Your house may be built on top of thousand year old cypress swamps and the evidence is often right in the back yard. You may have wondered about trees that seem to have grown underground.
In subdivisions and golf courses all over the area you often see cypress stumps in the retention ponds. It is often assumed the trees were cleared out during building, but it is dangerous to make assumptions. After taking a much closer look, these trees have a much longer and more buried history.
We have come to think of the Mississippi River as a tamed beast corralled in a towering levee system, but Quincy Montz can remember a time before our modern levees.
“I was born in October 1919 so in May 1927 I was 7 years old.”
That spring, terrifying news of up river flooding spread to his small town of Lyons in St. John the Baptist Parish. Back then small levees built by the property owners protected the town.
“The river was about 3 feet from on top the levee and at the request of the officials of the parish the men of Lyons volunteered to patrol the levee with shotguns.”
Montz's father was part of a group ordered to shoot anyone suspiciously hanging around the fragile barrier.
“The reason was to prevent anybody from breeching the levee to protect properties downstream.”
One afternoon, Montz's father came home with a dire warning.
“He told my mother to start packing and make plans to evacuate because the river was seeping underneath the levee about a mile upstream and there was the danger of a breech there.”
Though young at the time, he remembers that day well.
“Having no luggage my mother put two big sheets on the floor and we started to put our valuables in there.”
For seven year old Montz, it wasn't a cherished toy.
“I remember me putting a little suit that I had just purchased from Beeckman’s store in New Orleans the previous Easter.” He can picture it all these years later ” a little blue tweed suit and brown and white shoes.”
