Hardcover, $49.95; Paperback, $34.95; 216 pp.
Louisiana State University Press
April 2025
Richard Campanella’s Crossroads, Cutoffs, and Confluences tells the epic story of human settlement in Louisiana, unearthing the original geographical rationales for the formation of hundreds of cities, towns, and villages where most Louisianians live now. Campanella illuminates why these communities formed where they did, be they at river confluences, forks, crossroads, heads of navigation, ferry landings, shortcuts, portages, resource-extraction sites, or railroad stations, and explores other spatial factors that initially attracted settlers. Readers curious about the origins of Louisiana’s cities, towns, and villages can turn to Crossroads, Cutoffs, and Confluences for answers to that most fundamental question of human geography: Why are we here?
(from Chapter 5 – The Western Florida Parishes)
. . . . Four of these back roads emanated from Bayou Sara/St. Francisville along Little Bayou Sara, chief of which was the Old Tunica Road. Their destination was a remote landing named Tunica serving steamboats on the Mississippi and plantations along Tunica Bayou. By the early 1900s, the roads were supplemented by two tracks laid through Bayou Sara, that of the Louisiana Railway & Navigation Company, which hugged the base of the Tunica Hills, and that of Woodville & Bayou Sara Railroad, which became a branch of the Yazoo & Mississippi Valley line. Together with the roads, these arteries gave rise to the rural population clusters of “Laurel Hill, Ratcliff, Riddle, Rogillioville, Row Landing, Star Hill, Wakefield, and Weyanoke,” as well as Solitude, Bains, Catalpa, Converse, Brothers, McGehee, Wilcox, Flower Hill, Rosebank, Turnbull, and Retreat. Some formed as arterial increments, post offices, or station stops; others germinated around old plantation houses. None had a population of more than a few score, and only a third endure today.
From the standpoint of modern human geography, the most influential outcome of West Feliciana’s historic arteries, starting with the Old Tunica Road and ending with today’s Highway 66, was the access they provided to a remote plantation at the base of the loess bluffs. That river-fronting bottomland is now home to 6,300 “residents” and 1,800 workers, by far the highest concentration of humanity in the region. Officially the Louisiana State Penitentiary, it is universally known by its historical plantation name—Angola. How the nation’s largest maximum-security prison got sited in “the land of happiness” is the story of a highly controversial policy and one determined man. . . .
. . . . To the question of why 8,000 people now occupy this remote bottomland, it’s probably true that Samuel James could have secured a comparable field elsewhere, and the availability of this particular plantation ultimately explains Angola’s siting. But this parcel was well-positioned for James’s brand of convict labor, and for what the State of Louisiana later needed for its penitentiary. It was located near Baton Rouge, home to the prior prison, and accessible via road, rail, and river, close to most of the state’s people (in fact, Angola is just a few miles from Louisiana’s population centroid, at New Roads). Being fertile bottomland abutting the Mississippi River, Angola needed levees and could yield bumper crops, both of which would enrich James, a levee builder who fancied himself a planter. Angola was also isolated, and when the state purchased it to become the state penitentiary in 1901, officials valued its out-of-sight, out-of-mind location all the more because it was also accessible and convenient. Angola’s siting thus has a spatial rationale, and it strikes a common theme in the geography of incarceration.
Like its western neighbor, East Feliciana Parish had its own web of antebellum roads, but to look at its population distribution today, it is plain to see that the primary settlement vector was the Yazoo & Mississippi Valley Railroad (later the Louisiana, New Orleans & Texas and now the Illinois Central). We have already seen how the men behind this influential artery, commenced in 1882 to link New Orleans to Yazoo City and beyond, ordained today’s Scotlandville, Baker, and Zachary in East Baton Rouge Parish. Originally station stops, these settlements were later paralleled by Highway 19 and are now collectively home to over 40,000 people. As the tracks proceeded northward, the economic magnetism of greater Baton Rouge diminished and the rurality of East Feliciana Parish prevailed, yielding smaller communities at longer intervals.
