When I started digging for the story of Vermilionville, Louisiana, I decided I'd just type in Vermilionville into Google and just keep hitting it and see if something good comes up.  I looked at every item whether it looked promising or not.  After a long and exhaustive search I finally hit what I thought was pay dirt.

 A publication called Scribner's Monthly commissioned the services of a traveling writer (kinda like Mark Twain) by the name of Edward King to make a "Record of Journeys in Louisiana, Texas, the Indian Territory, Missouri, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, and Maryland:"

 "Alright," I'm thinking. He's going to start in New Orleans then work his way through Louisiana towards Texas. This of course would take him into Vermilionville. Right?  Wrong.  The following is from the book itself.  Right after this disclaimer:

"This work is the property of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text."

         THIS book is the record of an extensive tour of observation through the States of the South and South-west during the whole of 1873, and the Spring and Summer of 1874.

        The journey was undertaken at the instance of the publishers of Scribner's Monthly, who desired to present to the public, through the medium of their popular periodical, an account of the material resources, and the present social and political condition, of the people in the Southern States. The author and the artists associated with him in the preparation of the work, traveled more than twenty-five thousand miles; visited nearly every city and town of importance in the South; talked with men of all classes, parties and colors; carefully investigated manufacturing enterprises and sites; studied the course of politics in each State since the advent of reconstruction; explored rivers, and penetrated into mountain regions heretofore rarely visited by Northern men. They were everywhere kindly and generously received by the Southern people; and they have endeavored, by pen and pencil, to give the reading public a truthful picture of life in a section which has, since the close of a devastating war, been overwhelmed by a variety of misfortunes, but upon which the dawn of a better day is breaking.

        The fifteen ex-slave States cover an area of more than 880,000 square miles, and are inhabited by fourteen millions of people. The aim of the author has been to tell the truth as exactly and completely as possible in the time and space allotted him, concerning the characteristics of this region and its inhabitants.

        The popular favor accorded in this country and Great Britain to the fifteen illustrated articles descriptive of the South which have appeared in Scribner's Monthly, has led to the preparation of the present volume. Much of the material which has appeared in Scribner will be found in its pages; the whole has, however, been re-written, re-arranged, and, with numerous additions, is now simultaneously offered to the English-speaking public on both sides of the Atlantic.

        To the talent and skill of Mr. J. WELLS CHAMPNEY, the artist who accompanied the author during the greater part of the journey, the public is indebted for more than four hundred of the superb sketches of Southern life, character, and scenery which illustrate this volume. The other artists who have contributed have done their work faithfully and well.

NEW YORK, November, 1874.

 I've lived for a time in the New Orleans area, so the places he described were quite familiar too me. I saw myself as calibrating my instruments with his, so that when he got to Vermilionville I should be able to extract a veritable 3-D image of what it was like in 1873. His desciptive is that good.

 Along with an excellent review of the French Quarter, the American Quarter, French Market, the cotton trade, and the levee systems, he takes us out to what we now know as West End.  He writes: 

 "On Sundays the shell road leading northward from Canal street past the Metairie and Oakland Parks, by the side of the New Basin, is crowded with teams, and the restaurants, half hidden by foliage, echo to boisterous merriment. But on a week day it is almost deserted. Schooners on the canal glide lazily along; ragged negro boys sit on the banks, sleepily fishing; while the intense green of the leaves is beautifully reflected from the water. Arrived near the lake, you catch a view of dark water in the canal in the foreground, with a gayly-painted sail-boat lying close to the bank; an ornamental gateway just beyond; a flock of goats browsing at the roadside; and afar off, a white light-house standing lonely on a narrow point of land. You may step into a sail-boat at the lake, and let a brown, barefooted Creole fisherman sail you down to the pier where the railroad from New Orleans terminates; then back again, up the Bayou St. John, until he lands you near the walls of the "old Spanish fort." There you may find a summer-house, an orchard, and a rose-garden. From the balcony you can see a long pier running into the lake; the sun's gold on the rippling water; the oranges in the trees below; the group of sailors tugging at the cable of their schooner; the pretty cluster of cottages near the levée's end; the cannon, old and dismounted, lying half-buried under the grasses; the wealth of peach-blossoms in the bent tree near the parapet; and a bevy of bare-legged children playing about their mother, as she sits on the sward, cutting rose-stems, and twisting blossoms into bouquets.

     As evening deepens, you sail home, and, in the dining-room of the restaurant near the canal, look out upon the passing barges and boats gliding noiselessly townward; hear the shouts of festive parties as they wander on the levée, or along the cypress-girt shore; hear the boatmen singing catches; or watch a blood-red moon as it rises slowly, and casts an enchanted light over the burnished surface of the water-way.

        A promenade on Canal street is quite as picturesque as any in the French quarter. There is the negro boot-black sitting in the sun, with his own splay-feet on his blacking-block; and there are the bouquet-sellers, black and white, ranged at convenient corners, with baskets filled with breast knots of violets, and a world of rose-buds, camelias, and other rich blossoms. The newsboy cries his wares, vociferous as his brother of Gotham. The "roust-abouts" from the levée, clad in striped trowsers and flannel shirts, and in coats and hats which they seem to have slept in for a century, hasten homeward to dinner, with their cotton-hooks clenched in their brawny hands. The ropers for gambling-houses--one of the curses of New Orleans--haunt each conspicuous corner, and impudently scan passers-by."

 Mr. King also made mention of the rail line's terminus near there.  The rail I'm referring to is on the eastbank side of the Mississippi River. Trains that departed for Brashear City (now Morgan City) crossed the Mississippi by ferry boat at Algiers over to the westbank side.  But Brashear City, at that time, was the end of the line for the railroad's westbound trek. King makes note of the benefit that a railroad would have for all of Louisiana including Vermilionville. 

 As mentioned, this was the year 1873. Later, upon reflecting what I had read, it dawned on me that almost exactly 100 years later in  early 1973, I sat with my cousin, both of us perched on bikes, looking eastward on the brand new pavement of a yet to be opened Interstate-10 east of Lafayette. Reading that gave me a sense that I was part of an historical continuum.

 Now let's skip ahead as our reporter departs Louisiana for Texas.

   "The route from New Orleans to Brashear City is, in the delightful months of April and May, one of the most beautiful in the South. The railroad which connects at Brashear City with the Morgan steamers sailing to Galveston, and along which the tide of emigration constantly flows, traverses weird forests and lofty cane-brakes, and passes over bayous, swamps, and long stretches of sugar plantations.

        Crossing the Mississippi by the great railroad ferry to Algiers, the traveler soon leaves behind the low, green banks, studded with neat, white houses embowered in a profusion of orange groves; and is borne out of sight of the black lines of smoke left upon the cloudless sky by the funnels of the river steamers. He passes Bayou des Allemands, and a low country filled with deep, black pools; hurries across the reedy and saturated expanse of Trembling Prairie, dotted with fine oaks; rattles by Raceland, and its moist, black fields, to La Fourche Bayou, on which lies the pretty, cultivated town of Thibodeaux.

        He next passes Chacahoula swamp, a wilderness of shriveled cypresses and stagnant water; Tigerville, with its Indian mounds; the rich Bæuf country, along the banks of whose lovely bayou lie wonderful sugar lands, once crowded with prosperous planters, but now showing many an idle plantation. He passes immense groves, from the boughs of whose trees thousands of Spanish moss beards are pendent; and through which long and sombre aisles, like those of a cathedral, open to right and left. He wonders at the presence of the bearded moss on all the trees, and his commercial eye perhaps suggests that it be made available in upholstery; but he is told that the quaint parasite already does good service as the scavenger of the air.

        At Brashear City he finds a steamer for Texas at the fine docks built by the enterprising proprietor of the "Morgan line," and notes, as he passes out to the blue waters of the Gulf, the richness of the vegetation along the shores of the inlet. An afternoon and a night--and he is in Galveston.

        The coast line of Texas, bordering upon the Gulf of Mexico from Sabine Pass to the Rio Grande,--from the Louisiana boundary to the hybrid, picturesque territory where the American and Mexican civilizations meet and conflict, is richly indented and studded with charming bays. Trinity, Galveston, West, Matagorda, Espiritu Santu, Aransas, and Corpus Christi harbors, each and all offer varied possibilities for future commerce. The whole coast, extending several hundred miles, is also bordered by a series of islands and peninsulas, long and narrow in form, which protect the inner low-lying banks from the high seas.

        The plains extending back from the coast in the valleys of the Sabine, the San Jacinto and the Colorado, seem in past centuries to have formed a vast delta, whose summit was probably near the Colorado, and whose angles were formed by the Sabine and the Nueces. Great horizons, apparently boundless as the sea, characterize these plains; the wanderer on the Gulf sees only the illimitable expanse of wave and alluvial; the eye is fatigued by the immensity, and gladly seeks rest upon the lines of ancient forest which cover the borders of the Colorado and the Nueces. Beyond these plains comes the zone of the prairies, whose lightly undulating surface extends inland as far as the Red river, while the mountains on the north-west crown the fertile knolls of rolling country.

        These mountains are portions of the Sierra Madre, which is itself but a spur from the grand Andean chain. Running to the north-west in the State of Coahuila (once a portion of Texas), the Sierra Madre spur bifurcates to enter the Texas of the present, and continues in a north-westerly direction, under the name of the San Saba, in whose breasts are locked the rich minerals which the Spaniard, during his period of domination, so often and so vainly strove to unearth.

        The Texan coast sweeps downward and outward by a wide curve to the Mexican boundary. Approaching it from the sea, the eye encounters only a low-lying level of white sand, with which, however, at all hours, the deep colors of the gulf are admirably contrasted.

        The great sea highway to which I have previously alluded, from Brashear City, on Berwick's Bay, on the Louisiana coast, to Galveston, is well known and fascinating to the modern traveler. The enterprise and liberal expenditure of a citizen of New York, Mr. Charles Morgan, has covered the waves of this route with steamships, which, until recently, furnished the only means of communication between Texas and the rest of the United States. The Morgan Line was not merely the outgrowth of an earnest demand; it was the work of an adventurous pioneer; and although its importance, in view of the grand railroad development of Northern Texas, can henceforth be but secondary, its founder will always be remembered for his foresight and daring. The improvements in the channels from Berwick's Bay outward are also the work of the owner of this line. They comprehend the dredging of a great bar which once obstructed the short passage to the Gulf, and when completed will be of infinite importance to the commerce of the whole south-west. Thousands of tons of shells have been dragged out of the dark-blue water to make room for the prows of the Morgan fleet, pointed toward Galveston and Indianola.

 Since I live in Houston now, I found it  fascinating to hear his descriptions of arriving in Galveston and Houston. Houston at the time was very small. But it had the best network of railroads already, and it was clear that Galveston would not stay the dominant entity that it had been. I also enjoyed learning of the nicknames the citizens of each town called each other in friendly rivalry. The people in Galveston referred to the folks in Houston as "mud turtles," because of the Buffalo Bayou's regular flooding. Meanwhile the people in Houston called the Galveston residents "sand crabs."

 We live very close to downtown and it is interesting to walk around the most historic part of the downtown area. But don't think that I'll be opening up any Houston city directories are seeking platts from the Clerk of Courts office over here. A staffer at the Houston Chronicle has a blog site called "Bayou City History," and he does a real bang-up job with it. Very thorough.

 Before I give you the link to this voluminous, free-of-charge E-Book, I should make note of something.  Any "history digging" that you do, especially pre-1965, you are going to inevitably face the difficult subject of skin pigmentation. As you read about the journeys of Edward King, keep in mind that this was not so long after the closing of the Civil War. You may find the way non-white Americans are described as not so flattering. Even from an east-coast reporter's point of view.

  To put in my perspective, I'm fifty years old and I never shared a classroom with a black student until I was in the fourth grade at Lafayette Elementary.  That's how long it took for that to occur. I do believe, however, this read can be a good starting point in understanding the complicated evolution of race relations in the United States since the Civil War. 

  So with that said, I present to you the journeys of Edward King, for Scribner's Monthly, in its entirety.      http://docsouth.unc.edu/nc/king/king.html#p50