Strawberry Fields Forever

More strawberries may come from California and Florida, but it’s the ones grown in southeast Louisiana that are said to be the sweetest. 

To grow to its full potential, the strawberry plant needs a certain space: you must dig your hole deep and wide enough for the plant’s root system to sprawl as it desires, with a hill mounded in the hole’s center, so the green crown, or central growing bud, can break the earth’s surface. It’s a cold, drizzly morning in December when Alex Kropog gives me this advice on planting strawberries, months before the best fruit will emerge. Here in Hungarian Settlement, Louisiana, very few berries will emerge at all. Only one farmer dedicates a portion of his thirty acres to strawberries. It was a very different picture a hundred and twenty years ago, when Hungarian immigrants flocked to southeast Louisiana for pine forests and mild weather—when lumber and strawberries formed the foundation of their new community.

[You may also like: Sherburne Lives On]

Before the Hungarian Revolution of 1848, Hungarians who came to America were usually just passing through on missions and explorations; those that did settle had immigrated in intimate groups for personal reasons, not in response to larger social or economic factors; and for the most part, they stuck to port cities like New York, Charleston, and Boston. The failed revolt against Austrian rule sent a slew of “Forty-eighters” to the United States, mostly educated gentry. At the turn of the century, overpopulation and unemployment in the home country spurred The Great Economic Migration (1880–1914), which brought a new wave of Hungarians (also called Magyars) to America. They came, primarily, to work.

The immigrants clustered at first in the more industrial Northeast, but news traveled north from their roving brethren that Louisiana was warm and that hard workers were needed at the Charles Brackenridge Lumber Company, which opened in 1890 near Albany, in a community then called Maxwell. In addition to providing jobs, the company would sell cut-over land on credit to its employees. With their own land, purchased in twenty-acre parcels at ten dollars an acre, the Hungarians began to farm. The acidic soil that suited loblolly pines worked well for strawberries too. “They were an agrarian people,” said Alex’s wife, Royanne Kropog. “They wanted to farm.”

They called the settlement Árpádhon, after Hungarian folk hero Árpád. At its peak, Árpádhon was the country’s largest rural Hungarian settlement, with an estimated 350 Magyar families in residence by 1935. Today, the community is known simply as Hungarian Settlement. Located just off I-12 along Highway 43, the landscape doesn’t appear much different from the surrounding Livingston Parish towns of Albany and Springfield. Just three historic buildings remain: the Hungarian Presbyterian Church (est. 1908), St. Margaret Catholic Church (est. 1910), and the Hungarian Settlement Museum, operated out of a beautifully restored schoolhouse (est. 1906 in Springfield and moved to the settlement in 1926). But within the walls of the museum, which opened last September, Hungarian culture remains very much alive. 

Displays in the spacious former schoolhouse include Harvest Dance costumes, embroidered lace, patterned china, a hand-carved oak chest; enlarged black-and-white photographs, newspaper clippings, a 1957 Time magazine cover with “Hungarian Freedom Fighter” honored as Man of the Year; and the shipping crates and labels that once left the Albany train depot in boxcars to transport locally grown strawberries to the rest of the country. “On any given day, there’d be as many as two hundred boxcars of strawberries that would leave this area,” said Alex.

Buyers would come down to Louisiana to examine the fruit. In one large photograph, visiting inspectors stand alongside the Hungarian farmers. “You see these guys in fancy coats with peasant-looking Hungarians to the side,” laughed Alex. “Every night they would set a price for a crate of these strawberries. You’d hear it from someone the next morning: ‘Well, yesterday the berries sold for X number of dollars.’ They’d be happy or sad.” Subpar berries would be fed to the hogs. “Some of those people would liked to have caught the inspectors and killed them,” added Alex.

The museum is run by the Hungarian Settlement Historical Society; Alex serves as the society’s president, and Royanne is society treasurer and the museum’s curator (and author of the 2006 book The Story of Árpádhon: Hungarian Settlement, Louisiana 1896-2006). Alex knows how to properly plant strawberries because he grew up planting and picking them in Hungarian Settlement. “My father died when I was nine, so we kept farming with my mother,” said Alex.

The lumber company closed in 1916, and by the 1920s, strawberry farming was Árpádhon’s main industry. Just miles away, the Italian immigrants of Tangipahoa Parish devoted ample acreage to the berry too. Popular varieties for growers were the Tangi, the Daybreak, the Headliner, and the Klondyke, all small but intensely sweet.

An 1896 advertisement in the Szabadsag, a Cleveland-based Hungarian language newspaper, promised an annual net product of $500 for one acre of strawberries, if it was a good year. The advertisement hangs on the wall of the museum and led Alex to remark that no year was ever quite that good. But the exaggeration did its job, luring Magyars south to settle: “Strawberries became their cash crop. It kept them here,” said Royanne.

One display case contains stacks of tickets of various hues that were handed out to the families who picked or packed strawberries (children picked, ladies packed). Each ticket bears a farmer’s name: Paul Sziszak Jr., Frank Kovach, and Alex’s mother, Mrs. Mike Kropog, among others. “Once a week, you’d take the tickets to the farmer and you’d get your cash,” said Royanne. 

“Hungarians have just persisted,” said Fekete. “We’re going to be there at the end of the game.”  

When Alex Kropog turned 18 in 1954, he considered himself finished with growing strawberries. He attended Southeastern University instead and became a teacher at nearby Springfield High School.

Farming no longer made the same economic sense to Alex and his peers that it had to their parents. Across the country, farms were rapidly being sold and consolidated; and the sweet, juicy berries that had put Louisiana on the map had shorter seasons than the hearty northwestern varieties. What’s more, they were prone to crown-rot.

The Hungarians weren’t quite so Hungarian any more, either. After World War II, the Magyars began to marry outsiders. Children learned to speak English at school and were discouraged from doing otherwise. In 1976, the bicentennial sparked a renewed interest in heritage, and the Hungarian language was taught in area schools. But that program ended in 1986 due to lack of funding.

The last strawberries

Frank Fekete faced a decision about farming at age 18, too; it was 1984, and his father had just died suddenly. Someone needed to step in and run the family farm, which had stood in Hungarian Settlement since the 1920s, when Fekete’s grandparents, Joseph and Theresa Fekete, came down from the West Virginia coal mines to join the community. Fekete attended LSU, where he studied agriculture education—then he came home to keep growing strawberries. “I paid my way through college with farming,” he said.

In the industrial arts building at Independence High Magnet School, where Fekete teaches vocational agriculture (and his students win awards for their berries), he shared with me three insights into Hungarians’ nature: they are born farmers; they’re cursed with “thick blood” (heart disease accounted for his grandfather’s and father’s early deaths, and Fekete had a heart attack at 42); and they stick together.

Today, Fekete is the last commercial strawberry farmer residing in Hungarian Settlement. His nineteen-year-old niece, Emily, sells Fekete Farm produce at the Red Stick Farmers Market each Saturday—it can also be found at corner stores in the area—and she’d like to take over the farm from her uncle when he’s ready. In April, Fekete will bring his Camino Real and Cabrillo strawberries to the Ponchatoula Strawberry Festival, where he was crowned Grand Champion in 2017.

[Now read: Isle de Jean Charles]

“A lot of people think farmers are not very smart. That’s not true at all. There’s a lot more to farming than you’d ever think. You can’t read things out of a book—you’ve just got to do it,” said Fekete. “You’ve got to diversify with what you plant, too, to keep your workers here. A quarter acre each of all kinds of stuff. Mustard greens, you can plant two or three acres. You’ve got to keep planting, planting, and planting.”

Pulling off I-12 today, Highway 43 hardly looks Hungarian—but roots have spread deep and wide, and celebrations of Hungarian heritage sit right on the town’s surface. Emily Fekete and her twenty-three-year-old sister Molly participate in the town’s annual Harvest Dance, held at the American Legion Hall every October. “They’re just a quarter Hungarian, but they’ve got that pride in them,” said Fekete.

For potlucks, relatives and neighbors bring sweet jammy kalács, cabbage rolls, and other Hungarian dishes. And according to Royanne Kropog’s careful catalog, over a hundred people have donated items to the museum, which also includes a research room where visitors can explore their family histories and write in contributions to the museum’s archives. 

“Hungarians have just persisted,” said Fekete. “We’re going to be there at the end of the game.”  

hungarianmuseum.com

This article originally appeared in our March 2018 issue. Subscribe to our print magazine today.