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Mark Twain returned to New Orleans in 1882, from 28 April to 6 May.

Sunday church with Cable [At Prytania Street Presbyterian Church]  (pg 468)

Winan's Chapel corner First & Dryades [Cable wrote this two-line address in ink at the top of a page.  Winan's Chapel was an African Methodist Episcopal church in New Orleans]

A Tour of the Warmouth Sugar Plantation:

The captain and I joined a party of ladies and gentlemen, guests of Major Wood, and went down the river fifty-four miles, in a swift tug, to ex-Governor Warmouth's sugar plantation. Strung along below the city, were a number of decayed, ram-shackly, superannuated old steamboats, not one of which had I ever seen before. They had all been built, and worn out, and thrown aside, since I was here last. This gives one a realizing sense of the frailness of a Mississippi boat and the briefness of its life.

Six miles below town a fat and battered brick chimney, sticking above the magnolias and live-oaks, was pointed out as the monument erected by an appreciative nation to celebrate the battle of New Orleans—Jackson's victory over the British, January 8, 1815. The war had ended, the two nations were at peace, but the news had not yet reached New Orleans. If we had had the cable telegraph in those days, this blood would not have been spilt, those lives would not have been wasted; and better still, Jackson would probably never have been president. We have gotten over the harms done us by the war of 1812, but not over some of those done us by Jackson's presidency.

The Warmouth plantation covers a vast deal of ground, and the hospitality of the Warmouth mansion is graduated to the same large scale. We saw steam-plows at work, here, for the first time. The traction engine travels about on its own wheels, till it reaches the required spot; then it stands still and by means of a wire rope pulls the huge plow toward itself two or three hundred yards across the field, between the rows of cane. The thing cuts down into the black mold a foot and a half deep. The plow looks like a fore-and-aft brace of a Hudson river steamer, inverted. When the negro steersman sits on one end of it, that end tilts down near the ground, while the other sticks up high in air. This great see-saw goes rolling and pitching like a ship at sea, and it is not every circus rider that could stay on it.

The plantation contains two thousand six hundred acres; six hundred and fifty are in cane; and there is a fruitful orange grove of five thousand trees. The cane is cultivated after a modern and intricate scientific fashion, too elaborate and complex for me to attempt to describe; but it lost $40,000 last year. I forget the other details. However, this year's crop will reach ten or twelve hundred tons of sugar, consequently last year's loss will not matter. These troublesome and expensive scientific methods achieve a yield of a ton and a half and from that to two tons, to the acre; which is three or four times what the yield of an acre was in my time.

The drainage-ditches were everywhere alive with little crabs—'fiddlers.' One saw them scampering sidewise in every direction whenever they heard a disturbing noise. Expensive pests, these crabs; for they bore into the levees, and ruin them.

The great sugar-house was a wilderness of tubs and tanks and vats and filters, pumps, pipes, and machinery. The process of making sugar is exceedingly interesting. First, you heave your cane into the centrifugals and grind out the juice; then run it through the evaporating pan to extract the fiber; then through the bone-filter to remove the alcohol; then through the clarifying tanks to discharge the molasses; then through the granulating pipe to condense it; then through the vacuum pan to extract the vacuum. It is now ready for market. I have jotted these particulars down from memory. The thing looks simple and easy. Do not deceive yourself. To make sugar is really one of the most difficult things in the world. And to make it right, is next to impossible. If you will examine your own supply every now and then for a term of years, and tabulate the result, you will find that not two men in twenty can make sugar without getting sand into it.

We could have gone down to the mouth of the river and visited Captain Eads' great work, the 'jetties,' where the river has been compressed between walls, and thus deepened to twenty-six feet; but it was voted useless to go, since at this stage of the water everything would be covered up and invisible.

We could have visited that ancient and singular burg, 'Pilot-town,' which stands on stilts in the water—so they say; where nearly all communication is by skiff and canoe, even to the attending of weddings and funerals; and where the littlest boys and girls are as handy with the oar as unamphibious children are with the velocipede.

We could have done a number of other things; but on account of limited time, we went back home. [LOTM p473-80]

Henry C. Warmouth and His Plantation:

In 1877, at age 35, Warmoth married heiress Sally Durand of Newark, New Jersey. They had two sons and a daughter, and resided at Magnolia Plantation in Plaquemines Parish. Warmoth had bought the sugar cane plantation in 1873. Warmoth helped establish a sugar refinery and get a railroad constructed along the west bank of the Mississippi, which contributed to the development of the area.
He represented the Sugar Planters Association in seeking a tariff against foreign competition, which they gained from Congress. Louisiana planters could not compete against outside sugar. In 1884, Warmoth traveled to France and Germany to study their sugar industries, and he developed an experimental station at his plantation afterward. Unable to compete with foreign sugar, Warmoth sold his plantation and moved with his wife and family to New Orleans. [14]

The trio registered at the luxurious St. Charles Hotel, [New Orleans] today the site of the Place St. Charles. Sam found the hotel bar much as he remembered it from a quarter century earlier, with its “cool porch,” “sawdusted floor,” and “mint-julep suckers.”

With the local author George Washington Cable as their concierge and tour guide, the three men promptly jumped into “a whirlpool of hospitality — breakfasts, dinners, lunches, cock-fights, Sunday schools, mule-races, lake-excursions, social gatherings, & all sorts of things,” Sam reported to Livy.  The day of their arrival they went sightseeing in a carriage through the French Quarter, where they visited the old St. Louis Hotel (“hasn’t been swept for 40 years”) at the corner of St. Louis and Chartres Streets, attended the mule races benefiting the Southern Art Union at the fairgrounds, and spent the evening in the West End dining on “a ground-veranda over the water’ of Lake Pontchartrain on pompano (“delicious as the less criminal forms of sin”), and returned to their hotel around 10:00 p.m. Ironically, Sam was more familiar with the streets of the city than with the natural bends and curves of the river. “The New Orleans of today in all respects is the N.O, of 40 or 50 years ago,” he marveled. “They use the electric lights here pretty lavishly. Canal st(reet] has more lights of the kind than I ever saw before; and several adjoining streets are so lighted. There are 4 miles of electric lights on the river front.”

On Sunday, April 30, they met Joel Chandler Harris, who arrived at Sam's invitation by train to join the soiree. 

The Sabbatarian Cable escorted the group to the Prytania Street Presbyterian Church. Sam's opinion of the ceremony may be inferred from Grace King’s observation five years later during a visit to Hartford that “one of his funniest hits was an imitation of the sermon Cable took him to hear.” Cable then ushered the men incongruously to a cockfight, which Sam considered an “inhuman sort of entertainment.” That evening they attended an African American service at the First Street Methodist Episcopal Church (aka Winan’s Chapel). Sam confided to his journal, however, that the experience “was a failure” because it was “too good for literature” and, besides, a “white woman preached.”

[Sam] was so eager to escape demands on his time that he was “reduced to lying,” as he put it, about other commitments. Part of the problem was the dearth of steamboats still plying the river. One tugboat “now brings down barges containing 6000 tons of grain—stuff which in my time would have come down in 4 or 5 steamboats,” he noted in his journal, and the once-bustling docks were now “a wide and soundless vacancy” and “dead past resurrection.” In place of “a solid mile of wide-awake” steamboats he now saw “half a dozen sound-asleep” vessels, In the billiard rooms and saloons of the port cities the rivermen with their “swell airs and graces, and ostentatious displays of money, and pompous squanderings of it” were conspicuous by their absence.

On Wednesday, May 3, he finally crossed paths with his former master Horace Bixby, “the man whom, of all men, I most wished to see." Bixby had just arrived in the city aboard his latest Anchor Line command, the City of Baton Rouge, a behemoth at twenty-three hundred tons and a length of over 290 feet, with six bridal chambers and a pilothouse that was, according to Coleman O, Parsons, “nickel-plated, sound-tubed, steam-heated, and partly electrified.” It once raced upriver from New Orleans to Memphis in a near-record time of two days, twenty hours, and thirty-eight minutes. At the spry age of fifty-six, Bixby cut the same figure his ex-cub remembered: “the same tight curls, the same springy step, the same alertness, the same decision of eye and answering decision of hand, the same erect military bearing.” He and Sam spent the day together and traveled in the same clique the next three days."

Sam had hoped to view Bayou Teche, due west of New Orleans, during his stay, but the river had flooded the district. Instead, he inspected the jetties below New Orleans. He and Osgood joined a party of fifteen, including Bixby and his wife, all of them guests of Captain Wood, and journeyed on the Wood about fifty miles south of the Crescent City to former governor Henry Clay Warmoth’s Magnolia Plantation in Plaquemines Parish, where they spent the night. Below the city the tugboat passed a boat boneyard, "a number of decayed, ram-shackly, superannuated old steamboats,” Sam reported, all of them “built, and worn out, and thrown aside, since I was here last.” At the plantation, a former home of Confederate general P, G, T.  Beauregard, the “tall, witty, self-possessed” Warmoth led them on a tour of his twenty-six hundred acres of fig and orange groves and sugar cane."

[From pages 360-363 The Life of Mark Twain - The Middle Years 1871-1891]


 

Start Date
1882-04-28
End Date
1882-05-06
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