Editor’s note: Andrew Perzo is on vacation. Today’s Informer features the second installment of a four-part answer to a question on when the boundary of Calcasieu Parish was drawn and why it juts northward to include DeQuincy. It first appeared in 2012.

The Calcasieu divisionists failed to create a new parish in 1904, but as the next legislative session approached two years later they set about marshaling their forces to press lawmakers for support.

The effort this time was led by Alba Heywood, a friend of then-Gov. Newton Blanchard and a man known for peppering his speeches with humor and wild tales. He himself quickly became the butt of many jokes in the Lake Charles press.

“Colonel Heywood Parish Buster … Says Parish Is Too Large,” read two of the headlines for a Lake Charles Daily Press story about a speech Heywood gave in Lake Charles. “Wants It Divided Because the Rest of Us Are Too Wicked, Too Extravagant, Too Parsimonious, Too Numerous, Too Rich, Too Poor, Too Unjust, Too Ignorant and Too Far from Jennings,” read the summary paragraph.

“Col. Heywood can tell the most venerable joke that ever excited the risibilities of the remotest ancestor of Rameses the First in a manner that would make a marble reproduction of Medusa’s head look like an image of the Goddess of Mirth. …,” read the story, published May 9, 1906.

“The speaker compared that portion of the parish that desires division to a fine milch cow in a herd of skinny heifers. He said the cow was developing into a kicker because she didn’t get her paths fixed up and not a ‘drop of political sop’ was thrown her.”

The headlines from a Lake Charles American report on the same speech: “Col. Heywood Finds a Hundred Complaints but Only One Remedy. Jeremiah’s Wails in Comparison as Optimistic as the Song of an Oklahoma Land Agent.”

Despite the Lake Charles papers’ criticism, Heywood’s push for a new parish, this time to be named Snyder, gained the support of Welsh and Kinder residents and met with initial success in the Legislature — thanks, the Lake Charles papers intimated, to Heywood’s relationship with the governor.

In early June, the House Parochial Affairs Committee, which killed the 1904 effort, OK’d a bill authorizing the division. The vote, which stood at 7-6, came after a rancorous five-hour hearing that included accusations that at least one anti-division petition was bogus because it might contain the names of black residents. The two men involved — both from Kinder — nearly came to blows.

In the end, anti-division lawmakers managed to muster support for their side, and the bill was defeated in the Senate.

“Parish Division Knocked Out,” read the four-column-wide headline in the June 20, 1906, edition of the Lake Charles Daily Press.

The triumphant summary paragraph took up two columns and ran for seven lines, and even managed to get in a dig at a prominent lawmaker:

“The Senate Refuses to Have Anything Further to do With Parish Division and Will Not Even Consider the Reference of the Question to the People of the Parish or of any Part of the Parish — Senator Drew, who is not Much as a Windjammer but Somewhat When it Comes to ‘Sawing Wood,’ Lines Them up at the Right Time — Colonel Heywood Acknowledges Defeat in Characteristic Manner.”

What Heywood said: “Well, we got it where Katy got the axe.”

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The Informer answers questions from readers each Sunday, Monday and Wednesday. It is researched and written by Andrew Perzo, an American Press staff writer. To ask a question, call 494-4098 and leave voice mail, or email informer@americanpress.com.