Photo by Gallery 3 Studio

October 2011. Wayne and Debbie Norwood keep the memories of long vanished towns alive.

In 1915, before named storms, a category four hurricane began hammering the coast of Louisiana near Grand Isle with winds of 165 mph at its center. The storm roared into the coast of Louisiana in the early morning hours of September 29th, causing coastal destruction and moving northward. Before it was finished, 275 people would lose their lives as a result of the “Great West Indian Hurricane of 1915.” It would also claim the towns of Frenier, Napton (formerly Wagram), and Ruddock.  These towns would never recover their population and finally would be lost to water erosion from Lakes Pontchartrain and Maurepas.

Today, Wayne Norwood keeps the history of these towns alive through artifacts displayed in his private museum, The Louisiana Treasures Museum, located in Springfield, Louisiana. “I got interested in artifacts diving for the sheriff’s office,” said Norwood who was a deputy sheriff at the time and explained that while diving, he “found some strange looking old bottles.”

It turns out the hand-blown bottles he discovered date back to 1790. At first, Norwood said, he just wanted bottles and passed up many other artifacts, “that got me started into this…from these little towns below Manchac…” He began collecting these area artifacts and before long, with other items, “had a 30 x 30 shed full of stuff.” Wanting a place to display the material he’d collected led him to build the present day museum, which occupies an area almost 3,700 square feet. The items Norwood has collected eventually encompassed not only the artifacts from below Manchac, but other period articles as well.

“I have a little of everything here. Our young people don’t know nor have any clue of some of the things that went on [prior to their life],” he explained. “Or how hard times were years ago. I’ve got something here of how people worked, how they played, how they lived, and they [young people] can see it firsthand.”  The museum artifacts date back thousands of years from Indian times to the twentieth century.

After becoming interested in the lost towns, Norwood sought out survivors and in 1990 filmed an interview with Mrs. Helen Schlosser Burg. The film was then transcribed and is available as a handout in the museum. Burg tells of life before the hurricane destroyed the area, the hurricane itself, and of abandoning the area after the storm. Burg was born in 1901 in the town of Wagram (later named Napton), deep in the swamps of Louisiana in St. John Parish.

“Manchac was first, then Ruddock, Napton (Wagram), and then Frenier,” reads the handout. Ruddock was developed to harvest the native cypress trees of the area and was a sawmill town, with the remains of the old sawmill still standing deep in the swamp. The other towns were agriculture–based with the main crop being cabbage. All of the land once farmed is now in the lake because of erosion. Also noted in Norwood’s transcription of the interview, “Mrs. Burg told of a wonderful life, the kind most of us would like to live today. Everything was peaceful and quiet. There were no police. No one locked their doors. Everyone knew each other and helped each other. Every day at 1 pm people would go into their home and rest until 3 pm. She talked of how she would walk along the lakeshore for miles and how peaceful it was.”

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