150 INDIANA HISTORICAL COLLECTIONS 



Mauchac. There are several other abandoned plantations 

 in Mr. Johnson's neighborhood, where buildings and 

 fences are tumbling in ruins, and beautiful gardens 

 grown up in briars and bushes, and large fields covered 

 with broom sedge, the whole making a scene of desolation 

 that is painful to pass by. And these things are not only 

 here — they are more or less to be seen all through the 

 cotton region. For the truth is, cotton cannot be grown 

 at the present prices. Mr. Johnson thinks that sugar can 

 be made at 3 cts. a pound better than cotton at six ; and 

 that anywhere within the limits of sugar growing, the 

 same hands and lands, will average, one year with an- 

 other, one hogshead of sugar for every bale of cotton. 



A few miles south of Jackson, on the Baton-Rouge 

 rt)ad, I crossed the Clinton and Port-Hudson Railroad, in 

 a state of dilapidation. Why is it that no enterprise of 

 this kind succeeds in this region? Dining with General 

 Carter,^ I learned that his brother, on the adjoining place, 

 made this year from four and a quarter acres of cane, 

 (nearly one fourth of an acre of which was waste ground, 

 in consequence of a pond,) seventeen and two thirds 

 hogsheads of sugar. The character of the soil is clayey 

 upland, rather flat; original growth, oak, magnolia, gum, 

 poplar, &c., and has been cleared and in cotton about 

 twelve years, this being the first crop of cane. Another 

 neighbor made 42 hhds. from 12 1/2 acres — certainly very 

 encouraging to hill-land planters, and I hope the same 

 success may continue to attend them. Though it is con- 

 sugar plantations in Louisiana, called Woodstock, and located in 

 East Baton Rouge Parish, 116 miles above New Orleans, the first 

 plantation above Bayou Manchac. Champomier, Statement of the 

 Sngar Crop Made in LovAsiana, 1849; Pike, Charles J., Coast- 

 Directory (New Orleans, 1847) ; map of Plantations on the Missis- 

 si])pi River; "Directory of the Planters of Louisiana and Missis- 

 sippi," op. cit., 359. 



^ General A. G. Carter, resident of East Feliciana near Port 

 Hudson. Associated with his brother, William D. Carter. Their 

 sugar planting operations were of recent origin. Champomier, 

 Statement of the Sugar Crop Made in Louisiana, 1851-1852. 



