Courtesy of the Center.
Antique craft boats from the collection of the Center for Louisiana Boat Building.
On a Saturday in spring, spectators lining a stretch of Bayou Lafourche between Lockport and Thibodeaux could be forgiven for thinking they’d stepped back in time. The bayou’s waters churned as a flotilla of antique, Cajun-style boats—skiffs, pirogues, and oyster luggers, chugged “up the Bayou.” The outing was a homecoming of sorts. The boats were from the collection of the Center for Traditional Louisiana Boat Building—their parade the first step in a journey that will end on the campus of Nicholls State University, where the center was founded, and to which its unmatched collection of historic Cajun watercraft will soon return.
[Read more about the Center for Traditional Louisiana Boat Building in this story from 2012.]
The Center for Traditional Louisiana Boat Building has been preserving Lafourche Parish’s wooden boatbuilding traditions for almost half a century. The center opened in 1979, co-founded by Tom Butler and a small group of locals interested in preserving the distinctive boatbuilding techniques that have a special place in Cajun culture. After settling in Louisiana in the 1700s, transplanted Acadians made the bayous their highways, depending on them for transportation and commerce; and fishing, hunting, trapping, and developing specialized boat designs to facilitate them. The center first occupied a maintenance barn on the Nicholls State University campus, and was soon attracting experienced craftspeople from around South Louisiana, who came to build wooden skiffs, luggers, and pirogues—the canoe-like craft synonymous with life along Bayou Lafourche—and to teach the skills they possessed.
Courtesy of the Center for Traditional Louisiana Boat Building.
In 2007, needing more space, the center relocated twenty miles down the bayou to Lockport, into a former car dealership. This larger space enabled the center to offer more programs teaching wooden boatbuilding techniques, passing the traditions and culture of Louisiana’s bayou Cajuns to a new generation. South Louisianans took notice, donating boats, tools, vintage motors, hand-carved duck decoys, and other artifacts, and the center’s collection of watercraft grew from twenty boats to more than seventy, including a Native American dugout more than four hundred years old, two large oyster luggers, and no fewer than twenty-two dugout pirogues. In 2021, after damage done by Hurricane Ida forced the Lockport facility to close, the search for a new permanent home led board members back to Nicholls State University. Now, plans are underway to build a state-of-the-art workshop and museum facility on the university campus, bringing Lafourche parish’s unique boatbuilding journey full-circle.
According to Center for Traditional Louisiana Boatbuilding board secretary Vickie Eserman, the May boat parade up Bayou Lafourche marked the beginning of a year-long capital campaign that aims to raise $2 million to fund construction of the new workshop and museum. Eserman, a former schoolteacher from a Shriever family through which the hand-craftsmanship gene runs strong, has been volunteering with the center since 2010. “When I got involved, I wanted to know what I was talking about. So I built a thirteen-foot pirogue,” she remarked, describing the process of constructing the boat from marine plywood and fitting it with cypress seats and decking. “Now, when I take my pirogue to [New Orleans’s] Bayou Boogaloo Festival, I’m known as ‘the lady in the nice boat,’” she said with pride. Eserman explained that the new center would be a 7,500-square-foot facility built on the Nicholls campus, alongside the kayak launch right on the banks of Bayou Lafourche. There, visitors will be able not only to tour the museum and view the collection of vintage boats, but also to rent a handcrafted pirogue or rowing skiff, setting out onto Bayou Lafourche to appreciate the unique culture of South Louisiana from the same vantage point as their Cajun ancestors. After an “only-on-the-Bayou” experience like that, who wouldn’t want to sign up for a boatbuilding class?
Updates about the center, its programs, and information about supporting the fundraising effort with a tax-deductible donation are at traditionallouisianaboatbuilding.org.
