Mermentau dam brought big trouble

Rice farming became the mainstay of our prairies after the railroad cut across them in 1880. Southern Pacific shipped 2 million pounds of south Louisiana rice to New Orleans in 1886. Those shipments grew to 200 million pounds over the next decade, and that was just the beginning. All of that rice needed more water than our rivers and streams could provide, and that brought big trouble in the Mermentau basin in the early 1900s.
By 1900 farmers and canal companies were using thousands and thousands of gallons of water from the Mermentau River for irrigation, but in 1901 and 1902, two of the driest years ever in southwest Louisiana, water in the river dropped so low that there was barely enough to irrigate the fields — and even that little bit could not be relied on because salt water creeping from the Gulf made it unusable for crops.
As a result, a group of farmers and canal operators formed the Rice Irrigation and Improvement Association to build a makeshift dam to block the salt water near Grand Chenier. When they could not raise enough money for something permanent, the group did what such groups naturally do. It went to the legislature for help. The association did not get anything directly from the state, but the legislature created the Mermentau Levee Board and gave it authority to charge a property tax to build something better.
That was the beginning of the big fight. Rice growers were all for the dam, but farmers around Grand Chenier grew corn and cotton and raised cattle. They thought the dam would flood their crop land during wet weather and, besides, didn’t like being taxed for a dam for rice growers who were steadily encroaching on their grazing land. Hundreds turned out for a mass meeting in August 1904 to “denounce the levee law,” according to a Crowley Signal article. N.P. Edwards, “a prominent attorney of Abbeville,” spoke in French “very strongly against the bill” and urged “the people … to fight the bill in the courts.”
The legal challenge didn’t work. The dam was finished in 1905, and the test came almost immediately. The skies opened that September, and as feared, the Mermentau overflowed and flooded the Grand Chenier corn and cotton farms. That’s when the farmers took matters into their own hands.
As the Jennings newspaper reported, “Dissatisfaction with the dam increased until in October 1905, two 20-foot sections of the superstructure … were blown out by dynamite, the guards having been overpowered and bound.” Unfortunately, that did not solve the problem. Debris from the blown-up part of the dam blocked the water better than the dam had done.
The debris was cleared away, the damage was repaired, and corn and cotton crops were flooded again in the summer of 1907. This time the blasters did a better job. Seventeen of the 41 sections of the 600-foot dam were destroyed in late July.
“At 11:15 Friday night [July 19, 1907] a crowd of men surprised the three guards at the dam, bound them, and set charges of dynamite at various points along the dam,” according to accounts in several papers. “The crowd was small and orderly. The guards were held up at the point of Winchesters [rifles] and quickly bound. Three men armed with Winchesters stood over the guards … [and] the men worked quickly and carefully.”
This time, the dam was only partially rebuilt but the farmers said even that was too much. According to the Jennings account, “On March 24, 1909, and again on March 26, 1909, dynamite was used in blowing up the superstructure of the dam, which by this time was pretty well destroyed.”
Construction of the Intracoastal Waterway through south Louisiana finally ended the fight in 1910k. Pujo was able to get an appropriation through Congress for a lock and dam near Grand Lake on the lower Mermentau that he said was “very necessary for the new waterway,” but that would be built in such a way that “Cameron farmers will not be overflowed and the rice farmers will not be flooded with salt water.”
The Jennings Daily News proclaimed that the project “would be a happy solution to a controversy which has stirred the Mermentau basin for years,” and it turned out to be just that.