Tradition restored

• By CAROL ANNE BLITZER
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: Oct 9, 2009 - Page: 1D

• Print
• Email
• Save
• Reprints
• Twitter
• Share

• Del.icio.us
• Digg
• Facebook
• Reddit
• 

SLAUGHTER — Sandra Guidry will never forget the day her husband, Billy, showed her Dawson Hall, a house in Morganza that he wanted to move to Slaughter and restore. She was not thrilled.

“I said, ‘You’re going to move me where?” she said with a laugh. The home was in great need of repair.

At the time, the Guidrys were happily situated in their dream house. That is until Billy Guidry, funeral director at Baker Funeral Home, saw Dawson Hall as he was driving in a funeral procession. The home belonged to a family member of the deceased. In front of it was a sign, “to be moved.”

“When I got back to gather with the family, I told them I was interested,” Billy Guidry said.

Visitors to the Zachary Historic Village Association’s Fall Festival of Homes can tour the restored Dawson Hall, one of five homes on the Oct. 18 tour.

The original house contained four downstairs rooms designed in the Acadian tradition with two front doors, a center fireplace and no hallways.  An external staircase on the front of the house led to an upstairs bedroom.

For decades the home had belonged to Charles Wickcliff Dawson and Ida Oubre Dawson and their descendants. It had been moved once many years earlier.

“The Dawsons lived near the Mississippi River in an area called the Morganza Crevasse. Being close to the river, they experienced flood waters every spring,” Billy Guidry said.

Ida Dawson was always worried about the annual floods, especially with small children in the home, so she convinced her husband to move the home back from the river to higher ground.

Charles Dawson, who was descended from the Barrows of West Feliciana, owned and operated three sawmills beginning around the turn of the last century. He used 150 mules, 12 wagons and 75 to 100 men to move some 7,000 feet of lumber per wagon each day.

“He had quite an operation,” Billy Guidry said. “Mr. Dawson had his own riverboat and barges to move his men, mules and equipment from one side of the river to another as well as to move his timber to markets in St. Francisville, Batchelor and Baton Rouge.”

Guidry said that Charles Dawson once remarked, “We Dawsons never have logged for a living, we’ve always logged to live.”

Charles Dawson used mules to roll the house on logs to its location in Morganza. “Once the home was at its new location, it was lifted and set upon the logs that had been cut into sections to act as pillars,” Billy Guidry said.