Experience, Learn, and Love Life

Thursday, October 2, 2014

1 October, 2014 - to Pensacola

This morning we awoke to a slight drizzle, but the weather was warm and comfortable. We had decided to take this morning and visit the Acadian Cultural Center, known as Vermillionville in Fayette, LA.  We found it to be a delightful place, filled with information and exhibits and interesting things.  It is a reconstructed village from the early 1800's, representing life among the Acadians or Cajun people.  It is located on a bayou and has reconstructed buildings including an actual home from the period, relocated here. As we walked through the village, we could feel a bit of the sense of how these people lived before the Civil War.

 Notice the cypress trees festooned with Spanish moss and the bayou nestled in the background.  In the 1800's they dried the Spanish moss and used it, along with cotton to stuff their mattresses.   They also used the dried moss to mix with mud to make it hold together.  Then they would build a frame for a house and put sticks between the supports for the wall and drape the mixture of mud and moss over the stick.  When it hardened, it was the material that made building homes in this area possible.  One of the presenters at the center was a Choctaw Indian lady who indicated that the indians made their structures the same way but the Acadians improved it by plastering the walls, over the dried mud and moss material.


 Here we are standing on the front porch of the home of one of the wealthy cattle ranchers,Monsieur. Broussard.  Notice the blue paint used for the trim and the underside of the porch.  When the Acadians were exiled here, they quickly learned that one of the pests was the mud dauber wasp.  But it will not build a nest on a blue surface, so blue was used on all the porch ceilings.





 These good old boys gave us a concert of Cajun music in the old school house.   It sounds so similar to Zydeco music but the difference is in the timing and the instruments.  Cajun music is 3/4 time and uses mainly an accordion, guitar and fiddle. Zydeco adds percussion and is mostly 4/4 time.  This old style squeeze box is now made mostly only in the Louisiana area.  Notice the smaller keyboard and size.  He told us they used to buy them from Germany but all but one of the factories went out of business and they could not deal with the one left, so started making their own.  Now it is called an Acadiana Accordion and the only foreign part is the bellows.  The songs are sung in French with a Cajun accent.  I think it does not matter how good your voice is, only that you can make it go up and down with a nasal twang and foreign language.  I think it is fun to hear.   Mom is not so sure.
 You can see here the old style of spinning, carding and sorting cotton. 2 paddles with combs in them sort out the seeds and stems from the cotton balls, leaving course brown cotton material.  They used hollow gourds to hold lots of things, including cotton seeds, turned into oil and the raw cotton.  The chair seats were made of hides, either deer or cow, fitted over the knobs of the frame.  This lovely lady developed a deep interest in nearly forgotten Acadian practices and learned how to make thread from the cotton the old way, by spinning and then weaving it into cloth.  She was very knowledgeable and had lots of information. Her 12 year old daughter is also learning how to card, spin and weave.

This interesting gentleman  carves wood by hand, such as the duck he his holding, which I purchased.  However, not one of his carvings are identical. Behind him on the floor you can see bundles of wood.  He stacks colored woods together with glue, then cuts them randomly and restacks and glues and does this over and over to create unique wood patterns to carve into shapes.  He also accidentally discovered that when fungus is allowed to grow in cut wood in this area, several different types compete in the wood and lay down layers of chemicals to stop the spread of competing fungi. After a year he heats the wood, killing the fungus and cuts it open.  You can see the patterns in the wood formed by the fungus, giving each piece a unique appearance.

At one point, to continue through the area, we had to either backtrack a ways or take a hand operated ferry across the bayou.  We watched a class of schoolgirls do it first and then I did it by myself to take us across.


 
 We did finally get the doc on the dock and were able to go on with our fascinating tour of old Acadia.





We then drove on to Pensacola, stopping briefly in Gulfport, Mississippi for a picture on the Gulf Coast.  We are having a great trip!





No comments:

Post a Comment