Living Our Dream

Jeanerette Museum

Berwick, LA

Jeanerett is a small town along Bayou Teche about half way between New Iberia and Berwick where we were staying. Margery found the Jeanerette Museum when she was doing her research into things to do.

Jeanerette is called "Sugar City," and, in addition to local history, the Jeanerette Museum has a lot of information on growing sugarcane and processing it into sugar. We have been hearing so much about sugarcane at all the Louisiana plantations we have visited, we wanted to learn more.

Another reason we decided to go the Jeanerette Museum was so we would have a good excuse to drive along Bayou Teche. The drive is quite scenic with many old plantation homes that were built in the 1800s. The photo below shows just a few of the mansions we saw.

Since most of the homes are privately owned, it's hard to find out much information about them unless you talk to the locals. The house in the photo below, however, had a plaque on the pillar by the gate that said "Arlington 1861." When we later Googled the name, we found out the house was for sale for $995,000. 

Franklin is another town along Bayou Teche on the way to Jeanerette. Franklin, which was named for Benjamin Franklin, was founded in 1808. Franklin is very charming with its white lampposts running down the center of the main street. The lampposts, which date back to 1915, were restored in 2005.

The town of Jeanerette was named for John W. Jeanerette, who came to the area in the 1820s from South Carolina. He worked as a tutor for a planter's family, and he also opened a store and saloon. By the 1830s, he had saved enough money to buy a plantation. John Jeanerette also became the town's first postmaster.

When we got to Jeanerette, we had no problem finding the museum. The Jeanerette Museum is in a 100-year old cedar house on the banks of Bayou Teche in back of a small park right on the main road.

Inside the museum, we watched their excellent video on sugar. From the video, we learned more about how sugarcane is grown and processed. Although sugarcane does produce seeds, it is most commonly grown commercially using stem cuttings. Short sections of stalks containing at least one node are buried horizontally in a shallow trench. Sprouts appear from the nodes. The photo below shows a field of young sugarcane plants.

Although sugarcane is still harvested by hand in some locations, growers in the United States use mechanical harvesters that cut the stalks at the base, strip the leaves and chop the stalks into short lengths all in one operation.

After harvesting, the canes are taken to the sugar mill where they are washed, shredded into small pieces and crushed between rollers to extract the juice. Crushing machines used to be turned by hand or by animal power. Outside the museum, there is a mule-powered sugarcane crusher. The canes would have been fed into the slit in the side of the machine where rollers would have pressed out the juice into the iron kettle.

Bagasse is the byproduct left over after the sweet juice is extracted from the woody stalks. The bagasse is dried and used for fuel for the boilers that produce steam to power the sugar mill.

The juice is then mixed with lime and heated to drive off water. In the past, shallow, open kettles were used. We have seen those kettles everywhere we have gone in southern Louisiana. Modern methods use vacuum kettles to remove water more efficiently at lower temperatures to prevent scorching of the sugar.

After most of the water is driven off, the sugar begins to crystallize. Molasses, which is the thick syrup that is left, is removed from the sugar by centrifuges. The resulting raw sugar is then sent to a refinery for final purification and bleaching into white sugar. Incidentally, most of the brown sugar we buy in the grocery store is really white sugar that has had molasses added back.

On average, one ton of sugarcane yields 180 pounds of raw sugar, 7 gallons of molasses and 270 pounds of bagasse. The remainder of the weight is water, which is evaporated.

One room in the museum had a lot of wooden foundry patterns used to cast gears and other components for local sugar mills.

The foundry, which is located next door, donated the patterns that are no longer needed to the museum. The reason some of the patterns are no longer needed is because many of the local mills have closed due to hurricane damage and environmental pressures against the burning of bagasse for fuel. The foundry is shown in the next photo.

The room with the patterns also had a great piece of local folk art in the form of a alligator hand-carved from cypress.

In addition to sugar-related items, the museum also had lots of photos and items that speak to local history such as these Mardi Gras costumes...

...and these household and kitchen items.

There was also a whole room dedicated to local wildlife. We called it the "man cave." There were mounted specimens of fish on the walls, and there were examples of other wildlife like the armadillo, alligator, wood duck, bobcat and otter shown in the next photo. The canoe-like boat is a pirogue. The pirogue is a traditional Cajun fishing boat built from cypress. The flat bottom is suited to the shallow waters of the swamps and bayous.

One surprising thing we learned about at the museum was that there was a WW II prisoner-of-war camp just 2 miles west of Jeanerette. Most of the prisoners were captured in North Africa and were under the command of General Erwin Rommel, the "Desert Fox." The prisoners were employed on local farms and engaged in the cultivation of sugar cane.

While the museum isn't a major attraction, we did enjoy it, especially the video on sugar production. It is worth stopping if you are taking the scenic route along the bayou.

Another thing we found out about when we visited the museum was Le Jeune's Bakery, which is located a couple of blocks away. The museum had several photos and newspaper articles about the bakery, which has been owned and operated by 5 generations of the Le Jeune family dating back to 1884. All their products are made from scratch using recipes that have been handed down from generation to generation.

LeJeune's Bakery specializes in French bread that they bake three times a day. If you know when to go, you can get it hot out of the oven. But we were interested in their other specialty - ginger cakes. In addition to being able to buy at the bakery, several local grocery stores carry Le Jeune ginger cakes, and you can also order their products online.

Signs direct customers to the side door because they're too busy in the back baking to man the front counter. In the photo below, Paul is trying to decide how many ginger cakes to buy.

The ginger cakes are fairly large (probably 6 to 8 ounces each), and they're only $1.75. We bought two. We should have bought more because we started eating the first one right there in the parking lot. Yum! They were as good as the ones we remember getting at the King's Arms Tavern Bakery in Williamsburg - maybe better.

We again took the scenic route along the bayou back to the motor home as we munched on our ginger cake. We planned to relax for the last couple of days of our stay in Berwick before we headed out to our next destination.

New Orleans, LA Part II: The French Quarter, Beignets and the Southern Food and Beverage Museum

New Orleans, LA

After visiting Oak Alley, we were anxious to get into the French Quarter so we headed for the Algiers Ferry first thing the next morning. The Algiers Ferry runs back and forth between Algiers Point, which is on the side of the river where were staying, and Canal Street at the southwestern edge of the French Quarter in downtown New Orleans.

The ferry is free for passengers and only costs $1 for automobiles. However, parking in the city is expensive and sometimes hard to find, so we always leave the car at Algiers Point. The parking lot at Algiers Point is privately operated, so they can charge anything they want. Rates go up to at least $10 when there is a special event in the city, which is the case many weekends; but since it was a Tuesday, parking was only $5.

The crossing takes about 10 minutes, and the ferry runs about every half hour. We arrived a little before the ferry was about to depart to the city. Riding the ferry gave us another opportunity to get a good look at the Mississippi water level. The photo below is a view from the ferry just before we left the dock. The lower deck of the ferry is to the right with the railing around it, and the ferry dock is to the left. There should not be water behind the row of trees to the left of the photo. However, the levee beyond the trees still had several feet to go before the water reached the top. As we mentioned in our last post, the levees protect the city to several feet above flood stage.

The Army Corps of Engineers started opening spillways upstream of New Orleans to divert water to Lake Pontchartrain several days ago, so the water level in New Orleans is staying fairly constant. They are also considering opening spillways upstream of Baton Rouge, so no major flooding is expected in New Orleans.

The current was fairly swift, but commercial shipping in New Orleans remained unaffected. We saw numerous freighters and tankers passing by in just the few minutes while we were waiting for the ferry to depart.

When the ferry docked on the other side of the river at Canal Street, we headed toward the French Quarter along the Riverwalk. The Natchez is a stern-wheeler that does various sightseeing and dinner cruises on the Mississippi River, and it was just departing on a two-hour cruise.

One of the things we love about New Orleans is the charm of the old buildings in the French Quarter. The next photo shows the old Jackson Brewery. The brewery was originally chartered in 1890. It survived Prohibition by brewing near beer and other beverages like root beer. The brewery closed in 1974 and was later remodeled and converted into a shopping mall.

Jackson Brewery is located across from Jackson Square, which is named for Andrew Jackson who was the hero of the Battle of New Orleans in 1815. At the back of Jackson Square stands St. Louis Cathedral. The first church on this site was built in 1719. The third church, which was built in 1789, was remodeled and expanded into the current cathedral.

The French Quarter is filled with two and three-story buildings with the well-known filigree ironwork balconies and porches. Horse-drawn wagons carry visitors on sightseeing tours.

Our first stop in the French Quarter was Café Du Monde for beignets (pronounced ben-YAY). Beignet means "fritter" in French.

Biegnets are deep fried French doughnuts that are covered in powdered sugar. Did we mention we like the good food in New Orleans? We learned from getting powdered sugar all over ourselves last year, and we wore light-colored clothing and took along some Handi-Wipes.

Café Du Monde is located at the edge of the French Market. The first section of the market contains permanent shops, and the remainder of the market is an open-air farmers market/flea market.

Following Hurricane Katrina, it took several years for vendors to begin to return to the open-air part of the Market. Last year, there were some empty stalls, but this year it looked like they were just about filled to capacity.

After we accomplished our first major goal of the day of having biegnets, and after we walked through the French Market, it was time to move on to our second major goal of visiting the Southern Food and Beverage Museum. The French Market is at the far northeastern end of the French Quarter, and the museum is located beyond the opposite end of the French Quarter all the way at the far end of Riverwalk Mall. The plan was to take the trolley because there was a stop right at the French Market and another stop right by the far end of Riverwalk Mall.

The fare on the New Orleans trolleys and buses is only $1.25 for adults and $.40 for seniors over 65. You can also buy unlimited all-day passes good on all the trolleys and buses for $5.

Unfortunately, we found out when we boarded that the line was closed for repairs past Canal Street, which was only about 2/3 of the way to the museum. By that time we had only walked about a mile, but it was hot and humid so we figured riding 2/3 of the way was better than nothing, so we hopped on.

We got off the trolley at Canal Street and walked the last half mile to the third floor of the far end of Riverwalk Mall to the Southern Food and Beverage Museum. The museum details the history of foods, beverages and ingredients that are unique to the south and specifically to New Orleans. Since we like the good food in New Orleans (Did we mention that?), we wanted to learn more about it.

Sugar was (and still is) a major crop in this area. It was grown extensively at the plantations up and down the Mississippi River in Louisiana. In the photo below, Paul is standing by a centrifuge basket used in later sugar production to separate the molasses from the crystallized sugar.

Seafood is of major importance in the cooking of New Orleans. Margery watched part of a video about seafood.

The museum is fairly large, but we were a little disappointed because we felt their displays were a little sparse and a bit uninteresting. They had numerous plaques with excellent information about southern foods, but we were too hot and tired from all the walking we did and ended up just skimming most of the written information.

Regular admission to the museum is $10, but AAA members and seniors can get in for $5. We're glad we both got the discount, but we still question whether it was worth walking all that way to get there even at the reduced price.

Even though we didn't take time to read many of the plaques, a few things did catch our interest. One was the description of some of the problems early settlers had baking bread. Early settlers had to import flour. Flour didn't fare well on the long ocean voyage, and it frequently arrived moldy or rancid. Bakers experimented with mixing rice flour and wheat flour to stretch the wheat flour. A few unscrupulous bakers also tried to get away with mixing in a small percentage of rancid flour to stretch the good stuff. It was also difficult to get a nice, crisp crust on the bread because of all the humidity. With the Louisiana Purchase, New Orleans bakers finally had access to wheat from the Midwest, and the prospect for good bread improved.

Another interesting fact we picked up was about sugar. Sugar cane had been grown in the area around New Orleans since the time of the first settlement. However, we didn't realize sugar production didn't really take off until sugar growers began coming to Louisiana in the late 1700s and early 1800s to escape the slave revolt in Haiti. By 1853, Louisiana produced one quarter of the world's sugar.

There was also some interesting information about the origins of the sandwich called the po' boy, but we're going to save the po' boy for a future post.

After we left the museum, we again had to walk half a mile back to the ferry dock. We were really tired and hot by the time rode the ferry back across the river to Algiers Point and got to the car. We headed straight for the motor home to put our feet up. We need to recover quickly, because we have more to see and do.