Full document / COSOC-W-86-002 - the National Sea Grant Library

of labor, one which utilized highly specialized tools and equipment and one-of-a-kind
workers. "Swampers," were men with rare skills andan affinity to live and work In an
environment that held little appealtoother men.
Most of the lumber workers had specific duties. On the pullboats, crews consisted of
deckmen, firemen, woodpassers, and engineers. Out In the swamp were the plug setters,
sliders, "saws' (two-man crews using six-foot crosscut saws) and whistle blowers
(Bourgeois, 1983).
Whistle blowers were important to every crew, because they were the only meansof
communication between the men working in the swamp and the workers operating the
winches. Forthis reason,notwowhistle blowershad the samesignal system. Most of them
used varying patterns of long and short "toots", but the man who whistled for Fernwood
Industriesemployed a "talkingwhistle," a sound impossible to captureon paper (Ramsey,
1985)
Whenthe cypress Industry ended, the workers not only lost the opportunityto employ
their specialized skills, manyof them had to change their lifestyles. A number of ihe
"swampers" lived with their families in the small communities of the basin such as
Ruddock, Frenler, Strader and Manchac They supplemented family income, when not
workingfor the lumbercompanies, with othermeans suchas fishing,shrimping,trapping,
hunting, boat buildingandmoss gathering. Most of these activities, the exceptions being
fishing and shrimping,declined when thetreeswereremoved. Moss gathering wasanearly
casualty.
Although the growing popularityof syntheticswould have doomed the moss industry
eventually, it suffered a prematureend because of the reduction of the forest. While noone
earned great wealth,mossgatherers could getas much as six centsa pound for mossat the
ginwhere it wasprocessed and pressed Into bales. The finished product provided padding for
furniture andautomobile upholstery(Kraemer, 1984). It goes without sayingthat since
Spanish moss grew ontrees, theremoval ofthetreesmeant theendofSpanish moss.
However .while It lasted, the moss industrydid provioe a sourceof needed revenue for
families livingIntheswamp The United States Census of 1900 listed it asoneof themajor
occupations of persons living in Rwttek end Frenler (U. 5., Department of Commerce,
Bureau of the Census, 1900).
Another occupation to suffer from the cuttingdown of the trees was boatbuilding, in
some cases swampers cerved their own pirogues (a dugout canoe found everywhere in
southern Louisiana) outof solidcypresslogs (Heath. 1984). There werealsoprofessional
boat builders in the region whoconstructed boats of varying size, from the pirogue up to
houseboats with four or five rooms The larger craft required the use of "tank grade"
cypress planksat leastthree inchesthick. Thisaspect of the industryhadadded importance
because manyof theswempers livedon houseboats which could be moved to accommodate the
needs of the workers in the lumber Industry(Kraemer, 1984).
The Industry hasnottotallydisappeared, because boats—the Manchac skiff—are still
being made In Manchac, but fiberglass has taken the place of cypress as the primary
building material.
Thedecline tn cypress trees hasalsochanged the maintenance program of the Illinois
Central. When trees were abundant, the railroadhadsectioncrews housed at Intervals along
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