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Mysteries of Minden

Written by John Agan

Friday, 18 December 2009

Recently while preparing for the Minden Cemetery’s Association Ghost Walk I ran into an all too familiar problem, a seemingly unresolvable mystery in local history.

In this situation I was seeking the cause of death of a young lady who died in her early twenties here in Minden during the first decade of the 20th century. In one edition of the local newspaper it was mentioned that she had returned from a visit to a nearby town and was feeling ill.

The next week’s “Society” section carried best wishes that she would soon be over her illness. The next week’s paper expressed worry that she was not improving.

The next week’s issue of the paper is missing from the microfilmed records and when the record resumes the following week the paper is filled with tributes from her friends mourning her death.

Newspaper Vanishes

The issue of the newspaper that contained the story of her death is gone, and unless someone, somewhere, has a clipping from that newspaper we will never know the precise cause of her death. Her family does not know, they were the ones seeking the answers, so, to steal the name of that great Southern novel, the answer is “gone with the wind.”

Locally, the main -- and in some cases the only – source for local history information is the newspaper.

Minden’s first newspaper was published in 1848, the Minden Ins. In the early 1850s, the first version of the Minden Herald began publishing and from the end of the Civil War forward, our town has never been without a newspaper – for most of that period at least two papers were published locally. However, so many of those papers are lost.

With the exception of two or three issues of the Minden Herald from the 1850s, no local paper published prior to 1878 has been preserved in any collection. I recently ran an editorial from the New York Times containing a reprint of an article in the Minden Herald from the 1850s.

That is the only way we can find what the local paper reported, when a story was picked up by a paper in another city.

This situation makes researching local history so very frustrating as you know that the story was there at one time, but now it has apparently been lost.

Other Problems

Even in the years where we have most of the newspapers in a collection other frustrations arise. One of these is the problem of missing issues, in some cases weeks at a time are missing.

For example, most of the local newspapers for 1923 are gone. That means that the local accounts of events such as the Mardi Gras Pageant fire, the construction of a new Minden High School and the announcement and first stages of the move of the headquarters of the Louisiana and Arkansas Railroad to Minden are not accessible to researchers.

An even bigger problem is putting all the newspapers together in one place. Recently the Webster Parish Library was able to obtain a large segment of local papers from 1938 to 1950 on microfilm, but the truth is that no library outside of Baton Rouge has all the old Minden newspapers that are still in existence. That makes it more difficult to research local history.

These various problems have led to some events and eras in local history that are extremely scarce on primary source material and in this column I’m going to discuss some of those mysteries that have been seemingly lost to history.

Politics in
the 1850s

One of those mysteries centers on local politics in the mid 1850s.

We know from the work of several Louisiana historians and those examples of quotes from other contemporary newspapers that in the years 1854 – 1856 Minden experienced a political revolution.

At some point during those years the American or “Know Nothing” Party gained control of the city government in our town. That situation was duplicated in only one other Louisiana community, the city of New Orleans.
The American Party was not particularly strong anywhere else in North Louisiana outside of Minden.

The Know Nothings were a xenophobic party dedicated to driving immigrants and Catholics out of the United States. I have speculated in the past that the nearly complete disappearance of the Eastern European who were living here in 1850, and the absence of a Catholic congregation in Minden were by-products of that Know Nothing takeover, but I have yet to find any primary sources to flesh out the story and indicate what really happened here to create such a drastic change. One of the city officials elected during that period was the editor of the Herald, Jasper Blackburn.

If Blackburn’s Herald had survived, I’m willing to bet we would have a very colorful era in our history documented.

Minden and the Civil War

Several mysteries surround the Civil War in Minden. One is the actions of our City Government. Local government records from that era disappeared and we are not even certain who were the local city officials during those years, but I’ll talk more about that later.

The biggest Civil War era mystery is the location of Camp Magruder. It seems almost certain that the camp was located east of Minden in the hills above Cooley Bottom, but we cannot confirm that.

It seems likely that the local newspapers that published regularly during the war would have given us so many missing details of that episode of our history. The final mystery of the Civil War era is the life during Minden’s occupation by the 61st United States Colored Troops from May to December 1865.

Some small details of events during those months have emerged. I have copies of the court martial trials held here in Minden of two or three soldiers from that unit and other area newspapers carry colorful accounts of at least two episodes where trials were held involving disputes between local residents and the occupation forces.

But the coverage provided by our local newspapers would prove invaluable in gaining a better understanding of that turbulent period.

Webster’s Creation

The entire story of the creation of Webster Parish is without any existing local coverage.

Study of the legislative record clearly indicates that the creation of our parish was a political exercise involving cooperation between the Radical Republican state government and local Democrats, but we don’t have the details local news coverage could provide.

Particularly puzzling is the story of those first few months of Webster Parish history.

In March of 1871, Governor Henry Clay Warmoth appointed the first Webster Parish Police Jury, a body composed of both black and white citizens. However, in September of that same year the black parish officials resigned and Webster Parish was “redeemed.”

What precipitated that change?

We have cryptic clues in at least one place. That unreconstructed rebel to his death, W. H. Scanland of the Bossier Banner, wrote in the pages of his newspaper about that time, “The Knights at Minden had a joust last night.

It was a success.” Using the parlance of the day it seems very likely he was referring to an action taken by either the Knights of the White Camellia or the Ku Klux Klan. Was their “joust” a peaceful coup removing local parish officials? Such actions did take place in other parishes, did that happen here, too. We many never know.

Adding to that problem is that nagging issue of “missing” records. Earlier I mentioned the missing Minden city records from the Civil War.

An educated guess suggests that those city records were destroyed, most likely by John L. Lewis. Lewis, who had opposed secession, left the Confederate Army after he lost a contested race for the Confederate Congress.

He returned to Minden and served as Mayor at some point during the war. After the war he became a Scalawag and joined the Republican Party.

It was later revealed that he was hiding a criminal past in Georgia, so it seems not out of character that he could have destroyed any city records so they would not document his support of the Confederate government as Mayor, that might spoil his chances to get ahead as a Republican after the war. But, we’ll never know from the local newspapers, because they are gone.

Webster’s Early Years

We have a similar problem in the early years of Webster Parish. In 1874, after the construction of the first Webster Parish Courthouse, a fire destroyed the Minden Town Hall.

Rather conveniently, destroyed in that fire were all records of the first three years of the Webster Parish government.

The official story is that those records had not yet been moved to the new courthouse. Perhaps that is what happened, but it seems rather convenient, particularly when viewed in light of the political strife in Louisiana at that time, that the records of the “redemption” of Webster Parish are gone forever. IF the local newspapers had been preserved we might well know what happened.

Another nagging mystery to me is the story of the political wars in the 1890s here in Webster Parish. In the election of 1892, the entire slate of sitting parish officers were defeated in their bids for reelection.

The election of 1892 was a heated campaign for control of the Democratic Party in Louisiana between two wings of the party, but, indications are that the struggle here in Webster Parish may well have been between Democrats and Populists. The Populist Party’s support in Louisiana was rooted in the Farmer’s Union. Webster Parish had perhaps the strongest Farmer’s Union organization in North Louisiana.

It seems very likely to me that the ousting of the parish officials in 1892 came through the Farmer’s Union working with the Populists. In almost every case, the defeated official was a resident of Minden and the replacement was a rural resident. Just as mysteriously, in 1896, all of those 1892 victors were defeated and each of them was defeated by the man they had themselves defeated in 1892. That outcome makes sense if 1892 was a Populist victory in Webster Parish. By the election of 1896 the Populist Party in Louisiana had been painted as a Fusion Party that was attempting to increase black voting power. Massive fraud was used across the state to assure Democratic victories in 1896.

In fact, the Shreveport Journal, one of the leading Democratic papers, boasted editorially about stealing that election. If Webster Parish had truly been the site of a Populist revolution in 1892, it makes sense that those same Populists would be swept out of office four years later.

But again, without local news coverage we may never know.

I actually do have hope that some of these mysteries may one day be solved.

At present it is still an overwhelming task to scan contemporary newspapers for any mention of Minden that might explain some of these circumstances. However, every day more and more historic material is being digitized and made accessible to electronic search mechanisms.

I am confident that in the not too distant future one will be able to scan years of the files of many different newspapers (as you can today with the New York Times) to find where our town was mentioned. Until that time, if you know any of these answers or have some scrapbook or journal of a relative from those long ago times, please let me know so we can get some answers to these lingering mysterious Echoes of Our Past.

John Agan is a local historian, an Instructor at Bossier Parish Community College, and a published author. His column appears Fridays in the Minden Press-Herald.

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