Merchants and Farmers Bank, Tangipahoa Parish, Louisiana Submitted to the USGenWeb Archives by Sandra McLellan, Oct. 2006 Special thanks to Jim Perrin for donating it to the archives. ************************************************ Copyright. All rights reserved. http://usgwarchives.net/copyright.htm http://usgwarchives.net/la/lafiles.htm ************************************************ THE MERCHANTS AND FARMERS BANK AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF WEST PINE STREET BY JIM PERRIN, Local Historian For three decades the Merchants and Framers Bank of Ponchatoula served their customers until it succumbed to the financial ills of the Great Depression. The bank was chartered 17 Nov. 1902 with a capital of $15,000, and opened for business 2 Jan. 1903. It was initially located on the north side of the 100 block of West Pine Street in the left of two twin buildings which had recently been constructed. This location is today numbered 136 West Pine Street. The early Board of Directors of the bank were: William L. Wright, Henry P. Mitchell, Percy Delmau Parks, Jacob R. Abels, Charles D. Abels, Reubin A. Pierson, Andrew J. Pusey, Jr., C. C. Gray, Damion Schafer, Frank J. Campbell, and Meyer G. Prince. Serving as officers of the bank in 1906 were William L. Wright, president; Jacob R. Abels, vice-president; Henry P. Mitchell, cashier, and N. R. Anderson, assistant cashier. The bank's officers were the same in 1907 except L. V. Settoon was serving as a vice-president in place of Percy D. Parks. The bank prospered as the Ponchatoula economy grew in the opening years of the twentieth century. The bank's charter was amended in 1903 and 1906 increasing the capital available for lending. In April 1908, a committee of the Board of Directors composed of Jacob R. Abels, Andrew J. Pusey, Rudolph Flasdick, and Henry P. Mitchell was appointed to seek a permanent site for a bank building. The committee did not have to look far since Henry P. Mitchell, the cashier for the bank, owned a choice piece of property across the street at the western corner of the 100 block of West Pine Street. Mr. Mitchell had purchased a piece of ground on West Pine fronting fifty feet from the end of the block and 200 feet deep down South Sixth Street in January 1906. Mitchell purchased this property from local barber Henry Levi Wells who operated his barber shop in a frame building on the corner and lived with his family in the rear of the shop from 1899 until 1906. The Bank's Board of Directors recommended the purchase of a portion of Mitchell's newly acquired lot, being 28 feet by 75 feet on the corner of West Pine and South Sixth Street for the price of $500. The recommendation was approved and the bank purchased the lot from Mitchell in late May 1908. The two story brick building was to have solid brick walls no less than seventeen inches thick, with the east wall of the building to be a ³party wall² so that a future adjoining building owned by either Mitchell or the bank could use that wall as part of a new neighboring building. Mitchell agreed to move Wells' barber shop building and residence from the bank site within sixty days while the bank was finalizing designs and seeking a contractor. Henry Mitchell, who had purchased fifty feet of frontage on Pine Street from Henry Wells, had sold the bank 28 feet from the corner and seemingly had 22 feet left for his own use. The next property owner on Pine Street to the east of Mitchell's property was Ernest Hoffman. Hoffman had purchased a 25 foot frontage on Pine Street from Jacob R. Abels in March 1904 for $600 and soon thereafter erected an attractive two story brick building on the lot. The ground floor of the Hoffman building was used by Fred P. Willis and Son as a hardware store and later by Wilber ³Will² Richardson and his partner as a hardware store. Henry Mitchell purchased the Hoffman building in July 1908 for $2,400. As planning for the new bank building progressed during the summer of 1908, a problem arose concerning Henry Mitchell's purchase of the Hoffman Building and the exact location of the neighboring boundary lines. Henry Mitchell had purchased fifty feet of frontage from Henry L. Wells, sold the bank the west 28 feet which should have left 22 feet between the balance of Henry Mitchell's land and the newly acquired Hoffman Building. However a quick measurement showed that the Hoffman building was about seventeen feet from the proposed east wall of the bank property. Where were the missing five feet of frontage on Pine Street? The bank's directors wanted to be sure where the property lines were located before their brick building was erected and since the contract for construction had already been signed they needed a quick solution. The answer as to what happened to the missing five feet of frontage began as a question in the mind of Jacob Richard Abels several years earlier. Abels, the largest land owner in Ponchatoula at that time, had operated a general merchandise business in a two story frame building at the other end of the block, on the corner of West Pine Street and Southwest Railroad Avenue. His business was doing very well and he decided in 1901 to replace the old frame building with a new two story brick store and apartment complex. There were then two or three different maps of the town of Ponchatoula in existence than had been drawn over the years. Some of these maps showed that James Clark, the town's founder had laid out the blocks 100 feet from the center of the railroad tracks and some showed that the city blocks began 105 feet from the railroad tracks. Since there was no official map approved by the town, Abels wanted to be certain that his building was erected on his property and not encroach on the public street (Southwest Railroad Avenue). He therefore had his building erected 105 feet front the center of the tracks. Jacob Abel's decision was followed by his business neighbor across the street, Frank J. Campbell when he erected his own large brick building in 1904. The effect of Abel's decision was to shift all the properties in that block {Square 41} five feet to the west and led to the erection of the Hoffman Building five feet over on Henry Mitchell's land. After much litigation the 100 foot measure was said to be correct, but the brick buildings in question were in place and remain there today. The Merchants and Farmers Bank was at the end of the block so they did not encroach on any other business to the west but they wanted to ensure that their bank building was properly and safely placed. To solve their problem they purchased the balance of Henry Mitchell's property between the proposed bank and the Hoffman Building for $350. The bank building was erected in 1909 and the Merchants and Farmers Bank continued to operate in that location until 1933. The space between the bank and the Hoffman Building was filled in with another building and made to generally match the original bank building, although the window spacing and construction vary between the two structures. In later years the wall between the bank owned building and the Hoffman Building was opened up and the weight of the second story and roof supported by a massive I beam that is visible today in Roussel's Antiques, which is located in the former Hoffman /bank/ Willis/ Richardson Hardware Building. The bank building was completed in short order and looked very much as it does today. Some changes were of course made over the years such as the addition of a large clock on the corner of the building which was installed in the summer of 1926 and could be seen from several directions. In recent years a covered walkway and small balconies on the Sixth Street side have been added, as well as refurbished front doors and windows. The second floor of the bank building housed offices and meeting rooms. A number of fraternal groups used the bank's meeting rooms on a regular basis. These upstairs rooms are now used as apartments. The bank continued to grow with the community and by Feb. 1915, the charter was again amended with the bank stock now reaching $50,000 being held by the bank's stockholders as 5,000 shares of stock at ten dollars per share. In 1918, Henry P. Mitchell was serving as the bank president and his son Willard M. Mitchell was the bank cashier, with William E. Mount and Andrew J. Pusey serving as vice-presidents. The Merchants and Farmers Bank flourished in the 1920's as the population of Ponchatoula quadrupled with the opening of two large cypress lumber mills at the southern edge of town. The bank temporarily moved to another location in September 1922 while their building was being renovated. Thousands of dollars were spent placing a marble wainscoting facade on the front of the building, putting in a new floor, plastering the walls, installing marble sections in the lobby, and replacing the safe and vault. The prosperity these renovations reflected ended at the close of the decade when the mills ceased operations in 1929 forcing many families to leave Ponchatoula and search for jobs elsewhere. This economic setback for the local economy was soon followed by the onset of the Depression. As people became unemployed or were under-employed, many families could no longer make their payments on their home and farm mortgages. The hard times caused by the Depression also meant that the homes and farms that had been financed by the bank greatly depreciated in value. With most of their funds tied up in property that could not be sold at a profit, the Merchants and Farmers Bank and thousands of other banks across the nation faced bankruptcy. In order to stave off financial collapse the Merchants and Farmers Bank merged with other small banks in Independence, Amite, and Kentwood to form the Tangipahoa Bank and Trust Company in Dec. 1932. The other bank in town, the Ponchatoula Bank and Trust Company attempted to merge with the Merchants and Farmers Bank in Jan. 1933, but because there were some alleged bank irregularities connected with the Ponchatoula Bank and Trust the Tangipahoa Bank and Trust Company would not accept the merger. The efforts to save the Merchants and Farmers Bank by merger with other banks in the same plight were fruitless as the bank failed in 1933. With the closure of the Merchants and Farmers Bank, the shareholders lost most of their investment, but hardest hit were the many customers of the bank who lost their hard earned savings. Individual customers were not protected against bank failures until later in 1933. As one of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal measures Congress enacted the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to safeguard funds in banks who were members in the FDIC. The loss of even one or two hundred dollars in the bank could mean a financial disaster for many impoverished Ponchatoula farmers. Some financial institutions such as the Ponchatoula Homestead Association, established in 1911, although also suffering were able to survive the economic storm. Ponchatoula was without a banking institution until the newly formed Guaranty Bank and Trust Company opened a branch in town in the former Merchants and Farmers location on West Pine and South Sixth Street. The bank building was renovated when the new bank was established, but what was most important for Ponchatoula's banking customers was that their deposits were now protected by the United States government. The Guaranty Bank continued to operate in that corner location until the opening of a more modern facility on West Hickory Street about 1960. During the spring of 1961 the vacant bank building was the headquarters for Ponchatoula's Centennial celebration. In later years the Citizens Finance Company located in the old bank building and operates there today. The finance company continues more than a half century of financial transactions in that historic site. Anyone with questions, comments or suggestions for future articles, may contact Jim Perrin at 386-4476.