol, was bitterly opposed by another body of organized Baptists,
under the lead of that good Christian and citizen, Major
Doughty, who locked the heretic out, and carried off the keys
in their pockets.  Then there was war in Hephzibah and the
contending factions were not appeased until the Rev. H.D.F.
Roberts, from Sumpter District, S.C., with a diploma from Columbia
College, and Rev. Thomas Adams, and impassioned and learned
divine, from Richland District, S.C., came to pour oil on the
troubled waters.  Under the impassioned appeals of these two
missionaries the conscience of the eighth ward was stirred to its
lowest depths and the list of Hepzibah members rapidly doubled.
Perhaps it will add to the interest of my narrative to say that
Mr. Roberts left the work here to serve a pulpit in a Tennessee
church, where he reared four promising sons, of whom our
esteemed fellow citizen, J.M. Roberts, Esq., was one, and all
of whom have been, from time to time, members of eighth ward
society, as guests of their father's older brothers, Messrs.
William and Sylvester Dunn Roberts, both immigrants from Sumpter
District, S.C.  The Rev. Thos. Adams founded a home and raised
a family on the banks of Pretty creek, and continued his minist-
rations in the East Feliciana church until his death near Clinton
in 1859, where he was buried, and over his honored grave the
congregations he had so faithfully served united in erecting a
handsome monument.

After Furlow and Hornsby, the dim and scattered germs of Eighth
Ward settlers were first recruited by John Chance and James Felps
from Georgia, in 1803 and 1804, and probably by the ancestor of
Jack, Booker and Smith Kent.  Mr. Chance made his first clearing
on the place in the Seventh ward on which in 1806 old Mr. Henry
Dunn moved with his family and slaves.  This John Chance became
conspicuous in the annals of the Eighth Ward, for long and honor-
able services as a leader through its early struggles, and as the
founder of a numerous and powerful family by his marriage with Miss
Zilpha Doughty, who came into the ward in 1806 in company with her
father, old Mr. Levi Doughty, from Darlington District, S.C.  In the
same fleet of flatboats which floated the Doughtys out of South
Carolina, down the head waters of the Tennessee and through the
perilous Muscle Shoals, down the Ohio and Mississippi to Natchez,
came out of the same neighborhood a column of immigrants with their
families, slaves and household goods; and from Natchez, on foot and
in wagons, probably along the same trace which old Leonard Hornsby
blazed out in 1802, to the banks of Beaver creek, near which most
of these colonists commenced their clearings.  This large column
of colonists coming into the ward in 1806, embraced the ancestors
of the Doughtys, Rentzs, Brians, Morgans and Whites, who used to
tell their descendants some thrilling tales of hairbreadth escapes
from shipwreck on the snags, sawyers and hidden rocks in the un-
known channels of the French Broad, and how, appalled by the angry
roar of the swift torrents, whirlpools and eddies of the Muscle
Shoals, the immigrants from Darlington District landed their wives,
little ones and slaves at the head of the Shoals and trusted the ark
containing their herds, household and kitchen and plantation outfits
to a skilled Indian pilot, who, standing with his long pole at the
bow, with his squaw at the helm, would brave the dangers of the
perilous passage while the human passengers footed around the shoals
by a "cut-off."

The Indian pilots brought most of the boats safely to the foot of the
Shoals, but sometimes one would be wrecked and an outfit for a home
in the wilderness would go to the bottom.

Of the band of neighbors immigrating from Darlington District to the
Eighth Ward in 1806 there were some famous old pioneers who stamped
the growing societies of the ward with the zeal of their rugged,
virtuous and useful characteristics.  Old Mr. Levy Doughty lived to
extreme old age, and died honored and revered as a good citizen and
Christian gentleman, by his friends and neighbors, the Stewarts,
Humbles, and McAdams.  Old John White, blacksmith, from Timmonsville,
S.C., founded the ancestral home of the Whites on the headquarters of
Clear creek.  He was the venerated sire of Mr. Eli White, who was the
first born in the Clear creek home in 1807.  In 1888 he was a venerable
gentleman still reading the minion and agate of the New Orleans Picayune
without glasses, and it was from his lips the writer obtained the
following vivid picture of life in an immigrant family from 1807 to
1815:  " I never, " said he, "tasted meat, except bear, venison, and an
occasional panther steak, until I was a good sized boy.  The only milk
I ever tasted was my mother's, until my father returned to South
Carolina, and brought out with him one of grandfather's old cows.  The
dairy utensils my mother used were old fashioned, big bellied gourds,
sawed in two, my only clothing until I reached twelve years of age,
was a long shirt of coarse cotton cloth woven on mother's hand loom.
I always went barefooted, summer and winter, and my first pair of pants
were obtained from mother, after pleading long and persistently.  They
were of the fruits of the same old hand loom, made in the old style
with broad flap in front, a mile too big in the waist, and couldn't be
kept up without suspenders, for which there were no buttons."   "These
were very discouraging drawbacks," smilingly remarked the old man,
"but father, who saw my dilemna, molded a set of buttons out of an old
broken pewter spoon, and then I could wear my pants, and I was as proud
as a peacock.  Our farm in those days was a two acre patch which we
planted in corn and sweet potatoes and cultivated with a little pony
and a scooter plow with a wooden shovel board."

The venerable man who thus called from boyhood's memories these charming
details fo the simplicity and scanty luxuries of frontier life, was the
sire of a family almost as numerous as Jacob carried into Egypt to make
bricks for Pharoah.  In his eighty-third year, with intellect and all his
faculties unimpaired, verily this Louisiana scion of a Darlington District
stock was one of God's rarest physical conformations exceeding in preser-
vation and endurance the average specimens of humanity in any other part
of the globe.

There was another large column of immigrants starting from Darlington
District in 1804 or 1805 voyaging by flatboats down the Tennessee and
its headwaters for East Feliciana via Natchez, composed of the Scotts,
Dunns, Perkins, Winters, Robins, McKneelys, all connected by inter-
marriages with the Scotts of South Carolina who were near kindred to the
Scotts of Virginia, from whom the great Winfield Scott derived his
birth.  Though starting earlier than the column in which came old Levi
Doughty and John White, they arrived in the eighth ward later, because,
at the head of the Muscle Shoals they diverged in wagons from the river
route around by Nashville and the Hermitage where they were hospitably
entertained by "old Hickory."  At the head of this last column was Lewis
Perkins and his daughter Sarah, who was born in South Carolina in 1791,
and his son James, born in the same State n 1800.  When he reached the
Eighth Ward in 1806, Mr. Lewis Perkins made his clearing on the banks
of Little Beaver Creek, but soon abandoned it to remove to another
clearing just above the line of demarkation, impelled by hereditary and
very natural reluctance to live under monarchial government.

The clearing he abandoned on Little Beaver was soon afterwards developed
by old Mr. William Stewart, of North Carolina, into a home for children
who have grown up with the Ward and have always held an honorable place
in its social ranks.

Coming back to old Mr. Lewis Perkins, who moved at such short notice
out of the King of Spain's dominions in 1806; he lived but a short time
in his last home, and died, leaving Sarah Perkins, at fifteen years, at
the head of the orphaned family.  Notwithstanding her mother was a sister
of Mrs. Henry Dunn, who lived just below the line, a close neighbor to
the orphaned family, all the cares of her two young brothers devolved upon
the inexperienced girl of fifteen years.  Young as she was her trust was
discharged with good judgement and consientous care and won the lasting
gratitude of her young brothers.  She married, in 1817, a worthy and
handsome young gentleman from Georgia, named Louis Talbert, with whom
she reared a large and honored family; but even after the added cares of
a growing family began to exact much of her time and duty, she still clung
with motherly tenacity to the two boys entrusted to her by her father at
his death bed.  This magnificent specimen of the highest type of womanhood
died in 1888 in full possession of her faculities which, unimpaired, had
withstood the storms of a rough world for ninety-seven years.

The two brothers, whose early boyhood she had so sedulously guarded and
so intelligently guided, took high position in society when they became
men.  Doctor James Perkins became a famous physician, and so much beloved,
that he, an old line whig, was elected by a strong Democratic society to
the State Senate in 1844.  During his term of service, in an investigation
of the notorious Plaquemine fraud, by which John Slidell, of the Tammany
New York school, and not in any sense a Louisianian, stole the vote of
the State from Mr. Clay, Dr. Perkins was chairman of the committee selected
by the senate to investigate the alleged frauds.  His searching and incisive
scrutiny into the rottenness revealed many facts hitherto unsuspected, and
which have never have been refuted.  His fame as a scientific practitioner
of the abstruse mysteries of the healing art has been rivalled by his son,
Dr. Lewis G. Perkins, and his two grandsons, Drs. James and Harry Kilbourne,
the last of whom left Clinton a short while ago, full of youthful promise
and bright aspirations, to practice his profession in the parish of More-
house.  He carried with him the loving wishes and fond predictions of the
young and the old of his native town, and when the wires announced that
he had fallen a victim to malaria, there was not in his native town a
family circle without sorrow, nor an eye undimmed by a tear.

There have been many fine old characters and families which have been
powerful in shaping the trend of Eighth Ward society, and the names of the
Stewarts, Kents, Humbles, Geralds, Rogers, McAdams and Woodwards are
intimately connected with its social annals.  I regret my inability, from
lack of authentic data, to give them a notice better proportioned to their
social standing and merit.

As a faithful chronicler I cannot close my sketch without narrating my
last interview with another of the ward's best known landmarks.  A lady,
fit to be the mother of a race of heroes and statesmen, who came into the
ward as Miss Zilpha Doughty, from South Carolina, and after rearing a
large family as the wife of John Chance, of Georgia, was left a widow with
a large household to take care of.  During the war a Mississippi regiment
under orders for Port Hudson camped near my house in the suburbs of Clinton
one stormy night; the wind blew almost a hurricane and the rain came down
in torrents.  In the morning the half-drowned, shivering soldiers flocked
around my kitchen fires for warmth and food, and all my scanty store were
devoured by the hungry crowd.  In my distress at finding my family without
food, I thought of the never empty smokehouse of my thrifty old friend,
Mrs. Zilpha Chance.  She, compassionating my destitution, took me to her
smokehouse, in which the meat was assorted in three piles.  She pointed to
the largest pile, saying, "That is for the Confederacy; nobody can get
that."  "That," pointing to the smallest pile, she said, "is for my own
use."  Looking closely at the size of the third pile, she hesitatingly
remarked:  "Well, I reckon you can get 150 pounds out of the pile at two
bits a pound."  The bargain was struck, the meat weighed and loaded into
my wagon.  When ready to leave, I pulled out a roll of "Greenbacks" to
settle for the meat.  The grand old dame ( I can see her now ) folded her
arms with imposing dignity, but with an eye fiery with withering scorn,
exclaimed :  "I have never yet touched that hateful money, and have no
use for it now.  If you can pay me in Confederate money, I will take it,
because I can pay my taxes with it."  I stood humilitated and rebuked in
the presence of a "mother in Israel" who regulated her duties to the State
by such elevated and patriotic rules of action.  Pondering over the mem-
orable scene, as I rode home, I wondered how many women like Mrs. Chance
and her neighbor, Mrs. Talbert, would it take to make a "small State great?"
Ten years ago I met a matron whose maxims and rules of conduct were closely
akin to the exalted standard held up by her near neighbors, Mrs. Chance
and Mrs. Talbert.  She was probably a pupil of these two grand examplars;
my last allusion is to Mrs. Andrew White.

The Eighth Ward, like all the others, except the first and third, has large
areas of abandoned, uncultivated fields, which once furnished luxury and
plenty to the old slaveholders.  Most of these have gone to render their
last account, and their former slaves have migrated to newer and fresher
soils, and their once spacious and comfortable homes await tenants with
labor and capital to restore and make productive the cheap abandoned fields
around them.  Abounding as this ward does in bold streams of living waters,
which empty into the Amite river, its eastern boundary, or into Beaver
creek, its northern boundary, or into Sandy creek, its western boundary, its
surface presents a broad scope of cheap and fertile lands, blessed with
an unfailing water supply, and along its boundary streams and along its
small tributaries as well, namely, Poole's creek, Clear creek and Hephizbah
creek are to be found many small parcels of land which will produce without
fertilizing a bale of cotton to the acre.

The mention of Clear creek in the foregoing paragraph reminds me that I
have omitted any reference to a large, powerful and growing body of
Methodists, who have constructed a commodious house of worship on the banks
of that stream.

In a preceding sketch the men of East Feliciana have been described as
faithful and loyal to the law, in times of peace; and dauntless in war;
and ever prompt, as in 1814, when the British landed at Lake Borgne; as
in 1846 when the Mexicans crossed the Rio Grande, and as in 1861, when the
rights of their state was encroached upon, 'ever prompt to bare the
freeman's arm to strike for the freeman's home !'  Three levies, 'en masse'
without any summons but the natural pulse beats of native patriotism.
Three grand spectacles full of cheerful promise and hope to the patriots
heart !  But there remains a 'fourth' pregnant with still grander and more
sublime significance.  Although their homes were sacked by many a pilfering
raid; although every house in the parish mourned its dead, whose bones
lie bleaching on the battle fields of the war of the rebellion; as soon as
the tocsin of war ceased to be heard in the disturbed land, this warlike
population, charmed by the sweet music of the peaceful church bells on
the Hallowed Day flocked to the shrines of a pure faith whose inspirations
is "Peace and good will" and renouncing on their knees, the thirst for
vengeance, the hatred and discords of four years of civil strife, solemnly
renewed their vows of fidelity to a reunited country.

With a few more words my sketch of East Feliciana and its social life will
come to a close.  I know this announcement will be hailed with pleasure by
some few prejudiced critics who have already been complaining that "his
old legends tire the ear; they are bu the tedious twaddle of a garulous
old man."  As a class critics are not a new or original type of casuists.
Nineteen hundred years ago their prototypes thronged the streets of
Jerusalem, injecting into the ears of the wayfarers their venomous sneers
by asking, "Is not this the Carpenter's son ?  Can any good come out of
Nazareth?"  From such a prejudiced judgement seat, I turn to a generous,
fair minded public and ask their verdict; whether my work has been skill-
fully or bunglingly performed ?  If their unfavorable conclusions are
fairly deducible from my writings, then I have raked among the consecrated
ashes of our ancestors, in vain.  Against such unfriendly conclusions I
still alive in the breasts of all except sordid, mean, unworthy people.
An orator; seeking to warm the heart of his generation to some heroic deed
of self-sacrifice, always points back to the tombs and monuments which
enshrine the dust of the great chiefs who have served the state, in camp
or in council; so too, have I, in the name of our Huguenot and Carolina
ancestors, who founded our society, appealed to the living to be worthy
of the dead.  In such an appeal I pay but merited homage, to the rough-
hewn symbols and images of frontier life, which, if a little too rude for
imitation in a smoother and more polished civilization, are, nevertheless,
admirable in my eyes as images of Truth, Honor and Patriotism.

I have tried to picture a good land, the home of good people, with good
soil, good climate, good laws, good churches and schools; if my picture
fails to attract the home seekers, with capital and labor, in that case
I shall confess that my aim has not been achieved.  Such a confession will
be made with deep regret, but without humilitation, for I honestly feel
that I have done my best.  With a sangnine hope for better results,
I am, etc., H. SKIPWITH.

Part Fifteen

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"EAST FELICIANA, LOUISIANA, PAST AND PRESENT."

SKETCHES OF THE PIONEERS,

By H. Skipwith
1892
Hopkins Printing Office, 20 & 22 Commercial Place,
New Orleans

RISE AND PROGRESS OF CLINTON.

In my sketch of the pioneers of the Fifth Ward of East Feliciana,
which, with a similar sketch of the other seven wards of the parish
is now in the hand of the publishers nearly ready for publication in
book form, but a short incidental glance of the town of Clinton was
given.  This notable omission has elicited some sharp, unfavorable,
and I believe merited criticism.

In atonement for an omission which assumes the complexion of intent-
ional neglect and injustice to a widely known and renowned seat of
educational, social and religious development, my only apology is that
Clinton is the creation of circumstances in A.D. 1824; whereas, the
pioneers who made the first clearings within the border lines which
now mark the boundaries of the Fifth Ward, came into the ward in 1795,
1803-4-5 and 6.

As a full compensation for my omission I offer to His Honor, the Mayor,
and town council of Clinton, the following reliable history of the
origin and progress of their town, which is also intended as a supple-
ment to the sketch of "The Pioneers of the Fifth Ward."

That oldest seat of population, commerce and education in East Feliciana
is undoubtly the town of Jackson, which in its palmiest of metropolitian
days was the seat of justice of a County bounded on the east by the
Perdido river, forty miles east of Mobile Bay; on the north by the line
of demarkation established during General Washington's administration
by American and Spanish commissioners; on the south by the sea coast,
and on the west by the Mississippi river.  The biggest county ever
laid out since the days of the original thirteen states, and its mag-
nitude existed at a day before steamboats, railroads, telegraphs and
telephones.  But alas ! as not many years after the creation of the
big "County of Feliciana," with Jackson as its metropolis, Alabama
budded from a territorial hoyden into a full grown State and wanted an
outlet to the sea, that part of the big county which included Mobile
city and by was added to the dowry of the new comer into the family of
states; and so, likewise, when the Territory of Mississippi applied for
admission as a State, and all the old county of Feliciana which lay
eastward, of the Pearl river between Mobile and Pascagoula, Biloxi, Pass
Christian and Bay St. Louis were all wrested out of the county of
Feliciana to give our neighbors acces to the sea when she was admitted
into statehood; and thus crumbled away the vast territory under the
county jurisdiction of which our ancient and venerable neighbor, Jackson,
was the metropolis.

Between 1813 and 1824 the big county was further dismembered by the
creation of the parishes of St. Tammany, Washington, St. Helena and
Livingston, thus reducing the county to the small territory on which the
parishes of East and West Feliciana are now seated, and in 1824 the
state government, impelled by complaints that the floods and quick sands
of Thompsons creek established a barrier to the speedy and cheap course
of justice; created the Parishes of East and West Feliciana, with
instructions to the Police Jury of the Eastern Parish to establish its
seat of justice in the centre of the parish.  The commissioners ascer-
tained by actual survey the centre, in the middle of an old worn out
field about two and a half miles west of Clinton, the old field being
entirely destitute for forest or fountain.  The commissioners selected
the site for the parish seat on which Clinton now stands, because it
was well watered by perennial springs and by Pretty creek, and wooded
by dense forests of pine and hard woods all around it.

Two western mechanics and speculators, John Bostwick and George Sebor,
were the actual, not mythical founders of Clinton after it was selected
as the seat of justice for the parish.  They bought most of the land
now within the corporate limits - they built a small temporary court-
house, jail, and hotel, and laid out the streets and squares of a
large city in the prospective.

The writer came into Clinton in 1825 from where Wilson now stands by
narrow bridle paths, all through dense cane thickets, extending after
fording Pretty creek to the top of the hill on which the livery stable
now stands.  Around the courthouse square there were two frame houses
used as country stores and saloons, and between Carow's corner and Mr.
Henry Hartner's dwelling, there stood in 1825, the dwelling of the
original proprietor (Louis Yarborough) and his family.  The fertile
and extensive back country east of Clinton soon attracted merchantile
enterprise and merchants reaped golden harvests; the disputes between
landed proprietors, questions of boundary and the right of way, and
the more vigorous collection of debts soon brought into the Forensic
arena just opened a large body of intellectual recruits from the law
schools all over the Union; and old Tully Robinson (the father of the
East Feliciana bar), who had been sent out early in the century by
President Jefferson as U.S. District Attorney for the Territory of
Orleans, and who, after the Territory of Orleans became the State of
Louisiana, clung to the county of Feliciana, as the last appanage of
his official realm and made his home at the new seat of justice, found
himself bearded by a guild of lawyers his equals in all the wire
drawn arts of professional skill, though the old settler still held
all his rivals at bay in the brilliant science of rhetorical display.
Among the aspiring spirits who first flocked to Clinton in search of
professional laurels where Lafayette Saunders, who held the parish
judgeship and state senatorship, and would have been, had he lived
until March 4th, 1849, a member of General Taylor's first cabinet; -
Thomas L. Andrews, - John R. Bullard, James H. Muse, - Edwin T. Merrick
(afterwards Chief Justice of Louisiana) - Thornton Lawson (afterwards
District Judge) and R.W. Short, the two last having engaged in a
personal controversy which was ended in a duel at Kellertown in which
Short met his death at the first fire.  Take these all in all the
first generation of the East Feliciana bar stood unrivalled in Louisiana,
as able, adroit and eloquent advocates, and the second generation of
lawyers held up bravely the brilliant record of the first.  Among the
leading spirits of the second generation were such masters of the art
of rhetorical fire works as the late Colonel Preston Pond, the late
Judge John McVea and the late Judge Charles McVea, Judge J.G. Kilbourne
and Judge W.F.Kernan, all graduates of the old college of Louisiana
at Jackson, or of old "Centenary."

With such brilliant Society of Intellectual Athletes it is no wonder
that churches and schools were the first wants of a community fast
growing in refinement and numbers.  And with the co-operation of
Clinton's old time merchants Clinton grew and prospered amazingly.
The religious societies, spying a new, populous and unredeemed field
of effort, soon added their mite to the moral leverage which was
leavening the precincts of the new court house; churches went up on
every spare lot, and "old Grocery Row," a second edition of "Natchez
Under The Hill," went down.  And now, Clinton of to day has a Bar,
though not so numerous, is probably as gifted as its brilliant ante
types of the first and second generations, and to-day the Methodists,
Baptists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians and Roman Catholics ( I name
them in the order of their coming) have each a handsome, roomy and
commodious house of worship.  And in proof that educational develop-
ment is keeping even step with religious development, there are n
Clinton to-day a prosperous and growing boys' school in which youths
are thoroughly grounded in all the walks of knowledge leading to a
complete collegiate course of study, - and an institute for girls,
with more than a hundred pupils, who are being as thoroughly educated
in all the ornamental and useful branches of knowledge, as they could
be in better endowed, and more pretentious seats of education.

In a closing paragraph I desire to submit a few additonal remarks
essential to round off a faithful SKETCH OF THE TOWN OF CLINTON.

East and south of Clinton, there are at least 100,000 acres of
cleared fields and forests now idle, waste and unproductive for
want of a sufficient labor supply.  All this area forms a back
country naturally tributary to Clinton commerce, in which Clinton
has no competitors; when all these broad and fertile acres are
stimulated to their highest productive capacity by intelligent
farming and abundant labor and capital, Clinton will become the
"entrepot" for a fifty thousand bale crop, which will surely attract
mercantile and manufacturing capital and enterprise.  The distribution
of the contents of the Western granaries and smoke houses to a laboring
population sufficient to make fifteen thousand bales, will add
enormously to our commercial ventures.

A centre for the distribution of such large quantities of raw material
will, as surely as the Pole attracts the needle, attract capital to
start a cotton seed oil mill, a compress, and a first-class cotton
factory, for Clinton will then furnish water fuel and raw material to
run machinery cheap and keep machinery well fed all the year round.

When commerce swells, when agriculture multiplies, when the town is
alive with steam whistles and the ceaseless run of busy lucrative
machinery, with a railroad equal to all its needs, the dream of its
founders and the hopes of this writer will have been fulfilled.

H. SKIPWITH.

S.LAMBERT
W. LANDRY

GENERAL INSURANCE AGENCY
THE LARGEST IN THE CITY.
INSURANCE IN ALL ITS BRANCHES.
THE STRONGEST FIRE COMPANIES IN THE WORLD.
THE STRONGEST LIFE COMPANIES IN THE WORLD.

OUR PATRONS WELL SATISFIED.

NEW ONES CONSTANTLY COMING IN.

Others Cordially Invited.

OFFICE ON LAFAYETTE STREET,
BATON ROUGE, LA.

Part Sixteen

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"EAST FELICIANA, LOUISIANA, PAST AND PRESENT."

SKETCHES OF THE PIONEERS,

By H. Skipwith
1892
Hopkins Printing Office, 20 & 22 Commercial Place,
New Orleans

"SUPPLEMENTARY SKETCH OF CLINTON."

Since the foregoing appeared in "The Southern Watchman" of December
19th, 1890, an old neighbor and friend who is like myself on the
shady side of seventy, has pointed out a number of notable omissions.

FIRST.  In my sketch of the educational advantages of Clinton it was
an important, and unpardonable omission not to mention the Finishing
school for young ladies' of that renowned and beloved educator Mrs.
Sallie Munday, which was founded as an Academy many years ago by the
mother of Admiral Gherarde, and which under Mrs. Munday's able super-
intendency has grown in popularity and usefulness, until, its capacity
is heavily taxed to give proper attention to the large number of boarders
and day scholars applying for admission.

SECOND.  The names of many of the lawyers who graced the early Clinton
bar, and who have since made famous names and National reputations
were omitted in my incomplete and hasty enumeration of the leading spirits
of the early Clinton bar.

Among those omitted were General E.W. Ripley, who after having perfected
the system of defences for the Louisiana coasts, retired from the army,
with a bullet through his neck received at the famous and bloody battle
of Bridgewater; and resumed the practice of his profession (the law), and
in partnership with Charles M. Conrad afterwards Senator and Cabinet
Minister, made Clinton his field of professional effort.  There too, old
James Turner, renowned for his adroit methods of saving criminals from
deserved punishment, and A.D.M. Haralson, the States brilliant prosecuting
officer, used to come out to Clinton to shiver lances with such expert
fencers as U.S. Senator Solomon W. Downes.  Joseph E. Johnson and Isaac
Johnson, afterwards Governor and District Judge.  In the midst of this
throng of bright, aspiring intellects, might be seen the burly towering
form of James M. Bradford, who started the first newspaper West of the
Alleghanys at the "Falls of the Ohio," the voice of Mr. Bradford, when
pleading a case was as loud as the voice of Mahomet's, uncle in the midst
of the battles around Mecca; from this distinguishing characteristic he
obtained the nickname of "Bull Bradford."

THIRD.  Reuben Washington Short, adopted son of Lund Washington, was not
killed at Kellertown, as was stated in the original sketch; he only lost
the plated ruffles on his shirt bosom instead of his life.

FOURTH.  James Holmes; who married a daughter of the grand old Pioneer
Baptist Missionary, Ezra Courtney; was part owner with Bostwick of the
site of Clinton, and George Sebor was their architect and constructor.

FIFTH.  Thomas W. Scott, a farmer, was appointed by Governor Thomas
Bolling Robertson, the first Parish Judge, instead of Sheriff as he
petitioned to be, always upright, modest and conscientous, he had written,
and mailed a letter of declination, to the governor, but his friends
overruled him and influenced him to accept an office, which was never
more satisfactorily filled, than it was by the honest unpretending farmer.

SIXTH.  I omitted to include in my museum of "antiques" the small brick
building in the Court house square, which is now the office of the
Mayor of Clinton, but which, until the new Court house was finished in
1838, served as the office of the Parish Judge and Clerk.

H. SKIPWITH.

(End of Book)