Mile 104.3 - LBD Batture Houses

104.3 LBD Batture Houses

The Batture Houses are a string of thirteen houses on the riverside of the levee. They are the last homes on the batture between Baton Rouge and the Gulf of Mexico (according to historian Oliver Houck). Before the 1950’s, the east bank batture was lined with squatter houses like these, for four miles, all the way to Audubon Park. During the Great Depression, down and out New Orleanians took refuge in this linear village along the river. “The structures were made of driftwood that came down the river. Hobos fished out the scrap and lashed it into shelters. It grew by accretion, a monument of ingenuity, a chaos of rafts and skiffs that lined the river,” according to author Rich Cohen. These river people scoured the banks for wood (especially ash, which burns longest and hottest), ran trotlines for catfish, made willow furniture, and salvaged whatever they could find to sell in the city. In 1950, with the the Corps of Engineers aiming to lift levees, the residents of the Batture houses were ordered to the other side of the levee. They fought, but they lost, and some were removed by force. Some houses were demolished, and others were moved. The thirteen homes that you see huddled under the sycamore trees managed to survive by technicality - because years before, Jefferson Parish had lifted their own levees. For decades, they have survived the dangers of yearly river floods, as well as the poaching of local businessmen who claim title to that land. (Wolf E. Staudinger)

Mahalia Jackson

As you drift beneath the powerlines and past the US Army Corps of Engineers complex, listen closely. Mahalia Jackson, the Queen of Gospel, was born in the kitchen of a batture house in 1911. As a child, she split her time between the river and Mount Moriah Baptist Church (still open, just across the levee on Millaudon Street). She writes in her autobiography, “The river levee was high and grassy, and it was our playground. We used to sit out there and sing songs with ukuleles and bake sweet potatoes in fires made from driftwood and catch all the fish and the crabs we wanted.” She collected driftwood and pried apart old barges to feed her family’s wood stove. She stuffed mattresses with Spanish moss and corn husks. “We often had baby alligator for breakfast,” she wrote, “When you saw one sunning himself in the swamp or on the riverbank, you’d get a stick and creep up real quiet until you got close enough to crack him on the head so hard he never knew what it was that hit him. You ate the tail baked like smothered chicken with onions and garlic and herbs.” When she was fourteen, she was baptized in the Mississippi River, at a calm place just upstream from Audubon Park. She was dressed in a light white cotton dress and a white veil trimmed with white lace roses. By the time she died in 1972, she’d recorded more than 30 albums, sang for heads of state, and been called, “the single most powerful black woman in the United States.” She sang at the 1963 Civil Rights March on Washington, just before Martin Luther King took the podium. When he died, she sang at his funeral. She is buried in Providence Memorial Park, a mile from the river in Kenner (112LBD). (Wolf E. Staudinger)