LOUISIANA STATE
SEMINARY, ALEXANDRIA, April 15, 1860.
This is Sunday. Some
of the cadets have gone to church, some fishing and the balance are walking
about. The Board of Supervisors are now sitting in a large room only two
removed from me, and I hear them wrangling and quarreling over points of
discipline and instruction which they have been now discussing for two days.
They have authorized
me to make plans and estimates for the two houses. And I expect a builder to be
out any moment to help me estimate. The Board approve my selection of the site
for the two new houses, and I believe the one selected for ours the best, being
on a fine high point, distant from the college building yet overlooking its
grounds. There is a fine spring near by. The weather continues warm and
excessively dry and all are praying for rain to bring up the corn and cotton
which has been planted for a month.
I have your several
letters asking the price of servants, etc., but I cannot answer as all servants
here are scarce and most everybody owns their own. I suppose ten dollars a
month will hire a black woman but it is impossible to hire a strong man fit for
field work at less than $25 a month and board. If Emily and Gertrude come with
you we will still need a man and maybe a black girl, as white girls won't work
down here long. Still we can agree to pay them a bonus if they stay a year. But
as I wrote you there is no chance of your coming down for a long time, may be
November.
Dr. Smith one of the
supervisors, a physician of long standing, says that October and November are
the sickly months. July and August though hot are perfectly healthy. So that he
favors those months as the vacation. So great is the variation of opinion that
I let them fight it out as it is proper that they who have lived here all their
lives should determine the question. I hope to get the builders to work in the
course of a month but all such things proceed so slowly here that I doubt if we
can finish this year. Nobody seems to pay any attention to time or
appointments.
Red River too has
already begun to fall and soon will be navigated only by the smallest kind of
boats and it will be next to impossible to procure anything from New Orleans,
the only point where furniture can be had. The stores in Alexandria contain
nothing of the kind. Indeed California in its worst days had a better market
than this country. There are no farmers here. The planters produce only cotton
and sugar on a large scale and deem it beneath their dignity to raise anything
for market. Some of the negroes raise a few sweet potatoes, corn, etc., which
they sell about Christmas time, but all the year else everything must come from
New Orleans. We are now paying for corn one dollar and ten cents a bushel and
hay costs about forty-eight dollars a ton. Everything is proportional, so that
I doubt if my four thousand dollars will more than barely maintain us.
No comments:
Post a Comment