West Feliciana parish is a farm parish..

They had us sold that we were solely dependent on the land owner we lived, on the fat of the land, because there wasn't no money.

There was not much opportunity in Hardwood other than working at the sawmill.

Streets was bad.

Houses was bad.

It just was bad.

In the 1800s and most of the 1900s, farming and working for sawmills were common ways for black people to get by in just about every southern community in the United States.

But there was something different in rural West Feliciana Parish.

Its population has never exceeded 11,000, excluding the inmates in Angola State Prison.

But West Feliciana has produced an exceptional number of black professionals.

Everything that you can name came out of Dawson High School is because the kids was more focused on their education, and what could I do to better my condition?

Many blacks collectively look back on our challenges and wonder how we got over.

The very foundation of West Feliciana Parish was based mostly on farming.

The area had been under Spanish, French and British rule.

After the Louisiana Purchase, it had even been the capital of the West Florida Republic.

Before becoming part of the United States, white families were given thousands of acres of land through land grants.

Some people were rewarded for military service.

Others were induced to move to the Deep South to develop farmland.

Still others were given land because of their relationships with the people in power who wanted trusted supporters in certain areas.

Some of these new landowners were already rich, and they wanted to build on their wealth by farming cotton and livestock.

The European families often rode wagons and horses as their enslaved workers walked from the northeastern corner of the country to the Deep South.

They brought with them cattle and hogs.

That journey was roughly 900 miles.

Others traveled by sea from the Carolinas, Virginia, and other states, and from other countries by ship to Louisiana.

The trip down the Atlantic coast, through the Gulf of Mexico, and up the Mississippi was sometimes thousands of miles.

Once the settlers arrived on their land, they made the workers clear.

The trees, including deeply rooted stumps, cultivate the soil and plant crops of cotton, sugarcane and other vegetables and fruit trees.

Cattle and horse pastures and hog pens also had to be built.

The ultimate goal of the move south was to raise enough cotton for the global markets.

Once picked, the cotton would be shipped by train or boat downriver to New Orleans, where cotton agents or brokers would find markets to ship the cotton all over the world.

In the 1830s, West Feliciana became the first place in the United States to operate an interstate railroad service.

The train went from Woodville, Mississippi to a shipping dock at Bayou Sara, an area on the banks of the Mississippi River near modern day Saint Francis Ville.

By the 1840s, West Feliciana farmers had roughly 40,000 acres of land planted in cotton, yielding about 40,000 bales.

A bale was about 400 pounds.

Farmers had also accumulated about 3000 heads of cattle.

They raised roughly 190 bushels of corn to feed their families.

The enslaved workers and the livestock.

A bushel of shelled corn weighs roughly 50 pounds.

Sweet potatoes, Irish potatoes, and beam crops were also popular.

An 1860 census report shows West Feliciana Parish had a population of roughly 11,000 people, a vast majority of whom were enslaved.

Blacks outnumbered whites by 3.5 to 1, enough to manage crops that thrive in Louisiana's warm climate and fertile soil, sometimes fertilized by the rich silt from the Mississippi River.

When it overflowed its banks, at least 20 planters each held more than 100 people as property.

Then came the Civil War.

Many plantation owners left their farms to fight for their way of life.

Some perished.

Some came home with deep battle scars.

Many gave up their cash for the cause.

But their descendants still live in the lavish homes built by slaves on property donated to their families.

More than 150 years earlier, other families prospered by selling the houses and the land.

The war ended with a declaration that called for the end of slavery.

It was a turbulent time for both the landowners and the former slaves.

Many of the freed men and women willingly headed north or west in search of a better place and a better life.

And some landowners encouraged former slaves to leave because they didn't want to continue providing a roof over their heads.

The planters and ranchers didn't know how hard the former slaves were willing to work.

Once they were free and some of the former slaves stayed in the meager houses they had been living in all along to try to negotiate better conditions with the landowners.

And some people say, oh, you sold yourself to the land landowner.

But if you don't have nothing.

It█s a trade off.

I'm going to take care of you.

But you're going to work for me.

You're going to have grocery.

You're going to have a roof over your head.

Yeah.

You got to worry about no light.

Bill, water bill, gas bill.

So that what you call selling yourself to the land owner.

Yeah, but you got to start from somewhere.

Vincent Smith, his parents, Nathaniel and Sally, and his ten brothers and sisters lived on one of three plantations owned by Douglas Hampton.

The children went to the fields as soon as they were old enough to work, and the plantation, when I was born on was called, Inheritance.. Douglas Hampton, was the owner.

Across the road was West Inheritance plantation owned by the same man.

Across the road was Tanglewild Plantation, owned by the same man.

And we rented land.

We didn't work on the fourth or the third.

All what we made was ours, but he fixed it so that we never could make money.

Just say we made $500.

The rent was $200, and then you had to go and take up all the year to make it.

And so when you run up the figures, you always come out even.

Well, Nathaniel, you did good this year.

You broke even.

That mean you didn't make nothing.

But you don█t owe nothing.

If you need plow points and ropes and and chained and whatever you needed to run the farm.

And we had a store up there Morgan and Damps run in the store.

And there you go there and say, give Nathaniel credit and give Vincent credit and give never.

So we go take up the grocer.

And so you had to pay all that at the end of the year.

Sharecropper if you worked on the third of the fourth, the man get three and you get one.

All we had to buy was salt and pepper.

But eating on Sunday we ate peas one day, butter beans the next day.

Okra we ate off the fat on the land.

Our meat was squirreled and rabbit killed the hog in the wintertime.

And then we didn't have electricity, so we had to salt the meat down and keep it.

Everybody had hogs cause hogs was a way of life.

We had three cows who had to milk and then we made butter from the milk, most of the school clothes.

My auntie made the pants, the shirts and all, and it wasn't no money.

The Reverend Alton Scott's parents rented land from Mary Willis which was just a few miles from the Smith's.

The Scotts for a family of ten, the parents and eight children.

Two other black families lived on the estate.

The landowner's husband was dead, and she relied heavily on the Scotts to help manage her fields and farm animals.

The Scotts fared better with their finances than the Smiths, and were able to stash away some money.

Several other black families lived on the nearby Emile Marchive property.

The Washington, the Allens the temples.

The Johnsons.

All of us grew up in that same neighborhood, and growing up in that same neighborhood, all of our parents was farmers.

Steve Williams senior was able to buy land in 1918.

His sons and grandchildren lived on his property about ten miles from the Smiths.

The Williams had to work as hard as everyone else to keep food on the table.

I can remember my mother sending us to pick blackberries.

She was canning blackberries for weeks at a time, batch after batch had been hundreds of jars of blackberries, peaches, tomatoes, okra.

Butter beans lots that was put in jars, preserved and set back so you could go and get that whenever you needed something.

You get a quart of, blackberries and some flour, dough dumplings.

And you had a good meal, you wasn't hungry, and then you liked it.

And believe it or not, she could order chickens through the mail.

They would come to the main post office in Woodville come to across the country.

Come there.

And the mailman, Mr. Green, would pick those chickens up, hot weather just like it is now put them in that truck, shade them.

Make sure they had water and feed.. Bring them blow at the mailbox and wait till somebody come up and pick them.

Cotton had been king in West Feliciana Parish before the Civil War.

Planters had gathered as much as 40,000 bales a year.

But by 1865 a year the war ended.

West Feliciana farmers harvested only about 800 bales of cotton.

As the 1870s progressed, it was evident that the profits from cotton would never return to pre-war levels.

Cotton was selling at high prices right after the war, but most farmers had skimpy crops because of overuse of soil, too much rain and infestations of worms.

Some land owners also suffered labor shortages.

By 1910, experts were urging West Feliciana farmers to burn their cotton crops to get rid of destructive boll weevils.

The insects ravaged many fields, eating buds and flowers before the plants had a chance to produce cotton.

With low income for the plantation owners and even less for the workers.

Some black men made extra money by helping to harvest sugar cane.

It was a popular crop just across the Mississippi River.

In pointe coupee parish and further downriver after they finish up with their crops around last of October.

Then it would go to the cane farm and they were cut cane until Christmas, using the cane harvest would be done by Christmas, and if they could find something to do during the winter months, it would do it.

But it wasn't that much to do with all of the sweat and occasionally tears that black people shed.

There was one constant in their lives Sunday morning church services.

Even before they had church buildings, the slaves had learned to worship God through prayer and song with that for the mushrooms, just about every plantation supplied workers with a place to worship.

Church services were packed and music was an integral part of the experience.

There's nothing else to rely on.

We have to do something to relieve pressure and pain and tension, and we sang many of the songs praise songs, and when they come directly from the Bible's the Book of Psalms, Proverbs, Song of Solomon, those are songs.

The entire book of Psalms is a song, and we sing many of those.

I will lift my eyes unto the hills.

Total praise.

That just makes it more meaningful.

And you can really get into it.

You can't express yourself.

All the ones that you'll hear every now and then guide me.

All that great Jehovah and the guidance they were work.

songs message, songs.

That was their newspaper all.

while earning a living was very tough for blacks, things were looking up on another front.

Two and a half decades after the end of slavery in 1890, John Sterling Dawson arrived in West Feliciana to help educate the former slaves and their descendants.

He was greeted at the train station by a train conductor, who was also the postmaster for the Laurel Hill community, Charles H. Agu a man only identified as John Jones, was traveling with Agu.

Agu lived within a couple of miles of where Dawson would begin teaching in Laurel Hill.

The 19 year old Dawson proved to be smart, wise and dedicated far beyond his years.

He came to our church to ask the pastor and the deacon, could you set up a school in the church?

And they said, yeah, sure.

That had about 125 kids and only about 20 could read.

You have a tremendous task there.

But he was smart enough to know it says he couldn't do it.

He had to develop what he called a grade A class, students who learn a little faster.

And he got them to help him to teach the other kids.

He must have been a genius.

Really.

Within a couple of years of John Dawson's arrival in West Feliciana, three white men, Vincent Jackson, Vincent Walsh and Sidney Howard Lemon put up land to build a school for blacks.

Black men in the community hewed the lumber, led by carpenters Andrew Bowers and Huey Dillon.

We used to go walk to Laura Hill School, and then they built Polk School.

Polk school and Laurel Hill were the two schools that were built just for school, the rest of what the churches and the school come out of solitude.

The same way they built the school.

But now we later year, it's unclear how much education Dawson had upon arriving in the community of Laurel Hill.

He, however, earned three college degrees while there, a degree from Natchez College in 1903, one from Southern University in 1924, and one from Leland College in 1936.

The professor, as he was called, was able to quickly determine which students had reached a level where they could teach others the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic.

He then sent his proteges to other locations to teach so they could reach every corner of the parish.

John Dawson was the reason for this.

He went to Hickory Grove.

Beech Grove,.

Most all the churches Chisel Valley.

setting up schools because black didn't have cars and you had to put a church or school every 5 miles so we could walk to school.

When we came home from school doing the farm time, we had to go into field, and many times we had to go in to see you in the morning before we go to school in order to put out fertilizer, put out corn or something.

So daddy could plow all day.

Many students missed days and weeks of school at a time because of planting and harvesting seasons.

Nonetheless, within a few years, every school age child in West Feliciana Parish had learned to read and write, add and subtract.

Some of Dawson's early students proved skillful at advanced math.

We now finish elementary school in Saint Francis Vale.

I went to Woodville to work at a sawmill, and I worked at a sawmill up there for a couple of years before I came to study in the West, and I was running the company shipping lumber and everything, and I wouldn't get paid.

for it.

the white shipping clerk was getting paid for it, but he was always sending more lumber than was necessary.

And so I would figure the lumber out , Mr. Hogan, that's who the superintendent at that time.

It was the Ransom Lumber Company.

He would take the shipping clerk away just to let me run the company.

And so my daddy came up to Woodville, Mississippi, and so that I was shipping all the lumber and went out into town, and everybody was talking about the little black boy who wouldn't call me by that name.

Then we're down in shipping lumber and say he keeps a sharp pencil meant that I figured out exactly what they ordered.

That's when Johnny Jones█s father, picked him up from Woodville and took him to Southern University.

He would eventually get a law degree and become one of the leading civil rights attorneys in Louisiana.

14 years after John Sterling Dawson arrived in West Feliciana Parish, a black landowner, Henry Polk, donated land for the construction of an even larger school for black children.

By the time Polk died in 1905, his will showed that he had somehow accumulated almost 1000 acres of land.

A decade after Polk died, one of the founders of Sears and Roebuck, Julius Rosenwald and the Great Black educator Booker T Washington, got into the business of helping to build schools for young blacks.

The Polk Rosenwald School opened in the 1920s with the help of post land and Rosenwald money.

Vincent Smith's family continued to work the property owned by Douglas Hampton, until Sally Smith's sister offered them an opportunity they could not resist.

Like daddy say, I wasn█t bought.

He could have had the whole place, 800 some acres for $6,000 and miss a few, and told him whatever he could afford to pay.

It didn't have no special note.

Everything was paid on farm time, wasn't no money.

My dad will stay and take the chance.

So my auntie Amelia Brown went to California, San Francisco, where she was not working and she was making a little money.

And in 1938, my daddy bought this place 162 acre for $6,000.

My auntie in California helped from 32 to 38 and could have had 800 acres for 6000.

Now I got 162 for $6,000.

Once the Smiths were able to purchase their own land, they began to accumulate things.

We didn't have nothing, but we live good, happy, bought land, cars, brand new truck.

We did good, with a little.

in 1951, the state of Louisiana and the parish of West Feliciana built the first school large enough to accommodate black high school students.

John Sterling Dawson died that same year.

The new school was named John S Dawson High in his honor.

By then he had taught for 58 years, and he had raised all four of his children to become educators.

Both of his sons, John Dawson Jr and Thomas, would serve as principals in the parish schools.

Dawson high closed in 1969 because of integration, but by then the Dawson's had instilled a culture within the black community that strongly embraced education.

African-American students in Wesley Shannon Parish outperformed their peers across the state and indeed across the nation in many categories, and much of that is due to the priority of education in the culture of West Feliciana Parish that crosses all racial lines.

It crosses all economic lines.

Vincent Smith's father, Nathaniel, was one of John Dawson students.

That may have been why the older Smith was adamant about making sure that all of his children got a good education.

They also, however, had to keep up with work on the farm, especially since they had broken ties with the old plantation owner.

The Smiths were forced to stop raising cotton when the local gin went out of business in 1957, probably because of fewer growers and low crop yields, it almost appeared as if divine intervention had taken over.

Another crop had gained popularity in West Feliciana Parish.

Sweet potatoes.

The Truitt family of Princeville, Illinois, were in the canning business, preserving vegetables and cans for market.

Most of the vegetables were available for harvest and then canning from mid to late summer.

The Truitts wanted a product that would take their work well into the fall and winter.

My father, Jordan Truitt.

And his grandfather came down to Louisiana and went initially to LSU and made contact with doctor Julian Miller.

They sent him up to Harry Daniel, in West Feliciana Parish, that was in the mid to late 1930s, around the same time that LSU researcher Doctor Julian C Miller was perfecting the highly desirable Puerto Rican potato, the large scale farmer Harry Daniel was following Miller's progress and adjusting his crops based on Miller's discoveries.

Doctor Miller had traveled globally to learn more about the vegetable and to get tested and retested products and methods before achieving success.

Some of their labels were advertised.

The fact that they were Puerto Rican varieties, they tasted real good.

But there are other factors that go on to the decision about what variety to use.

The grower of course, is interest in yield and the more pounds per acre tons per acre, the better.

But also the canning process wanted a potato that would not break down, which would be firm.

And so varieties evolve.

The Truitts were so smitten with the Puerto Rican potatoes that they started having them shipped from Louisiana to Princeville, Illinois, not far from Peoria, but the shipping process had serious flaws.

There was no such thing as refrigerated railcars, and so they would have a layer of sweet potatoes and then a layer of dry ice.

In those days, even our lickety split rail train would take 3 or 4 days to get to Illinois.

And so there'd be considerable product loss.

And initially they tried to grow sweet potatoes in Illinois to prevent the freight cost on the raw product loss.

But there was a limit on availability of seed vines for sweet potatoes.

And so they ultimately decided, well, we should probably just build a plant in Louisiana.

So they built the plant here in St. Francisville.

The decision by the Truitts to build in Louisiana would prove to be quite beneficial to the entire parish, which was struggling after the decline of the cotton industry.

Princeville opened its Saint Francisville plant in 1945.

They branded the product a Royal Prince brand, and the Prince Hallo brand.

Also, the Jack O Lantern Brand, and they had a network of brokers all over the country Southern California, Philadelphia, Chicago, New York, etc., etc.

and it exploded.

Actually, it difficult these days to think that I canned product would do so well, but it really did.

And this was the 1930s and early 1940s.

The demand grew and as the demand grew, the acreage required to grow sweet potatoes grew as well.

As the demand for sweet potatoes grew rapidly across the country, the need for more product increased and the need for farmers increased.

There was a ready workforce because there wasn't a lot of employment in the region at all.

People were eager to find, steady jobs over time.

About half of the workers came from was Feliciana Parish, but other workers came from the Woodville area, Wilkinson County.

Some came even from new roads.

Many came from East Feliciana as well.

And in the beginning, those who did not have transportation, we had busses to go pick up the workers and bring them to work.

I went to work at Princeville canning company in 1964.

I was putting the potatoes in the can and put them on the run.

Some people came in, their cars and trucks, coming from all direction.

That was probably the biggest job in St. Francisville.

My mother worked at Princeville and we sold potatoes to Princeville.

That█s how we made it.

She was making 50 cents and hour.

But back then, that was good money.

They were happy to have a paycheck.

I was happy to have a paycheck to.

I used to work summers in the canning factory.

And I did lots of jobs from the, receiving area to loading the rail cars and whatnot, and always worked alongside other workers.

So I interacted, directly as a young person with these seasoned employers that were thrilled to death to have jobs.

And I worked hard.

The plant generally operated from mid-summer well into winter.

Workers not only canned sweet potatoes, they also made a German potatoes salad for national distribution.

There was quite a process from offloading the raw potatoes at the plant to shipping the canned product off the market.

Fortunately for the local people, a lot of manpower was required.

The trucks were manually offloaded and then they were put on pallets, on forklifts carried the pallets to the entry place of the plant.

On the potatoes were dumped into a series of processes that would eliminate the peel from the potato.

Initially it went into a caustic soda bath.

Caustic soda is a basic ingredient.

The PH is high and then it would go into a steam bath.

Sprays would knock the peel off, and then the potatoes would go down a broad line, and workers would inspect the potatoes for color and size.

And there were cans positioned above the lines on a conveyor belt, and they would fill the cans by hand depending on color and size, and then the cans would be converted to a sealing machine, which would seal the cans, and then they would go into a retort basket and they would be filled and they were vertical retorts up and down.

The potatoes would be cooked in the retort.

and then they would be unloaded.

Those were pretty much done by hand, but they were also scraped off and then put into the warehouse.

When it was time for labeling, the man would emerge from the marketplace, and then they would be box and put on the railcar and shipped to the market.

There was a rail spur.

Illinois Central went all the way down to Princeville Canning Company went up through Bayou Sarah, and then it connected with a major Illinois Central.

With the processing running smoothly, the Truitts were able to hire additional workers ultimately grew to about 850 workers over two shifts.

The owners of the factory began to see their workers becoming more independent.

In many ways, you could observe the evolution of wealth from individual families, automobiles, houses, land, and so forth.

So I mean, it was visible and it really triggered the local economy.

What you see today is a thriving economy, but it had its beginning and really back in those days, because it was dirt poor, my husband was working construction work.

And then I went to work at France via.

We were raising sweet potato, .

We had to work really hard to get where we got.

We were able to save our money and bought the land and built the house more people bought land, build houses, more trucks and cars since Princeville come.

You pick cotton the whole week and you count it and make $160, something like that Sweet potatoes you can make that everyday..

But it's all seasonal thing just like cotton as the demand for more canned potatoes increased, The Truitts discovered they needed to become farmers too.

the market, was demanding more sweet potatoes than the local farmers could produce, and Princeville had the capacity to canned far more sweet potatoes than were coming in.

So they established a farming operation as well.

The son of Harry Daniel was Ed Daniel, and my father and Ed Daniel became partners in the farming operation.

Ultimately, it took 4 to 5000 acres of sweet potatoes and Daniel & Truitt farming grew about a thousand acres of sweet potatoes and the rest came from nearby growers.

I went to work for Princeville when we finished sending out potatoes.

When we finished Digging potato, I couldn't go.

When a time for me to be in my field or my daddy█s field Princeville was the only place that was hiring, blacks they had blacks working in the field Year-Round, and they had the women coming to the factory from August till December.

I enjoyed it, it was big time farm.

And was a tractor driver most of the time.

But I was also riding horses, handling cattle.

Daniel and Truitt relied heavily on hired hands and many of the field workers received checks for their labor for the first time.

For the most part, people just had to be willing to work, which they were eager to do.

I mean, it wasn't hard to convince somebody to work hard in those days.

The men scouted the parish to find land that was not overgrown and could easily be turned into farmland.

One of the places that Jordan Truitt, the newcomer from Illinois looked at was the land surrounding the Rose down plantation.

I remember coming out here with my dad and, visiting.

There was nothing like it is now.

They were probably interested in anybody that was interested in this place.

This place was wreck at that time, and I really had no idea what to do with the home.

And I'm sure the gardens were a part of that.

My mother told my wife that they almost bought a plantation.

It wound up in the right hand.

The Underwoods did a magnificent job with this whole place.

While farming was big in West Feliciana, there was another industry that was perhaps as old as farming, running sawmills.

The need for lumber was steady as more people from other states and countries settled in West Feliciana and needed homes.

There were three sawmills in the parish for much of the 1900s.

There was one near Woodville, Mississippi, one in the community of Hardwood near Saint Francisville, and another in Tunica, a few miles from the Angola State Penitentiary.

A gentleman from Colorado had bought that property and started a little small mill there, and that was early 20s, I think, about 1925.

They moved the operation up to Tunica and built a much larger mill and called Tunica Hardwood Lumber Company.

It began operation up there about 1925.

It was a steam operated boiler room.

I guess at its height, I would say there were over 100 employees there.

It was a very large operation.

95% were probably African American.

Logs that were to be sliced into lumber, were often shipped on barges down the Mississippi River.

Log trucks would go down to the river, and some of the drivers were African American, the log trucks.

And then they had workers at the river itself because the barges came in and there was, dragline that loaded the logs onto the trucks, and workers had to be there to make sure the logs were stacked properly and then chained up so that they would stay on the truck.

And then they brought them up to the mill.

Every log that went through the sawmill had to go through the hands of several people before it became timber ready for sale.

The log is loaded on what is called the carriage.

It's the entire tree after the limbs and everything was cut off.

And then there's a saw that the sawyer operates this machine, the carriage, and it runs back and forth, sawing the log into pieces of lumber.

And then it goes to what they call the resaw, which.

So it trims it up.

And then they had a edger, which also did a little more trimming.

And then it went out on what they called the green chain.

There was a lumber inspector there, and they had to grade the lumber based on the quality of what was coming out of there.

And then it left the grain chain.

And then that's when it was taken out and stacked on the yard for it to be air dried.

My Clark's father, Monroe Clark, was a manager at the sawmill.

Clark says that black and white workers were often segregated, but their living conditions were very similar.

Operators of sawmills had a pattern of building small shotgun houses with 3 or 4 rooms for all of their workers and their families.

Almost all of them were just little shotgun houses, basically, with, the ones we lived in had, the tar paper siding kind of looked like brick, but it was artificial tar paper, pretty much the same in what they called the quarters.

The wages were low, but of course cost of living was lower.

And being able to have housing was really a big, big thing.

During the 1800s and early 1900s, sawmill operators would pack up and move their equipment with workers to different sites.

Once they used up the timber supply in a particular area.

The hard wood sawmill had done just that.

When came here with that Hardwood where it was Tall Bennet it first come from Grenada, Mississippi.

And they brought all their workers, with them and they hired a few from West Feliciana.

But all old people come in here with the sawmill and they built a shotgun house right next to one another.

They didn't pay no rent, no electric bill.

They come to pay their everything.

God, they didn't make much, but they didn't have no expense.

It was dirty.

Streets was bad.

Houses was bad in everything.

It just was bad.

Had their own big store out there on the road.

That's the way they made it.

Because they could go to the hole and get money.

Going to the hole meant getting items on credit or borrowing money at the store by payday.

Some workers didn't have much of a check left because they owed money to the store, which had a partnership with the paper mill.

The neighborhood was known for its rowdy juke joint.

The blues played loudly, and the crowds danced with rhythm and joy.

Just about every Friday and Saturday night.

A lot of his entertainments.

We had to do stuff to entertain ourselves and they go to clubs and whatnot.

It was for entertainment just to do something different.

That's okay.

The sawmill in Hardwood shut down in the late 1970s, around the same time the federal government went in and replaced the three room chanties with brick homes.

By the time the hardwood sawmills shut down, the national paper maker, Crown Zellerbach was in full operation.

In the late 1950s, the company had constructed a huge $31 million plant in west Feliciana on the banks of the Mississippi River.

The plant hired hundreds of workers when it opened in 1959, and many of them were African Americans.

People were able to get off the farm and go there and get a job.

It was hard labor, but they felt it was getting paid great and they were compared to what anybody else was paying, and most times what they could make on the farm.

Reverend Alton Scott's father, Willie Bennett Scott, was one of the first black men hired at the paper mill.

That job allowed him to add on to the property his wife had inherited from her father, Henry Dunbar.

The family went on to build a home on the property.

Reverend Scott and other family members still live on that property today.

As time went by, blacks discovered that Crown Zellerbach had stopped hiring people from West Feliciana Parish, but the plant was hiring from neighboring parishes.

The civil rights movement was taking off.

A guy, Ronnie Moore, was a kind of head in the civil rights movement for black people.

And that parish there was talking to these people at the paper mill.

Why are you not hiring these people?

I█d taken the test home.

I failed the test and everybody from That parish and the answer we was getting way and they didn't pass the test.

Well, I got real curious and some other people said, look I think I passed the test I would ace my test would just tell me, no, you can't have it.

Ronnie Moore knew enough to know.

with your operation you can't hide this kind of stuff.

If they didn't pass the test, then we won't see it.

But I heard already what was going on.

These big farmer was telling them, look, we don't mind you operating here but you can't hire our labor out of this parish.

And they didn't.

So it kind of put the pressure on them and started asking questions.

They hired a guy, Evan White, then hired me.

But right behind that was a whole bunch of people from that parish, like Olton Scott Willie Stevens, Edward Sterner.

Now they were doing an extension.

They needed plenty labor, but they were also putting in the labor, but they wasn't coming out of that parish.

Hamp Williams was the second black man promoted to foreman at the paper mill.

He says the skills he learned working in the fields frequently for other people gave him a major advantage.

But Uncle Lott and Ed Daniel was my idol.

Those were people I watched.

The international conglomerate Tembec bought the Crown Zellerbach plant in 2001 and kept it operating until 2007.

Hamp Williams was the last person working in the ground wood department when Tim Beck shut it down.

He had worked at the paper mill for 40 years, Williams says he never had a problem as a union worker or a manager.

I thought I was as good as anybody walked the planet an equal.

I was treated that way.

I treated everybody else that way.

So I never had an instance in supervision where I had a problem with race color.

The mill underwent some instability until Hood Containers purchased it in 2015 and committed to plowing more than $100 million into overhaul ING the plant.

A few years earlier, Princeville Canning Company had merged with Joan of Arc before being bought out by a Belgian company, beginning Company eventually shut down.

Peter Truitt says the lay of the land in West Feliciana Parish was not ideal for the huge equipment that makes farming easier, requiring less manual labor.

For the most part of the farms were small plots of sweet potatoes and the harvesters.

In those days and in the current days are more efficient with large fields, and eventually the larger farms displace the smaller farms because it was more efficient for the harvesters.

There was another source of work in West Feliciana Parish.

The Louisiana State Prison at Angola began housing prisoners in 1901.

Workers were needed to oversee the inmates at the second largest high security facility in the United States.

Angola did not start hiring African-Americans until the late 1960s.

The prison has a capacity to house roughly 5000 inmates, but the population has sometimes exceeded 6000.

It has also dropped far below 5000.

It's estimated that at least 1800 employees are needed to meet the basic security needs of the prison when it reaches full capacity.

The state has had major issues with funding and staffing the prison ever since it opened.

Published reports revealed that between the 1940s and 1970s, guards supervised inmates, and some of those inmates carried rifles and tried to oversee other inmates.

The result was an atmosphere engulfed in rapes, stabbings and murders.

Long time prison reporters and inmates Billy Sinclair and Wilbert Redo reported that as many as 3000 inmates died at Angola over a period of three decades, because of inadequate care and supervision.

By the mid 1970s, the Federal Court stepped in and demanded improvements.

Today, a large percentage of the prison's workforce is now black and female.

As the nation entered the 1960s, friction mounted between blacks and whites in West Louisiana over voting rights, excluding inmates.

At Angola, the 1960 census counted about 7,000 black people in West Louisiana, compared to about 4000 whites.

Blacks had a clear majority and wanted to flex their voting strength, but whites had almost all the land and the money.

Civil rights activist Ronnie Moore says the Saint Francisville area was one of the last parts of Louisiana that tried to deny blacks the right to vote.

The situation was so intense that the nation's most prominent black magazine, Ebony, shared the story with the rest of the nation.

Bob Adelman captured an image of a gun toting minister guarding his home.

The Reverend Joe Carter led the successful campaign to ensure blacks could vote, becoming the first black man in the parish to register.

After several failed attempts.

When the parish started moving towards civil rights and a right to vote, a lot of black was living on the plantation, and because the black wanted to vote, they made a move off the plantation.

Some was able to buy land and build a home, some had to even leave.

The parish is because they couldn't afford to buy land.

One white landowner evicted Ernest and Susie Morgan and their children after the Morgans registered to vote.

Vincent Smith recalls the story Susie Morgan told his mother about her husband, Ernest.

When was Fred Jackson so others Morgan at the courthouse, October 17th, 1963.

He told her they had to move, and that's when Ms. Susie told mama Mr Hunley hardley cried But that was the best thing ever happened.

And they went right to Solitude and bought their own house and land.

Since then, the Morgans have built a second house on their own property, and most of the Morgan children went to college and all lead successful, independent lives.

Most of the black churches were either on rent it or leased property, or donated by occasion, family of that more resource than they did, even providing cemeteries and whatnot.

Some people probably didn't come out boldly and speak their views, as was the civil rights movement.

Out of fear, you were very cautious and careful in what you said and did, because you want to try to keep what you had.

You don't want.

To make matters worse, many of the blacks who grew up in the Saint Francis Ville area during and after the John S Dawson era, went off to college and got great jobs.

They benefited greatly from the community being less than 50 miles from Southern University, and there was train service between Saint Francisville and Baton Rouge in the early years, Southen was everything.

That's the only black college that's close right there in Baton Rouge.

Whatever you need came out of Dawson High.

You have doctors.

Lawyers.

you have.

Judges Teachers.

You have nurses, Secretary is because the kids was more focused on the education.

And what could I do to better my condition.

There's a long list of success stories from Dawson High.

Joseph McDermott junior became a judge in South Carolina.

Lee Audrey Williams received his doctorate degree and worked in some of the highest positions with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Southern University and LSU.

Bennie Williams served as a probation officer and community activist in Austin, Texas.

Isaac Dickson Smith became a general in the United States Army.

He was always smiling..

He finished serving second Lieutenant and United States Army and went on, he made it to General I had five sisters and all of they are all right here and worked in the field.

You finish high school and went to Southern University.

The Scots also excelled in their professions.

Milton when into Accounting Milton Scott finished college at Southern University with the highest grade point average in his class.

He then went on to work for the fortune 500 company Arthur Andersen, which supplied accountants for companies on an international scale.

Milton then went to Dynegy, a power company based in Houston, before becoming the co-founder of a company called Complete Energy Holdings.

Elvin died very young, but he was in real estate and he was doing very well.

Elvin had already racked up millions of dollars in sales of homes in the Glen Oaks and Park Forest neighborhoods in Baton Rouge, before starting his own real estate company, he was a licensed real estate broker.

Lloyd went to business school.

My brother Calvin, he went to the service auto mechanic, my brother Willie.

He worked at Tamiya Willie, continued his education and earned a master's degree.

By then, however, the benefits of staying at the papermill exceeded changing careers.

Reverend Scott got a doctorate degree in theology and has been pastor of Saint Peter Baptist Church in West Feliciana Parish for more than two decades.

Reverend Scott also serves on many boards in the parish, including those that manage the parish hospital and the Voters League.

The 2020 census revealed that West Village he had a parish now has a population of roughly 10,500 people, about 70% of whom are white.

Many young African-Americans grow up, go off to college, and careers in other cities and states.

At the same time, many whites, especially those with children, are flocking to the parish, and with good reason.

We have the lowest crime rates in the state, lowest unemployment rates in the state, one of the best school systems in the state.

Depending on how you look at it, we could be number one.

Number two.

And it's always been traditionally right there is holding strong.

There is, however, pushback over a recent ordinance that seeks to limit the number of houses that can be built in the parish.

The apparent goal is to have no more than one house on almost two acres of land in most areas, Reverend Scott says the rules are harmful to poor people, mostly blacks, who have smaller plots.

It makes it difficult for my people to be able to build a house because we don't have the land.

You have three children, you have three acres of land.

And the way the thing is drawn up, I'm almost sure two wouild build a house on the land.

It tied our hands.

you have 150 acres of land.

That's a different thing.

We need to change our thoughts.

Just because I'm okay for my children.

I need to be looking out for your children.

Parish President Kenny Havard says the ordinance was put in place primarily to get major developers to be more responsible for water, sewer and road services in new neighborhoods without putting a major tax burden on people already living in the parish.

Our infrastructure stretched to the max.

Most of our roads are 17ft wide.

We had an engineering study on them.

They rated A through F and the majority of them are F rated.

We get about $111.26 per $400,000 house.

To do a mile of road is about $1 million, $800, $1 million.

We would have to build somewhere in the neighborhood of 7000 houses to pay for that mile of road, and it just doesn't work out.

Havard says the parish has major problems with some of its bridges.

They've been able to repair almost 30 since he took office five years ago, but much more work needs to be done, he says.

The new ordinance does accommodate families wanting to build five houses on five acres.

Havard resists the idea of grandfathering into the ordinance accommodations for African American families whose ancestors lived through slavery and sharecropping in West Feliciana I don't think we should carve out any special for anybody.

I think we should move on and quit.

Looking back into the past.

Everyone agrees that it's now difficult for anyone to get a start in West Louisiana Parish if they don't have deep pockets right back at me is White Oak subdivisions I think the lots is selling for $65,000 a lot.

I really don't know the true answer to why the land and everything went up so high.

You can throw comps kind of out the window right now because people will pay in whatever it'll take to get here.

There's a subdivision, it's one acre, it's $250,000 or so.

It's on the lot, 12 one acre lot with property values high and still rising in West Louisiana, the older generation is convinced younger people will have to work as hard or harder than they did to reach their goals, but they also believe the opportunities exist, even if not in West.

Feliciana you have to walk something out of life in order to accomplish anything out of life.

50% of success.

Start with you.

You have to believe in self and believe that I can do this.

And if you set your mind I wanted to do it.

You get it done.

You have to know where you're going.

Opportunities come, you got to be able to see it and you'll utilize it.

And you got to realize that the world is bigger than in the backyard.