Boulders on side draw attention
I have driven down Clyde Fant Parkway for several years and wondered who put those boulders down at the pond by the railroad bridge near Stoner Avenue. Was it supposed to be a park? For the life of me, I cannot figure out why anyone would want to do that.
The boulders along Clyde Fant Parkway do look peculiar. We usually do not think of Louisiana having boulders, but they were not hauled in. They are part of a natural formation walled the Wilcox Sandstone. That stretch of the parkway is wonderfully complex. The boulders also appear on the surface along Interstate 49 just north of the Posey Road exit about four miles from the main Natchitoches exit at Louisiana Highway 6. The can be seen on the west side of the road along the slope above the Bayou Pierre Bridge. A third occurrence of the boulders was much more famous, and infamous. These were located just north of the original town of Alexandria. Today the location is a little north of the convention center near the Forts Randolph and Buhlow State Park. These boulders were in the bed of the Red River. They plagued anyone in a boat during low water. The French first discovered them. They called the settlement they placed there Post du Rapides. Rapides in English is rapids. Most people don’t associate white water rapids with Louisiana, and justifiably so, but those boulders wreaked havoc with navigation. They destroyed by the first use of nitroglycerin by the U.S. Corps of Engineers in 1873.
When you drive south on Clyde Fant Parkway from Lake Street, you are driving in the bed of the Red River until it moved in 1912. Lake Street is named that because it bordered a raft remnant water body called Silver Lake. Raft remnant lakes were left over from the giant logjam called the Great Raft. It extended across what is today, the course of the Red River and covered most of DiamondJacks Casino. Clyde Fant at intersection of Lake Street takes a slight dip and that means that you are driving the bed of the Red River as it was during Henry Shreve’s time in this region, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and the next forty-seven years until 1912. As you look to your right driving south, you see above you the railroad yard of the Union Pacific Railroad. That is the bed of Silver Lake.
If you look at the railroad bridge near Sci-Port: Louisiana’s Science Center, you will notice that on land at the water’s edge at Riverview Park, there is a round bridge support. It is the only one.
That was the turnstile to move the bridge ninety degrees to allow steamboats to pass. That turnstile was in the middle of the river until the flood of 1912. If you walk up to that turnstile, you will notice some scraped area on the north side. That is the point that the U.S. government steamboat C.W. Howell lost power and slammed into the bridge. It was pinned against the column and the bridge by the current and sank at that spot. If you look at the downtown side of the bridge, you will see the old bank as it was before the flood.
The railroad tracks that run parallel to Commerce Street were at the edge of the bank of the river until 1912. All of the land that has been built up east of those tracks is accretion or build up from floods since 1908. We can learn a lot by paying attention to a common view if simply spend the time to see what is really there.
Dr. Gary Joiner is the Leonard and Mary Anne Selber Professor of History at LSUS, where he is also director of the Red River Regional Studies Center. Questions for “The History Doctor” may be addressed to editor@ theforumnews.com.
