Sherburne Lives On

"The mail was put in special bags and carried up to the railroad that crossed the road that went along the levee down into Sherburne. There was a pole by the railroad to hang the mailbag on. When the train passed, a bar on the side of the train would snag the bag off and throw out any incoming mailbags."

— Essie Sibley, formerly of Sherburne, La.

Mention the name “Sherburne” and most south Louisiana residents will think of the great hunting and fishing alongside the Atchafalaya River, just south of Krotz Springs. Before the Sherburne Wildlife Management Area, however, there was the small community of Sherburne, where as many as 1,000 people resided, farmed the silt-rich land, and logged the Basin’s bounty.

The community, which began in the late 1800s between the Big Alabama and Little Alabama bayous along what is now Highway 975, included a hotel, bakery, post office, a two-room schoolhouse for grades one through six, churches, a general store, and a lumber mill. 

Sherburne was the brainchild of grocer Henry Sherburne of Plaquemine, who saw opportunity in the rich, fertile soil between the bayous. Stripped of its valuable cypress in the late 1800s, the property was cheap to acquire. When the government dammed up the two bayous to control overflow, Sherburne owned 26,000 acres of deep sandy loam, according to a Shreveport Times article in 1925.

The grocer cleared trees from the area and used the lumber to build houses and buildings. He enlisted O.C. Roemer, a county agent from Iberville Parish, to take charge as general manager, according to the article, creating “45 comfortable tenant houses, a modern bungalow for Mr. Roemer, a large store, a church for the colored, a boarding house for the transient laborers and numerous other buildings that are being erected as fast as the timber is sawed.”

"Most of the mill workers made about $1 a day. If they wanted money before payday they received it in brozine (company money). It could only be spent at the company store (Martin’s store at the head of Big Alabama). Before we moved to Sherburne (I don’t know how long before), Sherburne Industries paid only in brozine, but a national law was passed requiring U.S. money on payday."

—Tolley Fletcher

Once the land was cleared, tree stumps removed, and drainage ditches and wells dug, vast acreage was incorporated for crops such as carrots, cabbage, potatoes, peanuts, peas, onions, and so much more. The Times article labeled Sherburne’s undertaking as a “magic plantation, where all one seemingly had to do was rub the magic lamp and presto, things were accomplished.”

Curtis Fletcher, 88, was born in Denham Springs but moved to Sherburne in the early 1930s, following his grandfather, Charlie Blount. The family had grown strawberries in Denham Springs, but the berries grew too large in Sherburne and became tasteless, Fletcher said, so the Blounts switched to growing cabbage.

The Fletcher family moved into a three-room shotgun house on Little Alabama Bayou, behind what was called the Negro Church. 

“We could plainly hear them singing on Sunday and when anyone was being baptized,” Fletcher wrote in a short memoir about his years in Sherburne. 

“My stepfather, Clyde Hull, had a job working at the sawmill from daylight to dark for one dollar per day cutting cypress trees in the Atchafalaya swamp while my mother, Molly Blount Fletcher Hull, with help from her five children, farmed land that belonged to a man named Hall,” Fletcher explained in a recent interview. 

Most Sherburne residents played an instrument, Fletcher said, and house dances were common. He and his brother and three sisters would boil peanuts, pull taffy, and make popcorn balls for fun. The family grew a variety of crops and worked the area’s cotton fields in early fall for money, which they used at the country store once a year.

Fletcher now lives in the Baton Rouge area along with his four siblings, Audrey Lee Fletcher Phinney, Lessie Rice, Tolley Fletcher, and Pearl Faser, but he remembers a young childhood in Sherburne making pop guns with china berries, picking wild fruit on Chapman’s Island in Big Alabama, and eating fresh vegetables from his family farm. He watched movies from traveling movie theaters that used tents to screen silent films, mostly westerns, and enjoyed traveling salesmen demonstrating the latest products.

"For the dances, a truckload of men came from Lottie. I was too young to dance but we would go and watch with the Lemoine twins, Ruth and Ruby. Their sister Mabel dated a boy from Lottie and married him. They lived in Blanks, between Lottie and Livonia. Their son was run over by the school bus. One night at the dance, Red Jones came walking across the dance floor leading his wife Emma with a pound of coffee under his arm and a pistol in the other hand. I never knew what happened."

—Audrey Lee Fletcher Phinney

“I remember one traveling salesman who was demonstrating a 22-caliber semi-automatic rifle by shooting the outline of an Indian in full headdress in the bottom of a metal wash tub,” Fletcher recalled.

"It was a good life."

Following the Great Missisippi Flood of 1927, the Flood Control Act of 1928 sought to wrangle the mighty river away from another disaster. In 1939, the federal government ordered the town closed, along with nearby Elliot City, and its residents dispersed for the construction of the Morganza Spillway. 

“I must have enjoyed my life in Sherburne,” said Fletcher, a retired petroleum engineer, “because when my youngest daughter, Terri Fletcher McCoy, was working on a master’s degree in English at UNO, one of her assignments was to interview someone, tape it, and write it up, so she interviewed me about our life in Sherburne and I used the term ‘it was a good life’ several times.”

The youngest of five, Fletcher never realized how poor they were; his siblings have a different take on their life in Sherburne. “We raised everything we ate,” Fletcher said. “The only things we bought, to my knowledge, was flour, coffee. The flour came in big 100-pound sacks and we used the sacks for dresses. I don’t think my sisters had any dress made out of anything but flour sacks until we moved from Sherburne.”

The families bought items at the general store on credit throughout the year, then paid the bill after the cotton harvest. Fletcher insists both black and white residents were paid the same for their services. 

“It was like we were together,” he said. “We got paid seven cents a pound picking cotton. They got seven cents a pound picking cotton.”

For extra money, he and other members of his family trapped animals for food and sold the hides. 

“We’d get 50 cents for hides sometimes,” he said. 

Pear Street in town was named for the pear trees lining the avenue and a man named Ziegler owned a fig orchard, Fletcher said.  

“To me it was a good life,” he reiterated. “We had plenty of food.” 

The Louisiana Department of Wildlife & Fisheries now manages the land once picked up by Henry Sherburne for a song, and owns part of the 44,000-acre tract with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The management headquarters sits where the old town existed, and visitors will be hard-pressed to find remnants of the once bustling community. Visitors can access the Sherburne Wildlife Management Area by heading north on Highway 975 off the I-10 Atchafalaya Basin Bridge (Whiskey Bay exit) or by traveling south from Highway 190 at Krotz Springs. Entrance is through a series of all-weather roads, ATV trails, and Big and Little Alabama bayous. wlf.louisiana.gov/wma/2763.