Columns

When we think about boats on Bayou Teche in days gone by, we think first about steamboats. But a surprising number of ocean-going schooners regularly visited Franklin and other bayou towns, bringing fancy goods and staples from New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and other places.
According to a story in Harper’s magazine in 1853, this schooner trade started by accident. A captain uncovered the rich Teche trade in the early 1800s when he was hunting for a place to weather a storm.

Life is like being on the internet; there’s lots of good stuff but there is also a lot of garbage. There’s lots of places you can get information; various news sites, social media, opinions, blogs, and videos. Unfortunately, there is no one place you can look to for plain, direct, and objective information. Each source has its biases, slants, agendas, objective, and focus.

When officer Plais Horn saw a man climb off a freight train in Opelousas in March 1917, he thought his sharp eye and good memory had helped catch a notorious bank robber.
The Opelousas Star-Progress called the arrest of the man, identified as Joe Davis alias Bill Butler, “probably the biggest capture in the history of local criminal authorities in recent years.”