From A. D. to Pete: Memories of Old Galvez

The rays of the rising sun illuminate a windowsill of the old raised house out on Highway 42, on the banks of the Amite River. Finding there an empty CD case, they pause for a few moments before moving on with the day's work, to bathe a black-and-white photograph in a chill winter glow. Shining in the light is a white, wood-sided church from a time out of memory; seated on the steps is country singer Alan Jackson. In the kitchen, black coffee drips, three strips of bacon sizzle in a skillet and two eggs await their turn. A man hums along with an old-time gospel hymn as he waits for the toast. As the sun begins to melt the frost on the grass, he doesn't worry about his strawberry garden. The blossoms aren't out yet and the plants will be fine. After awhile he dresses, climbs down the steps to his Ford Focus, pulls out onto the already-busy highway and heads west to visit a friend. A left turn and then a right, and he's nearly there.

But for just a split second before taking that right, the road before the man seems to fade to rutted dirt and the modern car becomes a horse-drawn buggy driven by his father. Down the road and around another turn stands a simple white chapel, and beside it a lane leads back to a cypress house where his bearded grandfather sits on the porch, smoking his pipe and reading a newspaper article about the war "over there." Some of the local Galvez boys have gone to the fight, and the old veteran keeps close track of Gen. Blackjack' Pershing and his doughboys'.

Then as suddenly as it had come, the vision is gone. The reins are once again a plastic steering wheel. An  ever-growing Ascension Parish bustles with business and traffic and the sounds of life as the man pulls into the driveway. Pete Carpenter steps out into the brisk air and the pale sun climbs  higher into a deep blue sky in the winter of his 95th year.

Back on Hwy. 42, at a gas station across from the LeBlanc's Pay-Less Food Store and not too far from the Hwy. 44 red light, the last of the morning commuters fill their tanks and grab a cup of coffee as they head into Baton Rouge. Alone and unnoticed the old oak still stands - to the left of the gas station, behind the wash-a-teria - a silent witness to another 95th year, belonging to another man, another time. In the pit of the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt in office exactly one month, family have gathered by buggy and automobile to celebrate a birthday. The children chase each other and the adults share their news as a great pot of jambalaya steams. As the photographer struggles to corral all 72 subjects into formation, the old veteran, seated front and center, drifts back.

Back to the beginning - past it. Before he came to Galvez. Leaving Blackwater Bayou up near Baker  bearing a rucksack and a rifle. The hard training at Camp Moore near Tangipahoa. Camping on the Comite River with the 9th Louisiana Infantry Battalion, Company B - the "East Baton Rouge Invincibles." The sharp, bloody, six-hour, running battle through the back yards of Baton Rouge, over fences, through hedges, and across open killing fields. The black smoke as one-third of Baton Rouge burned under naval bombardment. The retreat back up the Greenwell Springs road, and then later Port Hudson and the terrible six-week siege. The Union gunboats. The snipers. The shrapnel. The blood and the hunger and the valor. The bitter surrender, and going home in defeat. The few parts he has mentioned to  his sons. The other parts that he increasingly keeps to himself as the years pass.

But here and now, Sgt. Alfred D. Carpenter, C.S.A., sits in a chair on his 95th birthday, surrounded by his family. He wishes his two preacher sons could be here, but Rich has  been in the grave for 15 years, and Steve hasn't shown up - probably preaching out in Lottie again. But look at all the grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and more to come! He thinks  of his wife, Elizabeth, and how proud she    would have been to see this. At his feet, the little ones squirm and chatter and shade their eyes. Behind him, his grandson Pete and his wife, Ina, married less than a year, look steadily into the lens. The shutter clicks. The year is 1933.

Fast-forward nearly four-score years. During the last 15 years of explosive growth, the only constant for the rural sections of Ascension Parish east of Gonzales - little communities like Galvez and St. Amant - has been change. Areas where, so recently, everyone knew nearly everyone else, have become home to thousands of new families. Yet, despite all the change, a not-so-distant past is still with us. Every day, each one of us passes - whether in the market, at church, on the highway - someone who remembers how far we have come, and how each generation has stood upon the shoulders of the last. History surrounds us and instructs us, when we take a moment to ask.

This is the story of a time and a place and a way of life, seen through the lives of a grandfather and grandson, Alfred and Pete Carpenter. Though they themselves are bits and pieces of the whole, their stories paint a picture of past struggles facing our forebears, worth considering as we forge ahead.

My first glimpse of Pete Carpenter was as a blur seen through the truck window of my dad's cousin, Dan L. Dixon, Jr., rest his soul, around 1999. As we drove down Hwy. 42 toward Port Vincent, I saw a white-haired man in a red flannel shirt working in his garden on a cold January day. "That's your cousin, Pete Carpenter. "said Dan. "He must be about 87 years old or so."

I had known that my great-great-grandfather Carpenter had fought in the Civil War, had something to do with founding schools and churches in Ascension Parish, and that my father had sat on his knee shortly before he died in 1934, at 96. But I had never heard of "Cousin Pete," this hardy winter farmer.

Learning that the old veteran had lived with Pete's family for years further piqued my interest. The very idea that Pete had grown up with a man born in 1838 was hard to grasp. But what I came to respect most was how the individual can and does make a difference in the life of a
community.

When Alfred D. Carpenter, Sr., or "A.D.," came down out of the Blackwater country east of Baker to homestead near Bayou Manchac, north of what is now Hwy. 933 and near the intersections of Hwys. 42 and 44, the country was still mostly dense woods. Aside from some earlier settlers with names such as McCrory, Hodgeson, Parker, Thibeau, Delaune and Dixon, the old "Galveztown" area had lain mostly deserted for years.

Around 1778 the Spanish had  established a small fort and town at  the confluence of the Amite River and Bayou Manchac. In honor of Count Bernardo de Galvez, the Spanish governor of Louisiana and viceroy of New Spain (Mexico), it was named "Galveztown." Galvez had recruited several shiploads of Canary Island   soldiers of Spanish and Moroccan descent to bring their families, man  the fort, and protect Spain's holdings, A curious footnote is that the male Canarian recruits had to be at least  five feet tall, and the recruiter earned  a premium for every inch over this height. However, diseases, crop      failures and floods had left the town a deserted ruin by 1810.

Being that there were no stores, schools or churches in the Galvez  area, the new community truly had   to be built from scratch. Whether it was his experience in commanding Confederate sharpshooters at Port Hudson, or simple necessity, or a  combination of the two, what is known is that when A.D. Carpenter arrived from Blackwater Bayou in 1873, bringing his wife, Elizabeth Devall, and two infant daughters, he soon became a key founder of the modern Galvez area.

"It was a funny thing about Grandpa," Pete says. "He seemed to know everything. He had gotten some sort of an education somewhere... there were no councilmen, no elected officials, or anything - but if something needed doing, the people came to him."

By the time he retired to the front porch, his pipe and his newspaper, A.D. had been instrumental in   founding the area's first school and two churches, had been a teacher, a farmer, a blacksmith - his occupation in the 1870 census is listed as "wheelwright" - and a Justice of the Peace, who acted as the de facto judge for nearly all disputes arising in the area.

As even the longest journey starts with one small step, so it was with   the first church, Mt. Zion Baptist,   literally. About 1874, the men of the community met at the site of    the current "old" Mt. Zion cemetery, at the first big bend on Hwy. 933 south of the intersection with Hwy. 42, to build a little log church. A Mt. Zion history written   in the 1920s states that, "The men drew a ring on the ground and each placed his ax in the ring. After prayer...the men grabbed their axes and raced for the forest. The first to return with a log and lay it across the ring would be the 'HonorMan.'... Deacon Hodgeson stumbled on a root and lost to Brother Carpenter.

"The benches were made of logs, and a stump served as the pulpit."

At the time, the only schools in the area being at Dutchtown, Prairieville, Gonzales and St. Amant, the need was apparent, due to difficulty traveling the muddy, rutted roads. So at about the same time, the men also built a school, either next to the Mt. Zion church or across the road, and A.D. taught classes the first year as a private school, before going public the next.

Pete remembers well his grandfather's teaching skills: "I was having trouble with my algebra - I just couldn't get it. Grandpa said, 'Boy, come over here and let me help you with that.' He must have been up in his '80s - and I learned it right away."

As the fledgling Galvez community, grew, so did A.D.'s family. 1874 brought his first son, A.D., Jr., and in swift succession came five more sons and a daughter, bringing the clan to eleven with the birth of Philip Stephen in 1885. Galvez took its place as a small Protestant settlement, largely isolated by roads and religion from the little French towns to the south and east and across the Amite. But before long would come an unexpected   infusion of new blood.

June 1893 opened with the lower Mississippi above the danger line.   The rain kept coming. One by one, the levees began to fail. The crevasses crept further and further south.  Baton Rouge on the 13th. Napoleonville on the 16th. Then  came the big blowout at Convent on the 18th, drowning Acy and much of St. Amant. The wave of refugees made for Galvez, the highest point of land in the parish, where the locals pitched in to help the stricken families, mostly French-speaking Catholics.

Some of the displaced, including Joe, Emma and Alice Dugas, never returned home. By 1896, Joe had married Sarah Carpenter, her brother A.D., Jr. had married Emma, and Rich Carpenter had married Alice. Galvez grew and the old soldier's children moved on, the youngest, Steve, marrying in 1907, leaving an empty nest. Rich left for Louisiana College at Pineville - the first Carpenter to go to college - then on to the seminary in Shreveport.

Exactly why, the answer is lost to history. But in the spring of 1911,  old A.D., who had helped found    Mt. Zion Baptist as a young man, allowed a young Methodist minister, Spencer McLean, to begin holding services in his house. In the fall of  that year, it was 1874 all over again in Galvez. The whole family - Joe Dugas, A.D., Steve, A.D., Jr. (now known as "Bud") and many others broke out the saws and hammers, and soon a simple, white, wooden chapel arose on the south side of the old man's land, just east of today's intersection of Hwys. 933 and 44.

Bud's daughter, Josephine Carpenter Dixon, recalled that wooden chapel in 1986: "As a small child my grandmother [Elizabeth] Carpenter would sit in a chair... she would tell us Bible stories, as we could not read - she even taught us our alphabets. My father served as Sunday School Superintendent. We just had one small building with no lights, only coal-oil lamps to hang on the wall...we had no fan or heat or comfortable seats, but we enjoyed all of it."

Despite the old man's protests, the newborn building was officially registered as "Carpenter's Chapel United Methodist Church."

And in that same fall of 1911 Bud's wife gave birth to her last baby, a boy they named Walter.

"No one knows my real name," Pete says. "I've been Pete so long, that no one knows it's Walter!"

Bud Carpenter's neighbor was a  rarity in those parts, an Italian farmer. As a young boy, having nothing else to do, Walter would wander across the fence line to watch the farmer plow the field. Before long, farmer Peter Liotta and young Walter Carpenter had become a team.

"I'd stand in the headland [the area where the plow would make its turn], and he'd line up on me to keep his rows straight. I was over there so much, my brothers started calling me 'Little Pete' - and now that's my name," Pete chuckles.

By then, little Pete' had a new housemate. His grandmother had passed on and now old A.D. came to live with son Bud and family. Some nights Grandpa would break out his  fiddle on the front porch and the Carpenters would sing. Over a mile away, at their farmhouse at Hwy. 933 and Joe Sevario Rd., Steve and his  wife, Annie Dixon, would sit and listen to the music, coming across the fields clear as a bell.

Pete remembers that "it was so quiet back then, the sound would carry forever. People don't realize how much noise is in the air now. The loudest thing around was a wagon wheel. When we wanted to go hunting, we didn't have any telephone. We'd just holler back and forth to see who was going, and we'd go."

He will never forget the day in 1918 that the sound of those wheels dragged a black, horse-drawn hearse down the lane. Terrified at the sight, young Pete learned the news - Uncle Rich was dead. Dead at 39.

A.D.'s son had become the Rev. R.T.D. Carpenter, crusader for temperance and morality. His 1914 book, "My Brother's Keeper," warned against the evil of Demon Rum. Uncle Rich, a giant of a man, had preached all over the state, from Carpenter's Chapel to Crowley. He had founded his own church, Emmanuel Baptist, in Baton Rouge. But his fiery sermons had attracted the attention of more than just the moonshiners; the death threats from the gambling underworld had forced the Reverend to tote a double-barrel shotgun as he spread the word of the growing Temperance movement by buggy, alone.

Yet his undoing came at the hand of nature, not of man. Uncle Rich had been preaching in a barroom one night in Baton Rouge. Pete still sees no fault with his uncle's unorthodox approach: "If you can still hold up a mug you can still hear the Word."

Uncle Rich caught the deadly influenza of 1918 that night, took pneumonia, and died. A few days after his 80th birthday, the old man buried his son behind Carpenter's Chapel.

Rich's youngest brother, Steve, took up the fallen mantle and went on to preach at Mt. Zion, and for many years in a church in Lottie. In later years, as he raised his grandchildren, every so often a knock would come on the door late at night; Steve's grandson recalls watching as his grandpa married many a young couple in front of the fireplace.

That grandson remembers many things his grandpa Steve said and did, and so merits an aside at this point. By quirk of fate, by being raised by A.D.'s son Steve, he learned and has handed down stories that have been lost through time. One Civil War story, in particular, I recall hearing in my youth, because Steve's little  grandson - A.D.'s great-grandson - is my father, Herman Jerry Carpenter.

I speak of my father as a missing piece of Galvez history, because he was raised on a farm with the old folks, yet struck out for California in 1952 and never returned to live in Louisiana. It's worth noting my father's evolution from a 3-year-old child sitting on A.D. Carpenter's knee, to Galvez farm boy, to accomplished nuclear scientist, to ultimate retirement from the Air Force Reserve as a decorated two-star general.

But about that war story: It seems that at the Battle of Port Hudson, where 5,000 starving Confederate    soldiers were besieged, a Union ironclad gunboat would come up the river each morning and shell the Confederate lines, where Sgt. Carpenter's 9th Battalion was stationed under Col. William Miles. The sergeant and his men would dive into the "rat holes" they had dug to escape the shelling, but they were really tired of the routine.

Close study with a spyglass finally revealed the gunboat's Achilles' heel: Just before the gunboat opened fire, an iron plate would pop open to uncover each cannon. The next day when the gunboat came to rain down destruction, Sgt. Carpenter ordered his sharpshooters to aim directly at the dark space exposed between the cannons and the hull, and the bombardment eased. In the informal discussions between Yankees and Rebels after the surrender, the gunboat's captain confirmed that nearly every one of his gunners had suffered broken legs.

Now, back to Ascension Parish:

By the mid-20s, the new sound of the automobile, although not  common, became familiar. What   with the terribly rutted and muddy roads, young Pete and his friends  soon hit upon a way to make some quick cash. "We'd go down to the  old "Y," where 42 and 44 met, and  sit there for hours. Whenever a car  got stuck in the mud, five or six of   us would jump up and push it out  and get a dollar apiece."

In those days, a dollar was a day's wage for many a man, but the drivers paid it anyway. "You see," Pete grins, "the only people who had cars back then were the rich people - so they could afford to pay it!"

That sort of team effort was to prove critical during the Great Flood of 1927.

"It was the scariest thing you ever saw," says Pete. "All the flow wells were shooting like fire hoses, and crawfish holes had fountains of water going up in the air, from the pressure underground." Sixteen   years old, Pete, his friends and all the men of the area worked desperately to fill  a low spot on the levee down at Convent, likely the same area that had failed in 1893.

"We were afraid to drive trucks up on the levee, so we just kept filling those 50-lb. sandbags and carrying them up the levee. We must have put half a million sandbags on that levee, and the river kept rising. It started climbing the sandbags and we kept piling them higher... that water was boiling and the waves hitting those bags... it was a real close thing. Those sandbags saved the whole parish from being flooded."

Disaster of a manmade variety soon followed, as the Depression hit and work became impossible to find around Galvez. While most folks had enough vegetables, many had to make do with squirrel meat. And few had flour, or the money for it. Bud had a truck, and he and his sons took turns driving into Gonzales every week for Red Cross flour.

"Twenty-four pound sacks - we'd pile them on the porch and the men would come get their share for their families. A lot of people had a hard time back then. Some families made their shirts out of the sacks, so they had lettering all over them!"

Yet, life went on in Galvez. Pete went to a dance at the Lyons house down the road one night and met a fair-skinned girl from French Settlement named Ina Lambert. Little did he know that that evening would lead to 50 years of marriage, parted only by her passing in 1982.

That next year, Grandpa Alfred's 95th birthday party under the big oak at Johnny Heintz's house reunited a lot of the ever-growing family for what would prove to be their last group photo. In December 1934, the old soldier, still alert, active and reading his newspaper at 96, took sick for a week during a cold spell, and then quietly slipped away to join his wife, at rest behind the little wood chapel.

Around him, Ascension was struggling back to work. Pete joined the Works Progress Administration for $3 a day, supervising men who earned $2 a day clearing out the parish canals and bayous and improving drainage.

In 1935, R. N. Banker began stringing telephone cable in Gonzales; his wife worked the switchboard in their kitchen. Though the seed of Eatel had germinated, the branches had yet to reach far. Electricity came late, too, not becoming common in many places until the late '40s.

In those last years of isolation, before the war brought change - before the roads were graveled and the phone lines run and religious barriers between Catholics and Protestants softened, communication was still difficult. Pete says there were a couple phones in Galvez, one phone in French Settlement at a store, and it was hard to get in touch with people even a few miles away in Lake.

"Basically, you still communicated through the U.S. Mail, weddings, and funerals."

But World War II, although it didn't have much effect on daily life, set in motion processes that would accelerate life all over America, even  in rural Ascension Parish.

Servicemen returned home with new horizons and bigger thoughts. The brute force of American industry built up during the war provided better jobs. Paved roads began to appear and the baby boom filled schools. The hard work of those early settlers grew deeper and more firmly entrenched, unlike that of the unfortunate Canarian Spaniards of Galveztown.

As for Pete? He timed it right.  After a couple years of temp work at Standard Oil, he caught wind of a DuPont plant opening in Baton Rouge in 1938 and had saved enough money to buy a Model A to get him down the gravel road to where the asphalt began at Perkins Road. His interest in electricity led to a solid  34-year career as an electrical inspector for what became the Ethyl Corporation. The old Model A became a new Mercury and son Darrell and daughters Ina and Emily came along.

In 1942 the family moved to the raised house on the Amite, out on Hwy. 42. Pete served on the school board from 1950 to 1968, and continues his 81-year attendance at Carpenter's Chapel - still driving  himself down Hwy. 933 each Sunday to the modern, spacious sanctuary across the road from the site of the 1911 church. And his family still counts on those fresh vegetables from his garden. Alfred and Pete:  Two lives, spanning 168 years - enclosing the history of their community like bookends.

Oh, and the little white chapel? Drop in sometime for a cup of coffee at that new Internet cafe that just opened on Hwy. 42, maybe half a mile past 44 headed toward 61. You know the place - the one with the brick front that used to be Barattini's - the one that used to be Simpson's Bar and Restaurant. Take a good look at the wood - the old ceiling - the posts... You're looking at the original Carpenter's Chapel, salvaged and rebuilt in a different form.

From church, to bar, to restaurant, to cybercafe. Born once again. History is closer than you think.