Catahoula Elementary Collection
Community comes together to preserve shuttered school’s artifacts
If you know only one thing about me, know this. When it comes to any kind of historical anything about Catahoula, I will always say yes. Your father owned the Catahoula Lake Bakery in the 1940s, and you have a five-cent bread token to show me? Yes, I would love to see it. Photographs of your grandparents’ double wedding during the Great Depression in Catahoula Cove? Yes, I would love to sit down and scan the whole album. So when the school custodian texted me to say that she had some items in need of safekeeping, and would I be interested in taking a look at them, of course I said yes.
If you know only two things about me, know this. I take on too many projects. When I got home and saw the boxes stacked on the dining room floor, the tote bags overflowing with scrapbooks, et cetera, I wondered what I had gotten myself into. Two months worth of scanning? Three months? Four? The contents seemed to multiply with every box I opened. But if my first thought was to be taken aback by how much there was, my second thought——which crystallized so quickly it must have been hiding fully formed behind the first one——was to realize how little there actually was. Stepping back to take the entire collection in, I thought, “Is this all that’s left?”
Catahoula Elementary was ordered closed in 2021 as part of a court battle over desegregation that has been playing out in St. Martin Parish for over fifty years. The Fifth Circuit reversed the school closure in 2022, ruling it an overly harsh remedy to bring the parish into compliance, but one year later, the school remains closed, and it’s unclear when and under what circumstances a re-opening will take place. There have been enough twists and turns along the way that the school’s fate is anyone’s guess. But what the future holds for the school is a story for another day. Today is a story about what the school has already given us.
Catahoula Elementary opened its doors in 1938 and served as the only school in Catahoula until its closure in 2021. Generations of students attended Kindergarten through 8th grades on the campus located a block from St. Rita Church and not far from the legendary lake that gave the community its name. A 1946 class photo, in which more than half of the students are barefoot, captures the humble roots of the school in one poignant image.
Another photograph from the mid-1970s captures the school’s spirit of adventure——students looking up at the trees through binoculars as part of a class on birdwatching. Gold velvet curtains on the stage in the old gymnasium. Kickball on the tennis courts. Dressing up as book characters for Book Day. Building pine-needle-houses on the playground for recess. Tetherball. Uncommonly delicious lunches——sometimes even gumbo——dished out in the school cafeteria. Catahoula Elementary took its character from the culture of the surrounding community, emphasizing hard work, ingenuity, recreation and fellowship, and the idea that from Catahoula a student could go anywhere.
It was that same sense of community that kicked in when I announced my plan to preserve the school’s artifacts. I knew it was too big of a job to tackle alone, and within days of announcing my plans to scan the collection, I had a list of twenty volunteers ready to get to work, six new storage boxes delivered to my doorstep, and five hundred dollars donated to the effort. Scanning began on October 10, and the first batch of photos was posted the next day to the Catahoula Elementary Facebook page. The current plan is to set aside one afternoon a week for scanning. At that rate, I figure it will take our team of volunteers until April to get it done. Funds will be directed to long-term storage of these objects of historical significance and an online archive where the images can be viewed in perpetuity.
I started the Picture Catahoula archive in 2012 with the goal of scanning every film photograph ever taken in Catahoula, and for the next three years, I brought my scanner and my laptop all around the community, scanning anyone’s albums who would let me. When all was said and done, I had scanned, tagged and sorted almost six thousand images of Catahoula. Adding in the Catahoula Elementary collection——including the contents of fifteen scrapbooks, two hundred class photos and at least a thousand loose photographs——the Picture Catahoula archive will grow to over seven thousand images.
Seen as a whole, the collection of photographs paints a portrait of Catahoula that’s greater than the sum of its individual rectangles, and more durable than the paper they’re printed on. Mysteriously, it’s a picture that no one has ever seen before. The images were already out there, they were just too scattered and dispersed, too stored away in boxes, for the full picture to materialize. A picture of the past that we thought had already vanished, like magic, comes back into focus. Here is that Rapunzel egg diorama you made in the seventh grade. Here you are with your third-grade classmates, and everyone’s wearing sock-puppets. Here is your late brother shimmying up the monkey bars. Your late sister in knee-high white socks. In an age when it seems like everything is disappearing, here is a long-lost childhood afternoon suddenly reappearing.
