DONNER, La. – The cypress logs were cut, planed and loaded onto trains that filed down a windy railroad from a small swamp sawmill community for the last time. Families bid farewell to their houses, their friends, their jobs and their town.
Nestled among the cypress stumps of south central Louisiana’s Atchafalaya forest, the Dilbert, Starks and Brown Cypress Company collapsed and severed the levees that protected Donner, giving the town back to the swamp. It was 1938 when the murky wetlands swallowed a piece of Louisiana history.
The people packed up their belongings and scattered from Donner with a handful of fading memories. The swamp kept the rest.
Little remains of Donner anymore, just piles of cement and broken bricks. The swamps engulfed the town from the south. The construction of Highway 90 covered the northern half, removing much of what remained behind.
Tucked away in thick bogs on both sides of Louisiana Highway 20, cement pilings rise out of the stagnant swamp, and the remains of the dry kiln are little more than heaps of broken red bricks covered in dead leaves and speared by rusted pipes. A tupelo gum tree grows out of an old shed foundation, carpeting it with roots and black mud.
Ezeldia Harding, resident of Donner during the 1920s, now lives in the fragments of what once was Donner. Harding said she moved back to the family property.
“The highway was built over what used to be part of Donner,” Harding said. “There are very few houses left now.”
During that time, Harding said houses used to line both sides of the bayou in the northern half of the town.
“Houses on Deadwoods [Road] lined both sides of the narrow bayou, which crossed the Donner Canal and continued winding its way through the town,” Harding said.
Donner was located between Morgan City and Houma in the Atchafalaya Basin to the southeast of Baton Rouge. The Dilbert, Starks and Brown Lumber Company converted the swamp into a town.
Bobby Matherne, son of deceased resident Annette Matherne, said, “To build the town, they went in the middle of the cypress swamp, built levees, pumped out water and built houses.”
Following the construction of the levees, several streets were laid out to the east of the mill. The logging company built houses and leased them to company workers.
According to a book by Thurston Hahn and Cherie Schwab, “Donner, Louisiana: Historical and Archaeological Investigations of an Early-Twentieth Century Sawmill Community,” Donner had churches, schools, boarding houses, a commissary, a drug store, a barber shop, offices, barns and stables.
Matherne’s mother once lived there. She told her son about her life in Donner in an interview on Nov. 4, 1999.
She said people would sit on their front porches and listen to Mr. Stephans, owner of the Donner drug store, play his violin at night and watch the fireflies flicker and vanish in the cypress darkness.
Annette Matherne said in the interview she started going to school when she was 5, and the following year a hurricane destroyed the Donner school.
“The whole school was demolished,” Annette Matherne said. “They had to build a new school.”
The school was rebuilt, and in 1936 – one of the last years of Donner’s existence – it had 21 students in its seventh grade class.
Annette Matherne’s father Pierre “Peter” Babin worked as an operator for the planing mill.
“He used to tend to the mill and start it off in the morning,” she told her son in an interview he later published.
Wooden sidewalks called “banquettes” stretched between the houses, which were often a chore for the children of Annette Matherne’s family.
“She used to talk about when they had to scrub down the banquettes on the weekends,” Bobby Matherne told The Daily Reveille. “When it rained, mud splashed on it and it would get very muddy and slippery.”
Even when levees fought back the water, the ground around Donner was always saturated.
“Sometimes it was so muddy and soggy, that I had to put knee boots on, and I would sink all the way to my knees with the boots on bringing the cattle to the pasture,” Annette Matherne told her son.
Alone among golden grass in a 68-year-old marsh sat the old Donner sawmill. It was once a field, where children played games in the shadows of wood piles.
Surrounded by collections of tupelo gum and cypress trees, no saws hummed inside the two-story remnants. There was just the faint noise of a distant highway. The rest was silent.
Decades ago saws buzzed in the mill and cut wood that filled train cars with each year’s cypress harvest. But the supply could not last forever. When the trees became scarce, the company struggled to survive.
“Most of the virgin cypress timber on the lands surrounding the mill had been cut by 1935,” Hahn and Schwab said in their book. “The company began to liquidate its holdings, and in three-years time the mill, houses and other buildings were dismantled and sold.”
The company was completely dissolved by 1938.
And the city was left for the swamps that continued to grow from the breaks in the levees.
By the mid-1950s, the swamps had already swallowed the remainder of Donner.
“The surrounding swamps had reclaimed almost the entire Donner area by 1956,” Hahn and Schwab said. “By then, only Structure 90 [the sawmill], the slowly crumbling ring levee, and a clearing in Area 11 [a part of northern Donner], remained at what had once been the thriving community of Donner.”
Memories of the town are growing dimmer as time passes.
On the first Sunday of every October, former Donner residents meet near the old site of the town in the current community center of Donner, a new community founded a few miles down the highway.
Bobby Matherne went with his wife and mother to the reunion during the ’90s, before his mother passed away.
“It was neat to see an 80-year-old woman dance around excited because she saw people she hadn’t seen since she was 7,” Bobby Matherne said.
Old friends gathered at the reunion and swapped their memories.
But the people who once lived there are aging like the trees that have grown over Mill Street. And some memories are fading into the swamp.
Jo Anne Plessala, Donner resident, put together a book compiling the memories of many of the former residents of Donner in 1999. Since then, several of them have passed away.
Ivy Smith is one of the deceased. Violet Smith, his widow, answered the phone and told The Daily Reveille that her husband had died. Violet Smith said her husband never forgot his hometown.
“Every time he went somewhere, he’d be telling someone about Donner,” Violet Smith said. “It must have been a great place.”
 
Contact Justin Fritscher at [email protected]