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See PILGRIMAGE on page 4

Audubon Pilgrimage Begins FridayBy Anne Butler

The forty-fourth annual Audubon Pilgrimage March 20, 21 and 22, 2015, celebrates a southern spring in St. Francisville, the glorious garden spot of Louisiana’s English Planta-tion Country. For over four decades the sponsoring West Feliciana His-torical Society has thrown open the doors of significant historic struc-tures to commemorate artist-natu-ralist John James Audubon’s stay as he painted a number of his famous bird studies and tutored the daughter of Oakley Plantation’s Pirrie family, beautiful young Eliza. This year’s featured homes include three country plantations and one historic town-house, plus two significant state his-toric sites.

Open this year for the first time is Retreat Plantation, built around 1823 on property of Sarah Bingman and named Soldier’s Retreat by her sec-ond husband, Clarence Mulford, a U.S. Army captain at nearby Fort Ad-ams. A 1½-story Anglo-Creole home with handsome architectural details set on a bluff overlooking Little Bayou Sara, it has been restored by Afton Villa Gardens

present owners C.B. and Mary C. de Laureal Owen, continuing seven gen-erations of Percy family occupancy since 1859.

At the opposite end of the par-ish is Dogwood, in the Thompson Creek delta on lands initially granted by Spain to Jean Cloccinet as part of a failed resettlement of Acadian ex-iles. The house was begun in 1803 by George Freeland, an early settler from the Carolinas. His initial hewn-log shed-roof house, two rooms flanking a hallway and topped by a sleeping loft, has been enlarged over the years and is home to the family of Rob and Missy Couhig.

An exuberant Carpenter Gothic Victorian home approached from US Highway 61 via an impressive oak avenue, The Oaks was built in 1888 by Judge Thomas Butler, Confeder-ate veteran, planter and police juror. From his family’s isolated plantation he moved to be nearer St. Francis-ville’s amenities, embellishing his new house with stained glass, fanci-ful gingerbread trim, dormers and turrets. When the last of his nine chil-

The Artist as Gardner: Walter ImaharaBy PAtriciA StAllmAn

For Walter Imahara the act of art is ongoing. At play is the quietness of the garden in winter and what he calls the “miracle,” the return of leaves and flowers in spring. The actual view in February of the ev-ergreen and deciduous trees coex-ists in the eye with the anticipation of rebirth, an exquisite equilibrium. Each season, Imahara says, has its own beauty.

Of the 54 acres he owns, Wal-ter Imahara has carved and molded 10 acres to present his collections of Azalea (over 3,000 plants), Ca-mellia, Crape Myrtle (over 25 va-rieties), Holly, Magnolia and Oak

varieties in their native alluvial soil. The garden includes as well 11 species of palm trees. Past the Camellias, visitors may view Cy-press Point for “spectacular views of the vast natural swamp.” (Ima-hara Botanical Gardens)

The elevation of the garden site is 122 feet, Imahara says. The Mississippi River, which is three miles away, has a water level of forty-plus feet, “so this land is re-ally high.” The land to the west of the river, he says, was under wa-ter; winds from the west blew the dust that built his property after the Ice Age.

See IMAHARA on page 8James Imahara with three of his sons at Afton Villa Plantation.

2 Tuesday, March 17, 2015

DRY’S

To Market, to Market, to Buy a Dutch Roll: Clinton Market Day and McKnight’sBy PAtriciA StAllmAn

“The Clinton Market began right here,” Pat McKnight said on the first Saturday in March. “It was hashed out right here.”

There, around the table next to the gift-wrapping area at the rear of McKnight’s Department Store, sat Pat and Ikey McKnight, Butch Hooge, and Al O’Brien. As usual, most of the movers and shakers, the founders of Clinton Market Day and the descendants of founders, had stopped in, as they do most first Saturdays. Art-ist Kathleen Simpson, who joined the group following Hurricane Katrina’s destruction of her home in New Orleans, offered the spice cake she had made, a go-with for the coffee that’s always brewing.

Immediately outside the front door, vendors Joan and Ray Stine of Natalbany, which is near Ham-mond, greeted their loyal custom-ers who came, as always, for the Dutch Rolls—red velvet cake or carrot cake wound around a soft, white, sugary core. Next to the Stines sat the Vintage Linens lady, Penny Nichols of Baton Rouge. Nearby smiled Sarah Odom of Clinton, offering crocheted scarves, purses, and baby booties, as well as brooches she had made from painted sunflower seeds in small crocheted frames.

At the bandstand a bit to the east, the Bayou Blasters band belts out its rendition of Shake, Rattle, and Roll: “Like a one-eyed cat, peeping through a seafood store,” as Rah Rah Robinson performs in his East Feliciana High tiger mas-

Artist Marquita McKnight stands next to her recent painting of her youngest son. Dur-ing the years she ran McKnight’s Department Store in Clinton, she exhibited the work of area artists for sale alongside the clothing and gifts. McKnight was one of the founders of the Clinton Market Day.

cot costume.Toward the west, the St. Paul

United Methodist Church of Ethel fundraises with offerings of bar-be-cued ribs and chicken, potato salad and green beans, corn bread and rolls.

Pointing to Butch Hooge, Pat McKnight continues, “Butch was here when Pam Calhoun started the discussion about a market day for

Clinton. She got the idea from the Abita Springs market. Then, when Mayor Toler Hatcher stopped by for his afternoon coffee, the group discussed it with him, and he said he’d help. That was in 1998.”

McKnight resumes her tale. After the mayor approved the un-dertaking, “Ikey’s parents, Big Ikey and Marquita, picked up the ball. Butch built the original band-

stand. Johnny Beauchamp and Lit-tle Ikey used to grill hamburgers right on the street, and, man, were they good.” Beauchamp still runs Johnny B’s Restaurant, Pat notes, across from Feliciana Bank on Plank Road.

To get a sense of the whole story, first trace McKnight’s store back a bit. The original McK-night’s opened in 1929 “on the other side of Landmark Bank,” Ikey McKnight says. Pat adds, “The world was crashing—it was the Great Depression—and my in-laws were starting a business!” Then Clay and Jeanette Gerald McKnight, Ikey’s grandparents, opened the store “on the bandstand corner” just east of the present-day McKnight’s. Next, beginning in 1960, Ikey’s daddy, also known as Ikey, ran the current store with his brother Skeet (Louis). From 1960 through 1965, two McKnight’s stores operated in Clinton, “Clay’s store and this one,” Pat explains.

Ikey, his father, and his grand-father Ewing Markham “pretty much ran the sidewalk sale outside the store.”

Then, one day early in 1998, Marquita McKnight says, Pam Calhoun and Laurel Smelley “sug-gested an outside market for the whole town.” Next, the two ladies visited Loyola in New Orleans to attend a seminar on flea markets. There they learned, first, that Lou-isiana was “trying to revive these little towns” and that “you could therefore pretty much do what you want” with markets. The message was also, “You’ve got to do it your

Tuesday, March 17, 2015 3

See MARKET on page 12

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way."“That’s what I heard,” Marqui-

ta McKnight says. “That’s what I wanted to hear. As long as it’s not illegal, it’s okay!”

From the beginning, Al O’Brien, Butch Hooge, and Ikey and Marquita McKnight made the decisions. For example, Clin-ton Market Day would take place the first Saturday of each month, “because nobody had any money by the end of the month,” Hooge says. Second, the market would go on, no matter the weather or any other interruption. Vendors would pay no fee to participate. And, finally, the market was open to all vendors: individuals, clubs, church groups.

The McKnights and others hired a band, Ms. Marquita says, and “Pam Calhoun, Laurel Smelly, and I cooked food and sold it on the street” to pay the musicians. When Ikey, Sr., died, she asked Feliciana Bank and Landmark Bank to take over the bands’ fees, a contribution they continue to make to this day.

Though McKnight’s closed its men’s clothing department a few years after the death of Ikey McK-night, Sr., customers may find men’s and boys’ suits across the street at Feliciana Fashions, where Owner Eunice Veal greets visitors. Also packing the racks is Easter finery and hats for women. Other downtown anchors are Carmen Peay’s Home Furniture Company and Britton Howell’s ladies’ hair salon, Britton’s.

Among the early vendors were O’Brien, who sold copper sprin-klers, and Hooge, who sold slate

Gathering on the first Saturday of March for Clinton Market Day are Pat and Ikey McKnight, standing, and, seated from left, market day founders Al O’Brien and Butch Hooge. Artist Kathleen Simpson found her way to McKnight’s after Hurricane Katrina destroyed her New Orleans home, and D’Anna Lawton prepares to help with the market day crowds. O'Brien wears his signature occasional hat, this one a tribute to St. Pat-rick's Day.

roof shingles he had salvaged from the Courthouse (two shingles, in-scribed “McKnight’s,” grace the department store’s interior).

“As we went along,” Marquita McKnight says, “the market grew so big and so fast, we had to del-egate.” Butch Hooge directs and coordinates; that is, he “sees that the vendors are happy,” McK-night says. Hooge notes that at the market’s beginning, vendors set up only “on both sides of front street,” the part of St. Helena

Street (Highway 10) that includes McKnight’s. “Then, one day, a vendor from Mississippi, Moe Ezell, was on his way to Clinton when his trailer had a flat and he got here so late he had to set up in front of the Courthouse. He stayed till 4 p.m. and sold everything he had. The next market day, 10 ven-dors had set up around the Court-house,” now a prized space.

O’Brien, who “keeps the


PILGRIMAGE continued from page 1

dren died, The Oaks became home to the E. I. Daniel III family.

Perched on a hilly lot overlooking St. Francisville’s main thoroughfare, Ferdinand Street, the Levert-Bockel House was constructed in 1918 for Mamie Bockel Levert using mate-rials salvaged from flooded Bayou Sara properties inherited from her fa-ther, a prosperous Prussian immigrant sadler. In the comfortable bungalow’s front room, her husband Dr. Eloi Le-vert practiced medicine. It is now the home of the Tom Tully family.

Other popular features of the 2015 Audubon Pilgrimage include Audu-bon (Oakley) and Rosedown State Historic Sites, three 19th-century churches in town and beautiful St. Mary’s in the country, as well as the Rural Homestead with lively demon-strations of the rustic skills of daily pioneer life. An Audubon Play will be performed several times daily on Saturday and Sunday in recently re-stored Temple Sinai. Daytime fea-tures are open 9:30 to 5, Sunday 11 to 4 for tour homes; Friday evening activities are scheduled from 6 to 9 p.m., Saturday soiree begins at 7 p.m.

Afton Villa GardensOne of the featured antebellum

gardens, Afton Villa, survives today as testament to the tenacity as well as the fragility of historic settings, for these spectacular plantings have long outlived the flamboyant mansion they were designed to complement.

The property was purchased in 1820 by Bartholomew Barrow. When he married an engaging young wid-ow from Kentucky, he began con-

struction in 1848 of a flamboyant French Gothic-Victorian residence resplendent with intricate woodcarv-ings, stained glass windows, Dresden china doorknobs, elaborate marble and plaster work, towers, turrets, gal-leries, balconies and cathedral win-dows. Sentimentally incorporating the rustic eight-room original house, Afton Villa was named for the fond-ness of Barrow’s daughter Mary, who would become the wife of Eliza Pirrie’s son Robert H. Barrow, Jr., for the song, “Flow Gently, Sweet Af-ton.”

Bartholomew’s niece Martha Bar-row Turnbull had begun the glorious gardens at nearby Rosedown Planta-tion in the 1830s, and soon the family at Afton Villa followed suit, hiring European landscape artists to sculpt the lawns in a series of seven terraces sweeping from the formal parterres close to the house. Bricked path-ways led through boxwood mazes to a small cemetery containing the grave of US Senator Alexander Bar-row, called the handsomest man in Washington when he died in office in 1846. The winding entrance avenue, overhung by the intertwined arms of ancient live oaks and underplanted by the famed Pride of Afton azaleas, remains one of the most magnificent in the South.

When the house burned in 1963, the gardens languished until the property was purchased in 1972 by dedicated horticulturist Genevieve Munson Trimble and her late hus-band Morrell. Their loving care and constant attentions have returned the landscape to its original glory, supplemented by imported classi-cal marble statues and thousands of flowering bulbs, transforming a po-

Levert-Bockel Hometentially sad site into an exultant and immensely enjoyable celebration of the hardiness of early plantings nur-tured by the dedication of contempo-rary gardeners and preservationists.

Besides Afton Villa Gardens, other features of the 2015 Audubon Pilgrimage include in the country-side Retreat Plantation, The Oaks, and Dogwood, and in town the Le-vert-Bockel House, plus Rosedown and Audubon (Oakley) State Historic Sites, three 19th-century churches in town and beautiful St. Mary’s in the country, as well as the Rural Home-stead with lively demonstrations of the rustic skills of daily pioneer life. An Audubon Play will be performed several times daily on Saturday and Sunday in recently restored Temple Sinai. Daytime features are open 9:30 to 5, Sunday 11 to 4 for tour homes; Friday evening activities are scheduled from 6 to 9 p.m., Saturday soiree begins at 7 p.m.

The Historic District around Royal Street is filled during the day with the happy sounds of costumed children singing and dancing the Maypole; in the evening as candles flicker and fireflies flit among the an-cient moss-draped live oaks, there is no place more inviting for a leisurely stroll. Friday evening features old-time Hymn Singing at the United Methodist Church, Audubon Play in Temple Sinai, Graveyard Tours at Grace Episcopal cemetery (last tour begins at 8:15 p.m.), and a wine and cheese reception at Bishop Jackson Hall (7 to 9 p.m.) featuring Vintage Dancers and young ladies modeling the pilgrimage’s exquisitely detailed 1820’s evening costumes, nation-ally recognized for their authenticity. Light Up The Night, the Saturday evening soiree, features live music and dancing, dinner and drinks be-ginning at 7 p.m.

For tickets and tour information, contact West Feliciana Historical So-ciety, Box 338, St. Francisville, LA 70775; phone 225-635-6330 or 225-635-4224; online www.audubonpil-grimage.info, email [email protected]. A package including daytime tours and all evening en-tertainment Friday and Saturday is available. Tickets can be purchased

at the Historical Society Museum on Ferdinand Street. For information on St. Francisville overnight accommo-dations, shops, restaurants, and recre-ation in the Tunica Hills, see www.stfrancisville.us, www.stfrancisville.net, or www.stfrancisvillefestivals.com

Levert-Bockel HouseOne of the featured homes this

year is the Levert-Bockel House, on a hilltop lot overlooking Ferdinand St., in the 19th century a bustling thor-oughfare traversed by cattle drives and cotton wagons en route to the Mississippi River port of Bayou Sara below the hill. Just off the courthouse square, seat of parish government and justice, this little cottage, built in 1918 in the bungalow style then popular, has witnessed the passage of history for nearly a century.

The house was built for Mamie Bockel and her husband, Dr. Eloi M. Levert. Dr. Levert (whose first name was given the French pronunciation EL-WA), had come up the river from Iberville Parish, where his prominent family grew sugarcane on historic Willow Glen Plantation along the east bank of the river and also had family connections at Rienzi Planta-tion on Bayou Lafourche. The couple married in June 1912 in New Orleans at St. Patrick’s Church, and the St. Francisville newspaper announce-ment of the ceremony called Miss Mamie the only remaining member of a once large and prominent fam-ily of Bayou Sara, for she had long outlived both of her parents.

Her mother Bridget was Irish; her father, Conrad Bockel, had ar-rived from Prussia to prosper in Bayou Sara. A master saddle-maker, he owned more than 25 lots in the town and had business interests in merchandising, rental property and swamp timberland. All of this prop-erty was inherited by his only child, Mamie, but the year of her marriage was also the year of one of a series of devastating spring floods through the 1920s as levees broke and floodwa-ters from the Mississippi inundated Bayou Sara.

On lots she inherited in Square 2 of St. Francisville, prudently laid out upon a high narrow ridge safe from


Oakleythe floodwaters, the Leverts had a home built by Mamie’s relative, Eng-lish-born master carpenter Thomas W. Raynham, using salvaged archi-tectural elements from her flooded Bayou Sara properties---window jambs and sashes, deep door mold-ings---blended seamlessly with the more “modern” bungalow style.

In one room, Dr. Levert kept his medical office and saw patients; he was known for his success in treating pneumonia in the days before antibi-otics. In the 1920s he served as prison physician at Louisiana State Peni-tentiary at Angola. On an adjacent lot Mamie inherited from an aunt in 1919 was a cottage for the family cook, Aunt Nellie.

The Leverts had married late in life and remained childless, their relationship marked by a reserved formality; business correspondence was closed by Mamie sending best regards from “the Doctor and I,” and by her husband with “the Madam and I.” When Miss Mamie died in 1939, her separate estate in West Feliciana, including four lots in St. Francisville and many more in the old town of Bayou Sara, was appraised at $3,498. Dr. Levert lived in the house for some years afterward.

Today it is the home of Dr. and Mrs. Tom Tully. Dr. Tully is the avian and small animal specialist at the LSU Vet School, and the house is filled with the chatter of a number of caged birds both large and small; his wife Susie is a Master Gardener, as is obvious from the colorfully imaginative landscaping, with bor-dered beds, bricked patio with foun-tain, and raised wooden deck. They have furnished the house, which Dr. Tully bought in 1988, in the spirit of the Craftsman style in keeping with the home’s design. Color choices are suitable to the style as well, and the exterior is a rosy mauve with shutters in specially blended “Tully green.” There are four working fireplaces,

each with a different brick surround, and brick bases for the six columns crossing the front porch overlooking the steep slope of the front yard.

OakleyEliza would marry three times.

Her first marriage was to a dashing young cousin who contracted pneu-monia on their honeymoon and died before their first child was born; her last was to an attorney called by her friends “a trifling sponge,” lured away by the Gold Rush and not even present when she died of childbed fever. It was her second marriage, to the eminently respectable first rec-tor of Grace Episcopal Church, that produced the descendants who were still struggling to keep the plantation going into the 20th century. In 1947, when a few determined dowagers of West Feliciana persuaded the state of Louisiana to purchase Oakley, it was in dire need of attention, but its historic connections with Audubon cried out for preservation as a state property accessible to the travelling public.

A splendid West Indies-style three-story structure with jalousied galleries and lots of live oaks provid-ing the shade which made Louisiana summers bearable, the Oakley house was the focal point of a plantation that was well established by the time Irish-born traveler Fortescue Cum-ing visited the area in 1809. In his travelogue “Sketches of a Tour to the Western Country,” Cuming records a visit to Lucretia and James Pirrie’s fine plantation, with a hundred slaves “and the best garden I had yet seen in this country.” He was somewhat less enthralled by local culinary practic-es, finding gumbo “a most awkward dish for a stranger,” the okra making it “so ropy and slimy as to make it difficult with either knife, spoon or fork, to carry it to the mouth, without the plate and mouth being connected by a long string.”

In 1821 the Pirries hired John

James Audubon as tutor and drawing instructor for their young daughter Eliza, and he arrived by steamboat, penniless and with a string of failed business ventures behind him, but rich in talent and dreams. Born in 1785 in Santa Domingo to a French ship captain and his Creole mistress, Audubon was raised in France and sent as a young teen to learn English and a trade in America, arriving in 1803 just as the Louisiana Purchase doubled the size of the country. In 1820 he set out for New Orleans with only his gun, flute, violin, bird books, portfolios of his drawings, chalks, watercolors, drawing papers in a tin box, and a dog-eared journal. The meager living he earned painting por-traits in the city made the Pirrie offer

particularly appealing. When the artist arrived in the St.

Francisville area in 1821, he recorded in his journal that the rich lushness of the landscape and flourishing birdlife “all excited my admiration.” Having set for himself the staggering task of painting all the birds of this immense fledgling country, Audubon would find the inspiration to paint dozens of his bird studies while residing at Oak-ley. The arrangement called for him to be paid $60 a month plus room and board, with half of each day free to collect and paint bird specimens from the surrounding woods, where he cer-tainly must have cut a dashing figure in his long flowing locks, frilly shirts and satin breeches.

Popular as the central focus of the

Rosedown


Audubon State Historic Site for more than half a century, Oakley has been beautifully restored and carefully furnished in the late Federal style. Within its hundred wooded acres are a detached plantation kitchen re-constructed on original foundations containing a weaving room and wash room, a barn full of horse-drawn ve-hicles and farm implements, and sev-eral rustic slave cabins. These depen-dencies are periodically utilized to augment the house tour with demon-strations of old-time practical skills and fascinating living-history events. Oakley also has a picnic pavilion, hiking trails and extremely interest-ing visitor center/museum.

Rosedown PlantationAlways a popular feature on the

Audubon Pilgrimage is magnificent Rosedown Plantation. It was in the early 1830s that Daniel Turnbull and his young bride Martha, of the pio-neering Barrow family, erected this stately double-galleried home, all 8,000 square feet of it costing a mere $13,109.20 and completed in just six months, much of the labor performed by slaves during the winter months when planting chores were few.

On the Turnbulls’ lengthy wed-ding trip through Europe, Martha gleaned the inspiration for the grand gardens she would develop to com-plement the house. A century after Rosedown was built in 1834, author Stark Young used it as a picturesque setting in his acclaimed Civil War novel So Red The Rose, saying, “Of all the houses in the world it seemed to be the beloved of its own trees and gardens.” That charm and appeal continues unabated today, the house folded in the embrace of 27 surround-ing acres of 19th-century gardens and

live oaks grown to immense size. Martha and Daniel Turnbull’s

daughter Sarah, beautiful “National Belle” of 1849, married James Pirrie Bowman, son of Eliza Pirrie of Oak-ley Plantation, and it would be their eight daughters, several of them spin-sters, who would struggle to maintain Rosedown after the Civil War through some very lean and difficult years. In one particularly poignant scene from So Red The Rose, a Confederate cav-alryman rides along the avenue from the plantation house based on Rose-down, touching his hat to each of the magnificent marble statues lining the drive, a final farewell to a vanishing way of life. And indeed life would never be the same at Rosedown, yet the glorious gardens persevered, their beauty saving the house itself more than once through the centuries.

In 1956, when the late Catherine Fondren Underwood of Houston pur-chased Rosedown Plantation from descendants of the original family, her keen eye recognized the lush beauty of the extensive formal gardens and haunting dignity of the house even through the creeping undergrowth and peeling plaster. A meticulous 10-year restoration salvaged the house and its unique collection of plantings, and today Rosedown, now a State Historic Site and National Historic Landmark, is one of the South’s fin-est examples of antebellum splendor.

The detailed horticultural diaries of Martha Turnbull, spanning some 60 years until her death in 1896, proved that she was one of the first to introduce azaleas and camellias to the South, and these records were in-valuable guides for the garden resto-ration. On the grounds, a compelling collection of original outbuildings—

barn, plantation doctor’s office, milk house, latticed gazebos—provide fur-ther understanding of the operations of the early plantation communities, and here Rosedown’s staff periodi-cally demonstrates early plantation skills like down-hearth cooking in the detached kitchen.

This spring the original Rose-down dependencies are augmented by the relocated complex of authen-tically recreated structures beloved by pilgrimage visitors as the Rural Homestead, where the rustic skills of simple early pioneer life are demon-strated---riving cypress shingles with old-time froes, breaking ground for planting with horse or mule-drawn plows, spinning cotton, hammering iron tools over the blacksmith’s char-coal forge, grinding cornmeal on a steam-powered gristmill to be baked in the cabin’s wood stove, cooking cracklin’s over an open fire in a big iron pot, all to the accompaniment of lively period music

The OaksOne of this year’s featured homes

is The Oaks, approached from US Highway 61 just north of St. Francis-ville via an inviting allee of live oaks planted in 1899 paralleling the tracks of the West Feliciana Railroad, one of the country’s oldest standard gauge lines. The house was built in 1888 by Judge Thomas Butler on 158 acres of lands originally part of Rosedown Plantation and purchased for $1585 cash from Sarah Turnbull Bowman, daughter-in-law of Eliza Pirrie.

After valiant service as a young captain on General Braxton Bragg’s staff during the Civil War, Judge But-ler returned home and commenced the study of law, first with local at-torney William D. Winter and then at Tulane University. In 1876 he mar-

The Oaksried Mary Fort of Catalpa Plantation, and they made their home with Judge Butler’s elderly widowed father, Pierce, on Deserta Plantation, just across Sligo Road from another fam-ily property called Bush Hill, home of Audubon’s hunting companion Augustin Bourgeat. Judge Butler, who was born at The Cottage Plan-tation, served as parish attorney and then district judge, was on the police jury and the state Board of Apprais-ers, and he also planted cash crops on Deserta’s extensive acreage and on several other plantations as well.

The isolated old house at Deserta was overcrowded with a family that would increase by nine children, and the trip into St. Francisville and Bayou Sara, where Judge Butler’s civic and commercial interests lay, was difficult and long. When Pierce Butler died in 1888, the family built a new home closer to town, a Queen Anne-style raised cottage exuberant with flourishes and flounces, fanci-ful gingerbread, turrets and deep dor-mers that showcased the ambitious architectural possibilities presented by the new power saws and lathes of the industrial age.

Longtime parish historian Elisa-beth K. Dart concisely explains the turn-of-the-century taste switch from the ordered symmetry and formal white columns of antebellum Greek Revival architecture to the restless vitality of Victorian and Carpenter Gothic styles as symbolic of the re-surgence of the South after the Civil War. “There are many reasons,” she wrote, “social, economic, aesthetic, but chief among them is the fact that in the defeated South, where the glo-ries of the past lay over the land like a fine dust, and the ‘children of pride’ hung onto their legacies amid a fierce


and proud poverty, the toughest sur-vivors were done with classicism. Knowingly or not, they recognized in the new buildings the means of over-coming the self-consciousness of de-feat.” The Oaks certainly exemplifies this optimistic new spirit.

Constructed of pine and cypress with 14-foot ceilings, plastered walls, heart-pine flooring and fine interior wainscoting and moldings, The Oaks has a broad central hall and a bay window of colorful stained glass in the dining room, a room large enough to accommodate the big Sunday gath-erings of extended family beloved by Mary F. Butler. Arched 11-foot win-dows open onto the front gallery, and in the front parlor there is an enor-mous gilt-framed mirror just as tall. On the beautifully landscaped lawns are interesting original outbuild-ings, including a quaint enclosure, originally the dairy, where electricity (Delco) was later generated, and the sexagonal Gothic well house.

Judge Butler died in 1922; the last of his heirs, elderly spinster sisters Annie and Mittie, continued living at The Oaks until their deaths. When Mittie died in 1973 at the age of 87, the property was purchased by Ed-ward Irwin Daniel III and once again became a lively family home. The Daniels have beautifully restored the home, so that it provides modern-day comfort and amenities while retain-ing much of its original character and charm, as well as many of its original Eastlake furnishings, antiques now but the height of new fashion at the time the house was built.

Judge Butler, while he was cer-tainly a trained attorney and involved politician, considered himself primar-ily a planter, utilizing the extensive acreage across his four plantations; one of his sons made his career in the sugar cane industry in this country as well as in Mexico and for many years in Cuba before the revolution. Now Irv Daniel brings to The Oaks the ex-perience of a lifetime in farming as well, now planting plantation pines, hardwoods, and producing aggregate.

DogwoodOne of this year’s featured homes

is Dogwood, situated in the Thomp-son Creek delta on lands initially granted by the Spanish crown to Jean Cloccinet as part of a failed resettle-ment effort for Acadian exiles dur-ing the earliest days of colonization in the Felicianas. There is no trace of that Acadian habitation today; long-time parish historian Elisabeth K. Dart called those exiles “strangers in a strange land,” and noted that they quickly moved to be nearer their con-freres in south Louisiana.

By 1794 those 240 arpents had been purchased by George Freeland, who arrived from the Carolinas with his wife, two young sons and several slaves determined to make a new life. The home he built in 1803 was a sim-ple one of hewn logs in the pen tradi-tion, two rooms on each side flanking a hallway, with upstairs sleeping loft.

After Freeland’s death in 1835, finished lumber from steam saw-mills permitted new owners in the Atkins family to sheath the logs in clapboards outside and plaster the interior walls. A series of subsequent owners made additional improve-ments, most notably Baton Rouge antiques dealers Robert Womack and Ernest Gatlin, who in 1970 added a rear wing with modern kitchen and several bedrooms and baths to serve as Bed & Breakfast accommodations for a few years.

In 2005 New Orleans attorney, entrepreneur and political activ-ist Rob Couhig and his wife Missy took refuge from Hurricane Ka-trina with family members living in the St. Francisville area, a stay that stretched into months as the Cres-cent City struggled to recover and provide even the barest necessities. The couple had actually been look-ing for a beach house, or so the sun-loving wife hoped, but Rob, reading the New York Times months earlier, had clipped a tiny ad for a historic home with a pond on Highway 966 south of St. Francisville. Deciding to purchase a temporary home in the Felicianas that they could sell once a return to New Orleans was possible, they looked, and looked, and looked, with no luck. The frustrated Realtor showed them the very last house list-ed, which happened to be on High-way 966, and this triggered Rob’s memory of the dog-eared clipping folded and forgotten in his wallet.

The clipping described Dogwood, which had fallen into such deplorable condition that it was not even listed on the real estate market anymore. Recalls Missy Couhig, “Walking on the wood floors was like being on a trampoline, they bounced so much.” Today, Dogwood has a new tin roof, new electrical and plumbing systems, new French drains, and gleaming 200-year-old heart-pine floor boards that were meticulously removed, fin-ished and flipped. And the idea of selling once New Orleans was habit-able again? That didn’t happen. The Couhigs spend long weekends at Dogwood, gardening and enjoying the peace and quiet.

While their restoration of Dog-wood, including foundation and drainage repairs, was mostly prac-tical and structural, it is the inher-ited furnishings that must make Rob Couhig feel as if he’s coming home. His mother, that grand and well-loved hostess of note, the late Noot-sie Couhig of Asphodel Plantation in East Feliciana, had an eclectic style of decorating she called “because we like it: a few pieces inherited, a lucky find at an auction, a table really need-ed or another child to be housed.” That same confidently carefree el-egance of style, as well as some of those very same antiques, may now be seen in Dogwood, home of Noot-sie’s son and daughter-in-law.

The double parlor set from Aspho-del still bears the date it was shipped

in 1834 from France. There’s an American Empire secretary, an Eng-lish Chippendale card table, a col-orful pitcher considered one of the earliest pieces of Mason ironstone in America. Most of the lighting fix-tures through the home are converted gasoliers, but an elaborate French chandelier is from Asphodel. The dining room features a 19th-century New Orleans dining table, Mallard buffet, and colorful portrait of Queen Victoria’s surgeon-general, resplen-dent in scarlet coat, painted with his wife in England in 1869. A large soup tureen was part of a service for 18, Nootsie Couhig’s grandmother’s wedding china, shipped in 1835 from Limoges, France, painted in Canada, and then sent by barge to New Or-leans.

Retreat PlantationAppearing on the pilgrimage for

the very first time is Retreat Planta-tion, set high on a bluff overlooking Little Bayou Sara. The house, built facing the original well-travelled road to Mississippi around 1823, was first owned by Sarah Bingman and her husband Stephen Cobb. After his death, she married Army Cap-tain Clarence Mulford, who, while stationed at nearby Fort Adams, was involved in the arrest of Aaron Burr on charges of treason against the United States. When Capt. Mulford retired to a comfortable life on his new wife’s plantation, he named it Soldier’s Retreat.

Sarah Mulford, widowed once again, in 1857 donated 5 acres of plantation lands for St. Mary’s Epis-copal Church, hauntingly beauti-ful Gothic Revival chapel built to serve area plantation families. Upon her death two years later, Retreat was purchased by Elizabeth Leath-erbury Randolph Percy, beginning six generations of Percy occupancy. Born in Maryland in 1811, Elizabeth Leatherbury had first married dis-tinguished Judge Peter Randolph of Mississippi in 1828; after his death, she and Thomas Butler Percy were married in Natchez in 1833 and set-tled on his family plantation called Beech Woods (sometimes referred to as Beechwood) in the Weyanoke area of West Feliciana. Elizabeth had one son by Judge Randolph and seven children with Percy, two daughters and five sons.

Thomas B. Percy’s Anglo grand-father Charles was the first Percy to settle in Spanish West Florida, where he served as an alcalde, acquired a fortune in land and slaves, and in a fit of despondency drowned himself in Percy Creek. His son Robert went to sea as an 8-year-old in 1770 and finally retired from the British Navy in 1802 after three decades of valiant service, being wounded three times, shipwrecked three times, and a pris-oner of war three times. Encouraged by an old friend to settle his family “on the peaceable banks of the Mis-sissippi, at a distance from the din of war---the roaring of cannon, and the

troubled ocean,” he acquired a 2,200-acre plantation along Big Bayou Sara known as Beech Woods.

Robert Percy and his Scottish wife Jane Middlemist had married in 1796, and the move to Beech Woods proved to be a happy one. As he wrote in a letter to a friend in 1810, “My family has been uncommonly healthy, and increased. Mrs. Percy has grown very lusty.” Like his father before him, he served as alcalde under the Spanish regime, but soon took a leadership role in the 1810 West Florida Rebel-lion ousting the Spanish government.

The fifth of their seven children was Thomas Butler Percy, appointed to West Point in 1826 by John Q. Ad-ams; he also graduated from Medical College in Philadelphia. As a boy he must have known Audubon, for in the 1820s Audubon’s wife Lucy was in residence at Beech Woods to tutor the Percy girls and a few neighbors; Audubon himself spent time there and hunted in the surrounding woods, where he was said to have secured the wild turkey cock that became one of his most famous illustrations.

One of Thomas Butler Percy’s sons, William Chaille Percy, was born in 1840 and died on his plantation, Retreat, in 1891; he had six children. The youngest son, Edward McGehee Percy of Ellerslie Plantation, owned Retreat, and his heirs occupied the home through most of the 20th cen-tury until it was acquired by Ed’s great-niece, Mary Cleland de Laureal Owen and her husband C.B. Called a story-and-a-half Anglo-Creole style home with a brick-walled cellar be-low and four rounded brick columns across the raised front gallery, it is built entirely of poplar, including not only the big beams but the beauti-ful floorboards as well. Fine interior woodwork and original Federal man-tles grace the larger rooms---dining room and parlor---downstairs in the original old house; steep narrow in-terior stairs lead to several bedrooms.

Fortunately, very little had been altered in the house throughout the years.The Owens have recently com-pleted an extensive renovation, keep-ing the original footprint and fabric of the old house while sensitively attaching a new wing to increase the living space. Seamlessly blended with the old, the wing adds a large kitchen and downstairs bedroom, plus a screen porch overlooking an orderly parterre garden and beauti-ful landscaping designed to perfectly root house to setting. Cattle grazing on the surrounding acreage complete the peaceful pastoral scene.

Fine family antiques throughout the house, including several chairs and a four-poster bed salvaged from the burning of Greenwood Planta-tion, home of Mary Cleland’s grand-parents, range from the Federal pe-riod through the third quarter of the 19th century. The Owens’ children make the sixth generation of the Per-cy family to enjoy this old house as their special Retreat.


Like the artist, the viewer of Imahara Botanical Gardens in St. Francisville participates in its cre-ation with the decision to see what is in front of one, and to see, simul-taneously, what is, what was, what may or will be. “Everything has a story,” Imahara says. The art of the viewer is to choose to see each de-tail, as well as the overall pattern, and to ask why and how.

Walter Imahara’s story moves from his comfortable California childhood to the “concentration camps” of World War II, then to Southwestern in Lafayette, to mili-tary service, to St. Francisville’s Afton Villa Plantation, and to suc-cess in the nursery business in Ba-ton Rouge.

He began the creation of the St. Francisville gardens 10 years ago, a turning to art similar to his father’s embrace in his mid-70s of the art of haiku and calligraphy. Both men, born in the United States, grounded the art of their later years in their ancestry.

The Art of the GardenImahara’s St. Francisville gar-

den includes not only the physical limits of the ten developed acres, but “the borrowed view” that goes beyond limits. At the end of a re-cent tour, Imahara mentioned qui-etly, “If your neighbor has a pond, borrow the view.” Then he nodded toward the horizon, where, three miles south of St. Francisville, the tiny, just-visible towers and stay cables of the Audubon Bridge stitch together treetops and sky. “I removed three or four large trees to expose that view,” he says.

As in all art, in balance is the interplay of opposite forces: the freedom to create within a form, to make rules not a limitation of expression but part of the act of vision, as if the artist creates the strictures as part of his invention.

On the one hand, certain rules of the Japanese garden bind the gardener: For example, plantings and installations, including large stones, must occur in odd num-bers. The viewer notes nine ponds, namesakes of Walter Imahara and his eight siblings, the nine chil-dren of James and Haruka Imahara. As for the large rocks, also in odd numbers, the gardener must root them in the earth.

Pointing to a sculpted evergreen, a topiary, Imahara says that his fa-ther named the three tiers, small-est on top to largest on the bottom, “Heaven, Man, Earth.” Once, when a helper incorporated four tiers, Walter removed one. “The fourth is death,” he explained.

Yet the artist says, “Everything I plant is where the eyes fall. Any-thing I don’t like, I move it.” And the rules of art do not add rigidity or come after the fact. They coexist

IMAHARA continued from page 1

with the artist’s freedom. Should the viewer expect tall plantings—large bushes, for example—behind shorter ones, Imahara says, “No! Put the large one anywhere you want.” In one spot, his larger bush resides comfortably in front of the smaller plants.

Taken with the idea of a zig-zag bridge, which, he says came from China, he adds one. “It wards off evil,” he explains. “Evil travels in a straight line. So I thought, ‘I’ll build one.’”

Preparing for spring, Imahara uses gloves to rub the lichen and bark from the slim Crape Myrtle trunks and branches he allows to grow as they will, vertically. He then points out one Crape Myrtle, a topiary, the one whose twigs and branches he has pruned over ten years to create a twisting round canvas for the blooms of spring. Freedom alongside restraint, free-dom within restraint, freedom as restraint. He also points out the spiral junipers whose shapes he coaxes into their upward journey.

Imahara’s gardens incorporate found objects—seven large rocks from Hemingbough, for example, the gift of a friend, planted accord-ing to tradition. The gardens also create freestanding gates of 18-inch diameter cedar posts gleaned from the site, two huge vertical beams and one slimmer cross-

beam, which, according to tradi-tion, curves slightly upward. One Torii gateway, however, incorpo-rates the personal symbolism of a repurposed Mississippi River tug-boat rope, winding and knotting where the three posts meet on top so that somehow no end of the rope is visible, thus representing, Ima-hara says, his own marriage. Find-ing just the right knot required his finding those who possess that spe-cialized knowledge and learning the art.

The grounds, along the approach to the Japanese garden’s entry, find space for a cross that area Crafts-man Mickey Melancon made with wood from a 104-year-old cabin Imahara gave him. The Christian emblem fits right in, as if growing from the earth, as, like Nature, it signals both death and resurrection.

And among the serious vision of art, the viewer finds humor: Mt. Fugi, a mound of earth the artist named after one of his two rescued dogs. “I tell the children who vis-it,” he says, “‘Climb that hill. Then

tell your friends you climbed Mt. Fugi. Just don’t say where!’”

This gardener artist incorpo-rates, to spur growth, his own family mixture: the coffee grinds he collects from Starbucks cafes, combined with special sand and pea gravel and buried in a circle around new tree plantings, with one end of a pipe showing above ground to allow the play of air beneath…his own invention. One result was a Live Oak that grew “from Coke-can size” to a mature tree in the nine years the garden has existed. A nod to invention as to the world unseen.

Bamboo, a gift from a friend in New Iberia, lines the end of the drive to the convention center building. Once again, however, the gardener trims the plantings to cre-ate for each a thick base. “We will let it run later on.” Freedom and re-straint.

With a nod to odd numbers, Imahara planted the 100 Savannah Holly trees a nurseryman friend gave him in two odd-numbered rows along the property’s roadside fence.

Wherever the eye falls, a story and a work in process await.

Family HistoryThe tour begins at the Imahara

Family Gallery with the story of the Imaharas, an American story of immigrant success, loss, service to country, and perseverance.

Walter Imahara says, “We be-lieve in three things: education, get a job, live by the rules. That was 70 years ago.” Since then, his fam-ily has owned three businesses in Baton Rouge: Imahara’s Nursery and Landscape on Florida Boule-vard, established in 1968; a land-scape company on Old Hammond, established in 1976; and Louisiana Nursery on Perkins Road, which the family built in 1985.

Walter Imahara’s grandfather, Minezo, came to America from Hi-roshima, Japan, in 1895. His father, James Masaru Imahara, was born in 1903 in Watsonville, California; his mother, Haruka Sunada Imahara, in 1909. They married in 1927 at a Buddhist chapel. Walter was the first of four sons, “with five sisters before me.”

He remembers his parents’ two-story home on 60 acres in Sac-ramento and “a grape farm, then strawberries, a fruit tree orchard, and poultry,” as well as a bulldozer, tractors, a truck, and a car.

Then came World War II, and “122,000 Japanese went to reloca-tion camps. As we lived in an ex-

Walter Imahara's father received a medal from the Emperor of Japan.

Tuesday, March 17, 2015 9clusion zone, they picked us up and brought us first to Fresno, then to concentration camps in Jerome and Rohwer, Arkansas. We lost all of our property. We lost everything.” His father was 37.

His grandparents, however, had passed away before the War, and, as for himself, he says, “When you’re a child, you have a good time” wherever you are. “You don’t have the sorrows your parents have.” He points out two large duffle bags hanging against a wall. “Each per-son got two cloth bags; all you could take into the camp had to fit into those two bags, so that meant clothing. Everything else we left behind.”

After the War, the family moved to Louisiana. When his father was working in New Orleans, a time of great hardship for the family, Sher-iff Clancy knew that the owner of Afton Villa in St. Francisville, a Mr. Henry Mills—who, Imahara says, “was in gambling”—wanted a Japanese gardener. The family moved to the plantation area, where his father worked as head gardener and his sisters as a tour guides. That restoration of the acclaimed gar-dens led to James Imahara’s move to Baton Rouge and the family’s success in the nursery business.

Family Dreams, by Diane Koos Gentry, says that “When work-ing at Afton Villa, James drove all the way to Mobile to buy Japanese cherry trees for the grounds. ‘When they were in bloom, there is noth-ing more beautiful,’ James said. ‘But when their time comes, all the blooms drop. It’s symbolic. The Japanese way is to forgive without a grudge. Afton Villa made me start

forgetting the days of internment and our losses. It’s all over with now. I don’t feel any bitterness at all.’”

Two of the cherry trees, Walter Imahara notes, survive at Afton Villa Plantation, which fire de-stroyed in 1963.

Later, the eldest sister was work-ing in New Orleans, but the eight remaining children “got a college education. That was the turning point of the Imahara family.” His father told the children, “Get an education, serve your country, and buy land.”

Then Walter Imahara smiles. “Twenty years later I was a lieu-tenant in the U. S. Army and my brother John was a medical doc-tor, a major in the medical corps. All four boys served in the military, and we all made it back home.”

Before his enlistment, Imahara spent his undergraduate years at Southwestern in Lafayette, where he took up weightlifting while earn-ing his degree in horticulture. (His name, Walter, according to family lore, means “physical strength.”) After graduation in 1960, he enlist-ed as a private, then “went to offi-cer candidate school and came out a first lieutenant.” (Family Dreams, Diane Koos Gentry)

Imahara continued his weight-lifting in the Army. While in Ger-many, he entered a national cham-pionship in Pennsylvania, traveled back to the States, and won, a vic-tory that allowed him to visit his parents. Part of the family history display at the gardens marks his ca-reer as World Masters Champion in weightlifting.

The Imahara Botanical Gardens website notes that after his return to Germany, “Walter met another Japanese American, Sumi Mat-sumoto, a school teacher for the Army personnel’s children. They married and Walter brought his bride home to Baton Rouge. To-gether, the couple joined his father at James Gardening Service, which became Pelican State Nursery and later Imahara Nursery and Land-scape Co., Inc.”

Still later, in 1977, Imahara and his father, both native-born Ameri-cans, visited Japan for the first time, a trip that, at some later point, perhaps, awakened in both men the art of their heritage. Over 150 of his father’s haikus, handcarved into cypress plaques, line the walls of the Imahara Botanical Gardens family gallery. The elder Imahara taught himself the art.

During the men’s visit to Ja-

pan, His Majesty, the Emperor of Japan, honored James Imahara for “promoting good will between the U.S. and Japan.” James Imahara re-ceived the Fifth Class of the Order of the Sacred Treasure “for his help with the Issei prior to being sent to the relocation camps.” (Imahara blog) The Issei were first-genera-tion Japanese immigrants.

One of Walter Imahara’s trea-sured possessions, a painting of Afton Villa Plantation, which the Louisiana Association of Nursery-men presented to him in appre-ciation of his service to the group, hangs in the room that displays the family mementos. When the group consulted his niece, Landscape Architect Wanda Chase, who runs the landscape company in Baton Rouge, she told the questioner, “He loves Afton Villa.” The association then commissioned the painting.

After the death of Walter Ima-hara’s mother in 1990, his father returned to California to live with his daughter and son-in-law. That is also the year that each member of the family received a letter of apol-ogy signed by George H.W. Bush and a check for $20,000.

At the age of 96, in California, James Imahara enlarged his Bud-dhist faith to embrace Christianity and to accept Jesus Christ as his savior.

Location, HoursFrom Highway 61, turn west at

the four-way light. Then turn left on Commerce Street, then right on Ferdinand. Go past the Catholic Church on the right, and turn right on Mahoney.

The gardens are open every weekend from March through the end of July, and from October through the end of November. The hours are: Saturday from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. and Sunday from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m.

To schedule a tour or special event, call Walter Imahara at 413-4256 or email him at [email protected]. For general infor-mation, call 225-635-6001. The mailing address is P. O. Box 605 St. Francisville, LA 70775. For more information, visit: imaharasbotani-calgarden.blogspot.com.

Walter Imahara says of his gar-dens, “I don’t make money; I spend money.” Though the Imaharas view the gardens as a gift to West Feli-ciana and the surrounding parishes, they have had to charge admission to cover the salaries of gardening assistants. For seniors, the fee is $10; for adults, $12.50; for children under 16, free of charge.

A photograph of Afton Villa Plantation as Walter Imahara remembers it.


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Jackson Lions Club Invites

Participants for April 4 Easter

ParadeBy Beth DAwSon

Mardi Gras parades are over for 2015 and now it’s time to put all our efforts into the Third An-nual Easter Parade in Jackson. The Jackson Lions Club would like to invite all churches, businesses, clubs, horse organizations, politi-cians, and individuals to partici-pate.

The parade will take place April 4, with lineup on Eastern Louisiana Mental Health System grounds at 1 p.m. Neither registra-tion nor fees is necessary.

Lineup will be on a first-come, first-served basis. Of course, the American flag, the parade mar-shal, and the East Feliciana High School band will lead the parade.

This year Jackson is celebrat-ing its 200th birthday; therefore, the theme of the parade will be “Hoppin’ thru the Decades.”

The parade will travel around ELMHS, go out onto Highway 10, turn left and roll through Jackson, and turn right on Church Street. The parade will then turn right and travel to Centenary State Historic Site for an Easter Egg Hunt for the children.

Organizers have several re-quests: We ask that floats play only Easter music. Further, EL-MHS administrators ask that pa-rade participants not throw gum or beads on their grounds.

Jackson Town Councilman Rafe Stewart is furnishing prizes for the best floats. He’s giving a $75 Wal-Mart gift certificate to the best float, a $50 gift certifi-cate to the 2nd place float, and a $25 gift certificate to the 3rd place float.

For further information, please call the East Feliciana Chamber of Commerce in Jackson Monday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., at 225-634-7155.

West Feliciana’s Ngozi Nwabueze Recognized as National Merit FinalistBy tAmmy lAAkSo AnD PAtriciA StAllmAn

Ngozi Valerie Nwabueze, a senior at West Feliciana High School in St. Francisville, has been named a Na-tional Merit Scholarship Program fi-nalist. Of the 1.5 million students who take the PSAT examination each year, 15,000 achieve finalist status.

Nwabueze, who is WFHS Student Government Association president, lists as her college interests pre-medi-cal school studies, with neurocscience or cognitive sciences as her eventual area of concentration. She is consider-ing Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, where she recently attended Duke TIP, “a highly selective two-week summer program” that identi-fies exceptionally gifted students; Rice University, Houston, Texas; or Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, all major research universities.

Like her parents, Drs. Nnamdi and Stacie Nwabueze of St. Francisville, she has chosen medicine… “so that I

in science and mathematics but also in French, world geography, English, and theater.

She balances her academic inter-ests with achievement in sports, play-ing high school soccer for three years and volleyball for two and lettering in both.

Her volunteer work includes serv-ing as a soccer coach for the West Fe-liciana Parish Parks and Recreation Department and teaching vacation bi-ble school classes for young children.

Her memberships have included Igbo Union of Baton Rouge, which celebrates its members’ Nigerian heri-tage.

Hollis Milton, Superintendent of West Feliciana Schools, writes: "Ngozi is a model student who rep-resents what we hold dear: positive leadership, strong character, and high academic achievement. We are very proud of her many accomplishments, including National Merit."

Ngozi Valerie Nwabueze, West Feliciana High School National Merit Finalist. Photograph by Tammy Laakso

can have a career that fulfills my pas-sion to help others.”

Her principal, James Carroll, says Nwabueze “is an example, for her peers and the students who follow, of the rewards of academic diligence.” West Feliciana High School’s Stu-dent of the Year for 2014—2015, she is a member of Beta and a Mock Trial team lawyer, earning the “Best Lawyer” designation in 2014. South-ern University, Baton Rouge, named her “Most Outstanding Mathemat-ics Student” and “Most Outstanding Scholar” at its four-week summer En-gineering Institute in 2013. The fol-lowing year, she participated in Day with the Doctors, Louisiana State University Health in New Orleans, and A-HEC of a Summer, “a four-week community service program with medical field rotations in the lo-cal community.”

During high school, she has earned academic distinction not only

Lane Regional Medical Center Welcomes Gastroenterology AssociatesGastroenterology Associates

have expanded their digestive health care services to patients living north of the Capital region with the open-ing of their new office in Zachary, located at 4735 West Park Drive, Suite A, on the campus of Lane Re-gional Medical Center.

Kirk Mullins, M.D., Alan Malt-bie, M.D., and Douglas Walsh, M.D. specialize in the evaluation, diagno-sis, and treatment of gastrointestinal and digestive disorders and will see patients by appointment on Monday and Thursday mornings.

This new location reduces travel time for appointments and treatment while increasing the likelihood of proper diagnosis and care for local residents, bringing specialized GI services and procedures to the re-gion that were not previously avail-able.

With a specialized team of 17 physicians, Gastroenterology As-sociates have been the premier pro-viders of gastroenterological care in Baton Rouge since 1977.

Dr. Kirk Mullins Dr. Alan Maltbie Dr. Douglas Walsh

Fish Fry Friday!The LaneRMC Foun-

dation will host “Fish Fry Friday” on Friday, March 20th, from 11.a.m. – 1 p.m., in City Hall Parking Lot.

Meals are $10 each and will be personally pre-pared by David Amrhein and staff.

Meals include fresh Louisiana catfish, French fries, hush puppies and cole slaw. Re-

March 20th 11a.m. – 1 p.m.

Pick-up at City Hall Parking Lot

$10 per platePre-Orders recommended. Reserve your meal today!

Call 658-6699 or email [email protected]

FREE delivery,10 or more orders

Meals will be

Personally Prepared by

David Amrhein and Staff!

Featuring:

Fresh Louisiana Catfish,

French Fries,

Hush Puppies

and Cole Slaw

Proceeds benefit the many projects

of LaneRMC Foundation

Sponsored by

serve your meal today! Quantity is limited, Pre-Orders are recommended.

Email [email protected] or call 658-6699 to pre-order.

The event is spon-sored by Breazeale, Sachse & Wilson, L.L.P. All proceeds will ben-efit the many projects of

LaneRMC Foundation.


EVENT RENTALS

ELECTRONIC REPAIR

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ARTS, DANCE & MUSIC

AUTOMOTIVE

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ACCOUNTING/TAXES

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Fabrics, Slip Covers, Custom Drapery, Roman

Shades,Shutters & Upholstery

Credit cards accepted

“We come to you, FREE estimates”

DOG CARE

INSURANCE

INSURANCE

LAW SERVICES

PORTABLE BUILDINGS

REAL ESTATE

RESTAURANTS

HOME & LAWN

HEALTH/FITNESS

“God is first in all we do”

DRY CLEANERS

HAIR & MAKEUP

FORMAL WEAR

FRAMING

GUN RANGE

All Breeds Dog BoardingObedience & Retriever Training

www.y-farms.com • 225-445-5012

SAFETY CLASSES

NEED HELP Advertising in the EXPLORER?

JUST CALLAshley Evans

937-0581or

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ALL STARCHEVROLET NORTH9352 Plank Road | Baton Rouge, LA225-774-4152 | AllStarNorth.com

Your best price is right here in NORTH Baton Rouge!

MEET OUR STAFF.

NEW LOCATION!

TIFFANY ANDERSON

CADE EWINGJIM SWANSON

KEN TATE JEREMY RIGDONBUCK SPENCER DON GILL

DERALD SHURTLEFFSERVICE MANAGER

ROB MILLER MIKE CAMPBELLBRANDON CHANEYMELISSA TAYLOR

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books,” reports that over 3,000 different vendors have participat-ed in the market in the years since 2003. “Month after next,” he re-ports, “the market will complete 17 years.”

Asked about his St. Patrick’s Day hat, O’Brien explains that he became known for the occa-sional hat—hats for special occa-sions—when he requested an Eas-ter bonnet. “At one early market in spring, the ladies decided to have an Easter Bonnet decorating con-test, so Marquita set it up. When I saw what they were doing, I said, ‘I want one, too!’ They made me a bonnet with a birdhouse and a ‘Feed the birds’ sign and a nest with eggs. Now I have a hat for every occasion.” His wife Anne counts over 36. Now vendors and customers have no difficulty spot-ting O’Brien when they have a question or concern or just a “hel-lo.”

The memories at McKnight’s go beyond family history and mar-ket days. Pat McKnight points out the wall in the shoe depart-ment where customers, over the years, have painted messages on the tiles. Behind the gift-wrapping table, photographs paper the walls in the small room where the McK-nights brew coffee for their visi-tors. In some cases, the viewer can trace the photographs of particular children, updated year after year. Look carefully and you’ll find the autographed photo of Billy Can-non. Customers and friends are part of the story.

Yes, McKnight’s offers wom-

en’s clothing, including many pieces of flax, as well as shoes and jewelry the shopper would expect to find in a large city. That’s what brings most customers inside, at least initially. During the trip through the store, however, com-ing across the small section for infants and a space in the jewelry case for old-timey toys also de-lights the shopper. Then, suddenly, near giftwrap: a display of soaps, both cake and liquid, from France. And at what clothing store can the customer also pick up a work of art?

In the store, alongside the me-mentoes, visitors find Bubby Jack-son’s photographs of townspeople; near the gift department, an ex-hibit of Frances Durham’s paint-ings; in the window, paintings by Donna Kilbourne, Carol Shirley, and a new exhibiter, Phoebe Deil-lion. In the recent past, Marquita

McKnight, herself an artist, wel-comed groups of painters who held weekly workshops next to the jew-elry case. One of Ms. Marquita’s commissioned works, a mural de-picting Louisiana wildlife, graces a wall down the street at Landmark Bank.

Next, the visitor learns that Pat McKnight will happily order a pearl necklace made especially to fit a particular toddler grand-daughter and then wrap the gift at no charge. If the shoes you like are not in your size, no matter; McK-night will order them and have them ready for you in a few days. If you’re ill and can’t pick them up, she’ll find someone going your way or she’ll mail them to you.

Visiting McKnight’s is like vis-iting an old-time customer-first high-end clothing and gift store…and, at the same time, like shop-ping on line, but in person. Just

stroll until you find what delights you, then click…and it’s yours. Any problem? Have a live chat with Pat. McKnight’s: The best of both worlds.

The next market day is Saturday, April 6. Expect to find Al O’Brien wearing his Easter hat, vendors and local stores offering Easter finery and gifts, an Easter Egg Hunt for children, and that wonderful local barbecue and jambalaya.

And, everywhere you look, won-derful people.

At a prized spot along the Courthouse, members of St. Paul United Methodist Church in Ethel hold a fundraiser, selling barbecued chicken and ribs and fixings. Clinton Mayor Lori Ann Bell, center, stopped to greet the group. Pausing the greet the Mayor are, from left, Maxine Williams, Chiquntra Davis, Barbara Davis, the Mayor, Deloris Davis, Samuel Williams, Sr., Larry Robinson, Sr., Alfred Williams, James Matthews, Jr., and McKinley “Deuce” Matthews.

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Feliciana Explorer Mar 17