Photo by Jeffrey Dubinsky
From the time he was a teenager, Mark Lazarre was fascinated by family history. “I was fifteen when I got interested in genealogy,” said Lazarre, during a recent conversation at his law office on Summa Avenue. “I got stories from my paternal grandmother when she was ninety. She grew up in eastern Iowa and remembered her grandfather, who was born in 1803. She remembered relatives who had fought in the Civil War, and she remembered Indians living three or four miles away.
“I was the type who asked questions. When she died, I was twenty-two. She left me her photographs, four albums of them. She made me memorize who everybody in the albums was. She had told relatives she was leaving them to me, ‘Because you’re the only one who knows who they were and the only one who cares.’”
Lazarre has done extensive genealogical research on his own family and those of friends. He learned to research land records soon after finishing law school at LSU. “I was trained to research land titles in my first job, as soon as I passed the bar, searching to be sure there was a clear title to the property and no liens on it. Sometimes I went back to the original land grant from the government.”
These skills have been useful for his current project: tracing the history of the Baton Rouge subdivision near the intersection of Perkins Road and Essen Lane. “Every property has a genealogy,” Lazarre said. “Fifty years ago, the nearby subdivision where my office is located was an Italian truck farm, and before that it was a plantation. It’s fascinating to me—the march of time.”
Silverside Plantation
In early 2016, Lazarre began researching the area. He started by looking at digital maps he found at the East Baton Rouge Parish library’s online website—about forty maps dating from 1803 to the late 1980s. “Next I went to more recent and detailed maps at the courthouse, including individual plat maps of a subdivision or piece of land. I was bringing it forward. Just like when you are doing genealogy, you start with the most current information and work backward.”
The 1895 official parish map showed that a man named J. Hayes White owned one piece of property in the Perkins/Essen area and another piece in joint ownership with his brother David. It was located where the new children’s hospital is being built, between Essen and Bluebonnet parallel to Interstate 10. Using online resources such as Ancestry.com and the 1892 book Biographical and Historical Memoirs of Louisiana, Lazarre learned that the White brothers had come to Baton Rouge from Tennessee around 1844 along with other family members.
[Read "A poet's fascination with Amédé Ardoin, the chanson vivante who died too young."]
A 1914 plat map at the Clerk of Court’s office showed parcels of land, each about twenty acres, that had been subdivided to be sold. “The 1914 map was made after J. Hayes White had died in 1898. His plantation, Silverside, was south of Perkins and east of Essen. They subdivided the plantation into sections. Some were huge, and some were twenty acres divided into smaller lots.”
Rev. Willie Pitcher
Lazarre then checked conveyance records at the downtown courthouse to learn who had purchased each lot. A 1939 map printed in the State-Times newspaper “shows Essen, Perkins, and the LR&N [Louisiana Railway and Navigation] railroad tracks,” said Lazarre. “The families living there included Reverend Willie Pitcher, who was African American, and Professor William. H. Gates, who taught zoology and entomology at LSU. His wife sold chickens, which I found out through an ad in the parish library’s online historical-newspaper collection. Gates died in 1973 at age ninety. I found that out by checking Find A Grave [website]online.”
Lazarre’s research revealed that Reverend Pitcher, who farmed, ran a sugar mill, and made syrup, bought one half of a lot on the east side of Essen in 1917 from the nephew and namesake of J. Hayes White, who had inherited his uncle’s Silverside Plantation. “The nephew sold the northern half of Lot 4 to Pitcher. It’s right at Perkins at Essen. Pitcher also owned a store.
“Twelve different individuals bought lots. Professor Gates bought lots 5 and 6. Antonio Roppolo bought lots 7 and 8. Sebeal Raby bought Lot 2. Except for Gates and Roppolo, all of the buyers were African American. All the lots were part of the subdivided Silverside Plantation.”
[We also recommend "Mississippi River Ferry Tales: The history of the ferries in Louisiana"]
Lazarre hopes to interview descendants of Pitcher, who died in 1997 at the age of 108. He had been pastor at several churches, including the Sixty Aid Baptist Church on Raby Street, where he led the congregation for seventy-two years. In a 1997 newspaper interview, Pitcher said he had met and worked with Martin Luther King Jr., adding “He was a good preacher, too.”
“Pitcher was born in the West Feliciana town of Bains and was raised on the Wakefield Plantation there, where his parents [Calvin and Sarah Pitcher] once were slaves,” according to the article in the Baton Rouge Advocate, which Lazarre found online. Willie Pitcher and his wife Margaret had eight children, many of whom still lived in the area when he died.
E. McDonald
“The more I delve into this story, the more fascinating it gets,” Lazarre said. “I noticed on the 1895 map, at the corner of Perkins and Essen, there was a forty-two-acre plot labeled “E. McDonald.” It was surrounded by property owned by J. Hayes White. I kept wondering, Who is E. McDonald?
“I went to the courthouse and found an 1893 donation of land by J. Hayes White to Ellen McDonald. I figured she was his heir. I got on Ancestry.com and found her in the 1880 and 1900 censuses. [The 1890 census was destroyed by fire.] She is enumerated as black. According to the census she had children named White whose father was born in Tennessee—three boys and two girls.”
Further research led Lazarre to conclude that David L. White was the children’s father. “In 1931, there was a notice in the newspaper that Alice White, one of Ellen’s children, was selling property she got from her father D.L. White,” he said.
Lazarre checked the courthouse and found David White’s will, dated 1884, which left all of his property to Ellen McDonald and her five children. “This doesn’t prove that White was the children’s father, but it is another piece of strong evidence that he probably was,” he said.
“The land where my office is located was owned by J. Hayes White and his brother David equally. By 1899 both had died, so there was a court-ordered partition of the property. It was given to Ellen McDonald plus her children—Tillman, Hugh, and Arthur White and Alice White Thomas. Ellen had already bought out her daughter Gertrude’s share. My office is on the part owned by Hugh White.
“On Ancestry, I found that somebody had posted about Ellen McDonald. It was her great-great-grandson Dana White. I messaged him and learned that he was a descendant of Arthur White and was doing research into the family history.”
“We got together, and I showed him the research I had done. His ancestor Ellen owned forty-two acres on the corner of Perkins and Essen.”
Although he’s made several exciting finds and connected with a descendant of one property owner, Lazarre said his research will continue. “Everything I find builds on the next thing.”
