Lost Lake Charles by Adley Cormier

Lost Lake Charles by Adley Cormier

Author:Adley Cormier
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing Inc.
Published: 2017-10-15T00:00:00+00:00


The St. Clair House was the height of hospitality in the nineteenth century. Note the open ditches crossed by the occasional wood bridges and the extensive use of wood, including wood shingles. Courtesy the Imperial Calcasieu Museum.

It was a Saturday, a working day for most people. Men toiled at the mills or for the railroad, or they labored in shops and forges, warehouses, fields or, in rare cases, offices. Women maintained households, doing laundry, cleaning, cooking, baking and sewing. A few women operated their own shops and stores, but women-owned or operated businesses were few in number. Children would help their families with simple chores like harvesting vegetables from family gardens, collecting eggs, cleaning lamps or making beds. For working children, and there were many, the day meant running errands and delivering messages, helping in a shop, working for a blacksmith or a livery stable or, most dangerously, working at a sawmill or a in woodworking shop.

The few who worked a half day or, indeed, had the entire day off, might have taken one of the streetcars to Barbe’s Pleasure Pier or to Walnut Grove to enjoy the day at a site where one could fish, swim or just hold hands at the water’s edge. They might have chosen to visit friends or family, or perhaps they packed a picnic to enjoy at Orange Grove Cemetery. A lucky few might have chosen to take a short train excursion to visit the towns of Welsh or Jennings, or to Orange, Texas, and marvel at trains that raced at speeds of sixty miles per hour.

At 3:40 in the afternoon on April 23, 1910, Horton Porter, owner of Blaske’s Soft Drink Stand (or, as it was more commonly known, the Old Opera House Saloon), and a young boy named Chaffin who ran errands for Gunn’s Bookstore next door noticed a small, unattended trash fire behind the Williams Opera House. The young boy immediately began to throw water to quench the flame, and Porter ran to the fire department. According to the American Press newspaper of the day, Luther Sudduth, the fire chief, led the first wagon to the scene.



Download



Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.