Rita LeBleu

rlebleu@americanpress.com

Sweet Lake, Sweet Dough and Oleo

(With a dab of history slathered in between)

A couple of years ago, an American Press Home and Real Estate article made an attempt to differentiate between Grand Lake, Big Lake and Sweet Lake. Sure. People who live there know the difference. But what about people who live north of Hwy. 90? Do these names refer to one body of water or three? Did the water of Sweet Lake taste sweeter than the water from the other two lakes? Was Big Lake indeed big? Where did one community stop and the other begin.

To recap the previous article: There is no Big Lake, but there is a big lake. The body of water that runs to the west of Hwy. 384 is the Calcasieu Lake Estuary. Type Calcasieu Lake into a Google map and here is what comes up: A big lake with a surface of almost 78 miles that spans Calcasieu and Cameron Parish.

Grand is the French word for big, and the term was probably used by the French to refer to Calcasieu Lake. It’s the name of the school that students from Grand Lake, Big Lake and Sweet Lake attend. It’s also the name of a lake located southeast of Lacassine National Wildlife Refuge.

Yes. There is a Sweet Lake in Sweet Lake, but it’s probably not the sweetest water to be found today – though that is how it is said to have gotten its name. Saltwater intrusion and oil exploration has rendered it thus. It’s not known for being a great fishing spot. However, it’s possible the first people who struck oil in the lake thought it very sweet. Rigs were so productive here that the Pure Oil Camp established a worker camp around it. The camp is gone, but Sweet Lake continues to be productive.

When the American Press contacted Sweet Lake Land & Oil Company to see if there is a connection between it, Pure Oil Camp and the community of Sweet Lake, it was found that there is no connection between the two companies. President and CEO Buddy Leach recommended that the American Press start its research with a 1971 Sweet Lake Home Demonstration Program and a visit with Sweet Lake resident Bille LeBleu Fruge.

Fruge has lived in Sweet Lake for the past 84 years, and was very active in the Sweet Lake Home Demonstration Club up until a few months ago when the club finally disbanded. She joined in 1953, but the club had been active for some time before that date.

A dab of history

Home demonstration clubs were created in 1914 as part of the Cooperative Extension Service in Agriculture and Home Economics. Clubs were mostly in rural communities. At the start, skills learned were informative and helped make ends meet. Topics included gardening, canning and producing clothing, curtains and pillowcases from feed sacks. The club evolved to include a chance for social interaction, a little nibbling of home-baked goodies and club members begin to present informative topics.

The Sweet Lake Home Demonstration Club presented “Know Your Parish Tours” for over 10 years beginning in 1965. The following history tidbits are excerpts from one of those programs.

— The very first settler in the Sweet Lake Community, originally known as “The Bottom,” was Bellonie Granger, according to a HDC history/tour compiled in 1971.

— The North American Land & Timber Company, a predecessor to the Sweet Lake Land & Oil Company, purchased vast acreage in the Sweet Lake area and played a dominant role in the development of the community, especially the agriculture, under the leadership of H. G. Chalkey, Sr., who was president and manager of the company.

— Sweet Lake Land & Oil built a large number of homes for their farmers and employees. In the 1900s, it established a commissary. Supplies were hauled to the store in via tugs and barges.

— Long distance telephone came to Sweet Lake in 1955. Three hundred residents gathered at the Sweet Lake Community Center to watch as Eraste “Tumpy” Hebert, president of the Cameron Parish Police Jury, made the first official long-distance phone call. The second phone call was made by Charles Hebert to his nephew Herman.

— Sweet Lake farmers added eggs to the income producing ag mix in 1957 when rice acreage control began. Holmwood had a processing plant at the time. It had 25 employees, 12 delivery trucks and sold 2,000 cases of eggs weekly as far east as New Orleans, as far north as Alexandria and as far west as Beaumont.

— Sweet Lake had a post office from 1908 to 1919. After that, the post office was established at Holmwood. When it closed, mail was delivered to Sweet Lake from Iowa. Now it’s delivered from the Bell City Post Office.

— In 1935, construction began on Hwy. 42, which would connect Sweet Lake and Creole, a vision of H. G. Chalkley, Sr., Thomas Cox and Charles Eagleson. Chalkey and Cox could not speak French. Eagleson could. The three took the petition to get the highway going through the marsh sometimes by horseback, sometimes by boat.

Fruge’s 1981 Home Demonstration Club tour begins: “Bea Demarest’s beauty shop is located in her home.” In 1981, Fruge knew all her neighbors’ names, not just Bea Demarest’s and could tell tour attendees who lived where as they passed by. That’s no longer the case. New folks have moved further inland from the coast since Hurricane Rita. But could she unravel the Sweet Lake, Grand Lake and Big Lake mystery?

Ask her where she’s spent her life and she’ll answer, Sweet Lake. Her father and husband farmed land belonging to the two Mr. Chalkley’s of Sweet Lake Land and Oil Company. Her mailing address is Bell City. She graduated from Big Lake High School, which was in Sweet Lake across the Intercoastal Canal. Until the 7th grade, she went to Sweet Lake Elementary on land donated by the first Mr. Chalkley of the Sweet Land Land and Oil Company. Those schools have combined, and it’s called Grand Lake today. Students

Fruge said she had a large graduating class of 12. She played basketball against other schools. There were no inside heated or air conditioned wood courts like today. They played outside on mostly dirt courts with a little gravel mixed in.

“I remember our team wore tennis shoes but those girls from Cameron and Hackberry, they would wear these big ol’ brown shoes and step all over us. Gosh, how that would hurt. But the one game I remember best is the time my friend went diving for the ball – it was a close game you see – and skinned up her knee so bad an old man hollered at her to come let him put his chew on her so it would stop bleeding. She did as she was told.”s

Fruge remembers when the REA came to Sweet Lake in 1943. In fact, she helped serve them the noonday meal, which was cooked by her mother and served in the LeBleu’s home.

As for irrefutable boundaries for Sweet Lake, Fruge said the best way to explain was to drive the route. (Look for details of that drive and a more thorough history of Sweet Lake Land & Oil Company in a future article.) She did share one of her most requested recipes.

Sweet Dough fig bars.

½ lb. *Oleo

3 eggs

½ t salt

2 t vanilla

2 t baking powder

¼ cup milk

About 4 cups of flour

This can be mixed and placed in the refrigerator a few hours before rolling it out and forming two rectangle shapes. Place fig or pear preserves down center of rectangle. Roll the long ends together and place the seam side down on the baking sheet. Sprinkle with a little sugar and bake at 375 about 12 minutes or until curst is slightly puffed and slightly brown.

What do you know about Oleo?

In Billie Fruge’s recipe, the first ingredient is Oleo, a term common in older recipes. In the same way that Sweet Lake and Grand Lake are used interchangeably, *oleo is another term a previous generation used to refer to margarine. Today, some people call margarine butter when they’re referring to that spreadable tub of yellow-colored margarine they spread on toast or biscuits. What they might not know is the heated battle that began in the 1870s between butter makers and oleomargarine producers.

Oleum is Latin for beef fat. Oleomargarine was the full name given to a butter substitute created from extracting a certain oil from beef fat that was combined with milk. Later, vegetable oils were added. The dairy industry was threatened by oleo and margarine production. It was spreadable, tasted good and – most important to the consumer — it was less expensive than butter.

States with a powerful dairy industry presence demanded laws be passed that they said were in the best interest of the consumer. Oleomargarine had to be labeled as such.

Even after it was marked as Oleo, it continued to be the choice of many consumers.

The federal government imposed a two-cent per pound tax on the product in The Margarine Act of 1886. The tax was quintupled in 1902. Many states made dying margarine illegal. By 1902, 32 states and 80 percent of the U.S. population lived under margarine color bans, according to the article, The Politics of Yellow: Butter vs. Margarine by Lisa Wade.

Some states prohibited the sale of the dyed product. The industry went from producing 20 million pounds to 100,000, according to the online story, The War on Margarine by Adam Young.

Margarine manufacturers sold margarine in plastic bags with a small bead of dye that the buyer could knead into the oleo to make it look more like butter.

The Second World War brought back the demand for margarine and gradually restrictions were lifted.

By 1950, margarine makers had their own lobbyists. Wisconsin was the last anti-margarine state and held out until 1967. In 1957 the sale of margarine exceeded the sale of butter and still does today, and – ironically — butter manufacturers use yellow dye to make their real butter a deeper shade of yellow like margarine.

(Billie)

Billie Fruge holds some of her oldest recipes she’s collected over the years from home demonstration club members and Cameron Fur and Wildlife Festival cookbooks.

(Sweet Lake)

The water may not be sweet today, but this area has had some sweet-producing oil wells and the land is still productive today.

(Sign…Earl, can you cut the highway sign out so my car can’t be seen?)

Look for a future, brief article that will show the boundaries of Sweet Lake and point out the highlights.

(Mix)

Margarine makers couldn’t sell oleomargarine products dyed yellow, but they could include a capsule with the product and let the consumer mix it in. Today butter makers use yellow dye.