Forgotten First Flight

Douglas Villien inherited a photo album with unique images of Baton Rouge in the early 1900s

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“As the Aviator Soars So Are Lots in Roseland Terrace,” trumpeted a 1911 newspaper ad for the air show designed to introduce prospective buyers to the new subdivision called Roseland Terrace, built on the site of the old Baton Rouge Fairground. It was to be a state-of-the-art suburb with running water, electricity, sidewalks, and tree-lined streets. (Today it is known as the Garden District.) Lots were selling for $200 to $350, with cash down payments and no interest for twelve months. 

A notice boasted of the “Grand Aviation Meeting,” where spectators would see “the great aviator William G. Purves and others who will give exhibition flights …  in the Gates Biplane. … The day will be given up to speed trials, soaring, gliding, flights in the air, racing with automobiles and other acts showing the daring skill of these famous bird-men of the air.” Admission was to be fifty cents for adults and twenty-five cents for children.

Back in 1972, Villien’s grandmother offered him the vintage photo album. But he wasn’t interested. “My grandmother Maude Villien showed me the album during a visit to her house in Maurice,” said Villien, a retired Baton Rouge city planner, in a recent interview. “I had just graduated from USL [the University of Southwestern Louisiana, now UL-Lafayette]. I was intrigued but not fascinated. I was not that interested in history.”

Fast forward to 2006, when Villien’s father died and left the album as part of his estate. The album contains about eighty photos shot by amateur photographer William Belanger “Sweet” Hart, in 1911. Although some of the photos were taken in Reserve, New Orleans, Donaldsonville, Port Hudson, and Vicksburg, Miss., most were shot in Baton Rouge. 

“The album is about 12x10, with supple brown leather binding and black pages,” said Villien. “On the last page, in beautiful cursive handwriting in white ink, is written ‘To AMG from WBH - August 16, 1912.’”

AMG is Villien’s grandmother, Annette Maude Gaidry; WBH is the photographer Hart (1890-1960). Villien has no idea how they knew each other but says his grandmother often referred to the cherished album as a gift “from a Hart to a Heart.”  

Paging through the album, Villien discovered street scenes of Beauregard Town and downtown. “The federal post office and courthouse on North Boulevard was there. It’s now the City Club,” he said. “Those were intriguing to me.  

“Almost all the photos had brief captions. That was very important. It gave me a sense of where each place was.”

From one of these captions, Villien learned that Hart had lived in a third-floor room on Third Street. The Board of Trade, which Villien compares to today’s Chamber of Commerce, was on the ground floor. “Two of the photos in the album were taken from the window of his apartment above the offices of the Board of Trade,” said Villien. “I think he must have worked for the board.” He speculates that the board may even have provided Hart’s camera and that the association with the Board of Trade “probably gave Hart an in to Roseland Terrace and the airplane show.”

The show was the brainchild of A. F. Cazedessus, a real-estate developer involved with the Roseland Terrace subdivision and a member of the Board of Trade. “I think he convinced the board to sponsor the air event,” said Villien. 

On January 29, 1911, Baton Rouge’s newspaper, the New Advocate, published an article by Purves, the aviator, describing the rare experience of flying a plane—just seven years after the Wright brothers had made aviation history at Kitty Hawk. “[Y]ou can imagine the situation of a man in a flying machine skimming the air—the most uncertain, treacherous, and least understood element to which a human being ever trusted his neck,” wrote Purves.

The air exhibition, delayed because Purves’ rear-engine biplane developed engine problems, finally took place on March 5, 1911. “Purves took off, but he couldn’t gain altitude,” said Villien. “He clipped a fence. He crashed and was taken to the Baton Rouge Sanitarium.” Hart snapped the only known photos of the plane and the crash. “He even got a shot of the crowd running to the fallen airplane,” said Villien. 

“I really didn’t know what I had when I first saw them. I had to do research to find out that it was the first plane to come to Baton Rouge. I read a newspaper article about the crash, and all of the pieces began to come together,” he said. 

Villien also found a statement by historian J. St. Clair Favrot to the State-Times newspaper in 1926. “The first aeroplane to come to Baton Rouge was that brought here by a young man who was giving exhibition flights,” Favrot told the newspaper. “The wings of the machine were attached on bamboo poles. He exhibited in the old fair grounds, now Roseland Terrace. After many attempts he got off and then landed into a fence and was so seriously hurt that he died a few days later.” Actually, Purves lived for nearly two months with his injury, which the New Advocate described as having his body punctured just below the waist by a steel connecting rod. He died at the sanitarium on April 24, with his mother and his wife at his bedside. He was about 25 years old.

Villien originally wanted to write a book about Hart. He spoke to Hart’s son and other relatives; but none of them even knew that Hart had been a photographer. “I’ve spent thousands of hours researching this,” said Villien, who sent an early draft of the book to an editor at Arcadia Publishing. The editor suggested Villien widen the scope from Hart to the photos.

“I rewrote it focusing on the images themselves,” said Villien, who worked hard to identify the scenes Hart had shot, about forty-five of which are in the book. “I realized I needed more images, so I researched Baton Rouge from the 1890s to the 1930s. I realized that was the period of the city’s greatest growth.” 

When his book came out last summer, Villien donated the album to the State Library, whose archivist, Charlene Bonnette, had helped him with his research. State librarian Rebecca Hamilton said that the public is welcome to come in and look at the album.” We want things to be available to the public,” she said. “We take appointments and go out of our way to sit down and go through items with our patrons.’”

Villien appreciates the fact that the album can be shared with the public. “It’s just sheer luck on many levels,” he said. “Had I not pursued what those air-show photos were, they might have gone by the wayside. This is a real piece of Baton Rouge history.”