The past haunts a lumber mill commissary and a once-prosperous town
Her name is written in a fair hand on the back of a stiff, curling brown photo, along with her address. There is no mention of her town. She might have lived in Many or Natchitoches or some East Texas hamlet. Her dress and hat suggest the early 1900s. The woman’s hair and hat are a single piece of architecture. Her handsome face looks through the camera and down the years to anyone who finds her on a shelf in the old Louisiana Long Leaf Lumber Co. commissary store.
Where 4-L employees once shopped for flour, coffee, and dress cloth, tourists now shuffle over the springy wooden floors to look at antiques and plates like Mama’s.
The store’s clerk raises her voice to be heard over a passing freight train: “Close the door,” she says, “I want to finish the story.”
The clerk talks about the different sides of the railroad tracks in Fisher. Her story is about how black people were treated by the lumber company. For that matter, how white people were treated in this company town. Whites fared better than black people, the clerk thinks, but everyone served the company.
The clerk compares the old commissary store to Walmart. That’s a stretch. Fisher in its days as a lumber mill town was insular. Today, it’s an attraction a few miles from Many on the western side of Louisiana. Some people go to Fisher on business. It’s a working town with a city hall and an old movie house. There is a church and houses that twenty-first-century people call home.
The post office, on reduced hours, is still a place where friends and neighbors exchange nods on their way to collect their mail. On a waist-high shelf jutting from the wall inside the post office, there is a discarded, private letter from a lawyer in Alexandria. The letter is addressed to a customer of the P.O. telling him that his disability claim will be reviewed Thursday of the coming week. The man needn’t be there, the lawyer writes, but it would be a good idea.
I go to Fisher to visit the photograph of the woman in the hat.
The asking price for her image is $2.50. I’ve thought to buy her, frame her, put her where I’ll see her when I look away from writing to reel in a thought.
Did she have the picture taken for a friend, her parents, herself? Had she gotten a job she wanted, a promotion, and thought to have a photograph taken to mark the occasion?
I don’t understand how people’s photographs end up in antiques stores. Do shoppers buy them because they look better than real aunts and uncles? Are we captivated by these mysterious images as art or because their stories are unknowable?
From her shelf in an old company town’s commissary store, my woman in the hat haunts me until dinnertime.
Old buildings, stripped of their former lives, become museums where artifacts are for sale. Antiques stores offer a kind of homecoming where we recognize familiar things that make us nostalgic for the lives of strangers or some idealized version of our own lives.
I’ll probably never buy the photograph of the handsome woman in the old commissary store, but I’ll look for her every time I go to Fisher until, one day, I make my way to her shelf to find her gone.
Village of Fisher
• Capt. John Barber White and partner Oliver Williams Fisher incorporated the Louisiana Long Leaf Lumber Co., “4-L,” on ten thousand acres in Sabine River country six miles south of Many in 1899.
• The residents of Many (pronounced ‘Man-ee’) had turned down White’s and Fisher’s offer to build 4-L’s sawmill in their town. The people of Many didn’t want the noise and dirt. The partners had to build a town for their workers, naming the place after Oliver Fisher.
• The first employees of the mill stepped off the train into a great forest and the unwelcoming arms of people already living in Sabine Parish. The newcomers survived bullets shot through their windows and malaria to build one of the most important sawmill towns on the Kansas City Southern Railroad.
• Visit Fisher and you’ll see the buildings that survive from the village’s heyday—a church, commissary store building (now an antiques and good junk emporium), and houses of company officials and workers. There’s also a working post office and a movie house.
• People came from Leesville, Natchitoches, Many, and Mansfield to see movies in the “opera house” and listen to live music. It was the only picture show in this part of Louisiana. For a time, the only telephone in Fisher was at the post office; it was a pay phone.
• By the 1960s, Fisher’s future was uncertain. The commissary closed, and the hotel was sold for its lumber. Rail passenger service ended in the spring of 1968.
• In the early 1970s, residents organized the Fisher Heritage Foundation. Boise Southern transferred nine-and-a-half acres to the foundation, including a two-story office building, the commissary building, opera house, post office, paved parking lot, tree-shaded park and “the birds, bees and the grass thereon.”—Source: Sabine Parish Library.
• Fisher is six miles south of Many off La. 171. The information number at sabineparishchamber.com is (318) 256-2001. The website gives the commissary store’s hours as Thursday, Friday, Saturday from 10 am to 4:30 pm.
