Manchac

Most people think of Louisiana swamps as empty, treacherous wastelands.

But a century ago, the Manchac Swamp and I'm sorry if I'm pronouncing it badly, just 30 miles northwest of New Orleans was just actually teeming with life.

Deep in the isolated wetlands sat a string of tiny, thriving logging and farming villages strung along the Illinois Central Railroad line.

Their names were Ruddock, Napton, and Franier.

And all of the sudden, you have this terrifying realization that the air had gone completely cold and the wind is ripping the Spanish moss off the trees to lose, like, its loose hair.

As the mourners try to lower Julia Brown's casket in the ground, the 1950 New Orleans hurricane slammed directly into the Louisiana coast.

Because Manchac Swamp sits between Lake Maurepas and Lake Port Chantrey, it became a deadly funnel for this storm.

And the hurricane didn't just brought wind, it literally brought a wall of black lake water.

Yeah.

That place outside of New Orleans, Manchac, Melvindorf's or whatever.

Best thin and crispy fish I've ever...

I mean, that's what they're known for.

So in that first wave, he uses militia, free black from New Orleans, along with the regular white militia from throughout the lower colony.

And they take a small post called Manchac, but also Baton Rouge.

When Baton Rouge capitulates, they also get Natchez in 1780.

He goes on to take Mobile, coordinating forces, you know, with the greater theater of the Caribbean, with Cuba.

It's human nature.

A- and we see a very similar thread of marginalized women predicting disaster in Louisiana with the legend of Julia Brown and the Manchac Swamp.

Ah, another incredible story of a town's destruction.

Right.

Practically the whole town attends her funeral, perhaps out of respect or, honestly, perhaps out of fear, but just days after she was put in the ground, a massive, catastrophic category 4 hurricane rolled right into the Gulf.

Oh, wow.

The storm surge completely wiped out three entire logging villages in the Manchac area.

Hundreds of lives were lost.

Plus, I've got a storage shed that

I'm paying for out in Manchac every month.

It's twice the size of the garage.

When's the last time you went to that said storage shed? Honest to the Lord above, at least two years.

And when you hear people say died unexpectedly, I mean, I mean, I'd, An hour before I found out, I just sent him an email that we shared last hour.

And I was going to text, but I decided, since he's resting, Mark Fisher, I guess it's okay to say his name, he's very reliable, Mark Fisher, out in Manchac, been with us for years, as so many of you have, part of the family.

He said he reliably knows a contractor hit a line here in Austin, too, is what

happened.

So if we head down there, we go, go west out of New Orleans on all these old concrete bridges over the swampland.

You head out to a place that's called Manchac Swamp, okay? And it's the swamp that's just off of the Lake Pontchartrain River.

There's this little small isthmus, this little strip of land between Lake Pontchartrain and Lake Maurepas, where this town once sat called Frenier.

And now this was back in the, in the, the mid-1800s or so.

It's you destroying our community." So, um, from that, of course you guys, I mean, you can take it where you want to go with this voodoo priestess.

[laughs] You can take it wherever you want to go with that.

Go out to Manchac, though.

Go down there to the Manchac Swamp.