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November 1, 1962 ~ June 12, 2017

ABBEVILLE — Funeral services will be held at 2:00 PM on Friday, June 16, 2017 at Vincent Funeral Home - Abbeville honoring the life of Patricia Lee Trahan, 54, passed away peacefully on Monday, June 12, 2017 at Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital. She will be laid to rest at St. Paul Cemetery with Pastor Marvin Dunn officiating the services.
Our beloved one, Patricia Lee Trahan, was born in Inverness, Florida on November 1, 1962. She loved spending time wither her family and friends. Christmas was her favorite holiday and she left no one out. She loved to bake, play games, play pool, go to the beach, sing karaoke and go shrimping. She loved to laugh and make people laugh and feel loved. She had the ability to make friends with everyone. She had a lifelong battle with Lupus. She was so tough and battled everyday of her entire life. Regardless, she truly lived her life to the fullest spreading her loving spirit to everyone. We will always love her and never forget her.
Patricia is survived by her mother, Ethel Lee Day Head; brother, Stewart Head; sisters, Brenda Hebert, Tyra LeBlanc, Angela Head and Karen Head; children, Christina Head Gallardo and her husband Lucas Mejia, Hubert Joseph Trahan, Sharon Marie Trahan and her husband Thomas Adams, and Weston Aurelain Trahan and his wife Shannon Renee Trahan; grandchildren, Jayden Tyler Siony Lopez, Hubert Dame Trahan, Claire Trahan, Xander Trahan, Seth Nicholas Adams, Isaac Joseph Adams, Alexis Patterson, and Trinity Patterson; twenty-one step-children; numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren; she also had many sons, daughters, grandchildren that she had adopted over the years; nanny and aunt to many. Her best friend for over 20 years, Mona Nichols.
She was preceded in death by her maternal grandparents, Mr. and Mrs. Day; paternal grandparents, Mr. Barney and Mrs. Virginia Trotter; father, Clarence Dame Head; sisters, Debra Head and Virginia “Pumpkin” Redmond; son, Raywood Hebert; and her husband, Hubert Trahan.
The family requests that visiting hours be observed at Vincent Funeral Home - Abbeville, 209 S. St. Charles St., on Thursday, June 15, 2017 from 9:30 AM until 9:00 PM; Friday, June 16, 2017 9:00 AM until time of services.
Condolences may be sent to the family at www.vincentfuneralhome.net.
All funeral arrangements are being conducted by Vincent Funeral Home of Abbeville, (337) 893-4661.

In days gone by, the Calcasieu River was jammed from top to bottom with pine logs in the early days of June. This was the high-water month, when logs could easily be floated to nearly a dozen lumber mills that ringed Lake Charles.
It was a money month for men who cut timber and the month when mill operators stocked up on the logs they would turn to lumber, at a handsome profit.
There was plenty of timber to go around. In 1840, the huge territory in southwest Louisiana known as “Imperial Calcasieu Parish” contained one of the finest stands of longleaf pine timber in the world, part of 4,500 square miles of a forest filled with centuries-old trees that stretched north through what is now Beauregard, Allen and into Vernon Parish. and east into parts of St. Landry, Rapides and Natchitoches parishes.
Trees standing more than 100 feet tall yielded from 12,000 to 30,000 board feet of lumber per acre, and the supply seemed inexhaustible. In 1880, according to an estimate made as part of the federal census, Louisiana’s pine forests held enough timber for more than four billion board feet of saleable lumber — a huge amount of it eventually flowing through Lake Charles.
As Donald Millet put it in an extensive study of the industry printed in the journal “Louisiana History” in 1966, the town was “advantageously located on the lake from which (it) gets its name and through which the Calcasieu River flows with its many tributaries extending far into the pine belt and to the Gulf of Mexico.” The lake and the river also provided a base for a large fleet of schooners that hauled finished lumber to ports all along the Gulf coast, and so became “the first center of logging and lumber production in Louisiana.”
At first, timber was cut close enough to the banks of the streams that they could be easily hauled to the water by mules or oxen, but by the middle 1880s most of the easily accessible trees were cut and loggers began to build little railroads into the piney woods. A. J. Perkins, one of the owners of the Moore, Perkins, & Company mill, is credited with building the Calcasieu & Vernon in 1882, the first of the narrow-gauge lines built specially to haul logs. According to Millet, it started at White Bluff on Hickory Branch Creek—a Calcasieu River tributary—and eventually reached Leesville.
Millet gives a fascinating account of how a tree in the woods was turned into a valuable pine board to be sold in Galveston or Veracruz or some other Gulf port.
“First came the woodsman, whose duty it was to saw or chop the tree down” and cut it into logs about 20 feet long. Each log was dragged to the railway using a high-wheeled cart pulled by mules. About 16 logs could be loaded onto a flatbed rail car that hauled it to the water’s edge.
Pegs to hold short pieces of rope were driven into the logs before they were rolled into the river and hooked together into rafts that could be towed to the mills in Lake Charles. There, the rafts were linked together into huge “booms” of floating logs to be hauled up to the mills.
“Booms of fifty thousand or more logs were a common sight in the waters of Lake Charles,” Millet wrote.
It was a lot of work, but worth it. In 1878, the Galveston News reported that 20 million board feet of Calcasieu longleaf pine had been purchased by buyers on the island alone that year, at an average cost of $18 per thousand feet for top quality lumber and $16 for a lesser grade.
According to my calculator that amounted to about $3.5 million in sales in 1878 dollars in one year in one town. That would be about $90 million in today’s dollars, and that was just the beginning. The Southern Pacific reached Calcasieu in 1880, linking the area to the whole nation at a time when a building boom was going on.
There was a huge demand for Louisiana pine lumber, and within just a few years just one mill was turning out 85,000 board feet of lumber every day—more than 30 million board feet a year. The other mills weren’t far behind, and prices for the finished lumber were better than they had ever been.
A collection of Jim Bradshaw’s columns, Cajuns and Other Characters, is now available from Pelican Publishing. You can contact him at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.

August 3, 1949 ~ June 10, 2017

ABBEVILLE — A Mass of Christian Burial will be held at 11:00 AM on Wednesday, June 14, 2017 at St. Mary Magdalen Catholic Church honoring the life of Jerry Lee Romero, 67, who died Saturday, June 10, 2017. He will be laid to rest at St. Alphonsus Cemetery with Reverend Louis Richard officiating the services. Pallbearers will be Kullan Romero, Kayne Breaux, Kanyon St. Julien, Weston Cormier, Ricky Delcambre and Ollie Dupuy. Honorary pallbearer will be Chad Cormier.
Jerry is survived by his wife Linda Cormier Romero; children, Chris St. Julien and her husband Doug of Carencro, Jadie Breaux of Abbeville, and Chase Romero and his wife Crystal of Abbeville;, and eight grandchildren, Kullan, Kayne, Kanyon, Mia, Addison, Chase “C.J.”, Cash and Cruz.
He was preceded in death by his parents, Roy Romero and the former Eula Mae Trahan; brother, Larry Romero; and in-laws, Curley and Grace Cormier.
The family requests that visiting hours be observed at Vincent Funeral Home - Abbeville, 209 S. St. Charles St., on Tuesday, June 13, 2017 from 4:00 PM until 9:00 PM with a rosary being prayed at 7:00 PM; Wednesday, June 14, 2017 from 8:00 AM until 10:45 AM when the procession will depart for the church.
Condolences may be sent to the family at www.vincentfuneralhome.net.
All funeral arrangements are being conducted by Vincent Funeral Home of Abbeville, (337) 893-4661.