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There's a fascinating essay written by a man in the 1880s who rode a horse from Covington to Franklin, TN, and he called it the Erie Journey because he was going through this vast virgin pine forest and the trees were so tall that their branches intermeshed.

And so no sunlight touched the ground.

So there were no small plants in the absence of small plants, there were no small animals and there was a very heavy padding of pine needles so that his horse made no sound as he walk through this dark and gloomy, primeval forest drive in any given direction and see Tammany, and you'll most likely cross at least one of the myriad of bridges that span the streams rivers and bayous of the parish, not to mention Lake Pontchartrain.

This network of waterways is the key to the history and development of the area.

It is water that has defined the relationship between the North Shore and its neighbors, opening the parish to outside influence.

On the flip side, it is water that is maintained the degree of separation, thereby preserving the area's unique cultural identity.

We would be another Mary, except for the way that physical body of water protects us.

And besides being a great source of beauty and enjoyment for for people on both sides of the lake, it protects us from being consumed by the Greater New Orleans area.

The French who settled the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain in the late 1600s called it Latrell Coated du Lac or the other side of the lake.

And more recent times in the main North Shore has been enthusiastically adopted by the Media Tourist Commission and most of the 191,000 or so residents that called Saint Tammany Parish home.

The term North Shore is problematic for some parish natives, however, who are bemused by what they see as a geographically inaccurate New Orleans centric term.

For the 455,000 or so acres of lake marshland, alluvial riverbeds and timberland that make up saint Tammany Parish as one old timer in the rolling hills of Folsom declared, I don't live on a shore.

Karen Courtney, a third generation publisher, of the Saint Tammany Former a weekly newspaper covering the activities of the parish since 1874, is one who has wrestled with the term professionally as well as personally.

I moved away for a while and I came back in 1985 and all of a sudden people talked about the North Shore and at first it kind of bothered me because I just, it just seems that it's so sort of artificial.

And now as I understand it, there are people who object to the it's not just Saint Tammany Parish, it's Washington Parish.

Tangible Hope Parish, it's the entire I guess what we traditionally refer to as the Florida parishes are referred to as the North Shore.

Here at the paper we had to deal with just how to, how to deal with the term grammatically.

And so we made a decision to make it be two words lowercase.

We have chosen to to to use it as a description of a location and not a place in and of itself.

When I was a boy in New Orleans, you went away on the weekend and you either went to the coast or you went across the lake.

And it was called the phrase was across the lake.

And I think the North Shore really is a product of the causeway because we think about the north end of the college where the south end of the causeway, Saint Tammany is, is a collection of distinct communities.

Those communities have maintained and do have distinct kinds of identities and things they're known for stress that we actually, you know, go from Covington to Madisonville to enjoy the river, or do we go to Folsom to get us more pastoral kind of lifestyle?

While the lines between the towns that sprang up across Saint Tammany in the 19th century have blurred with time, the loss of local landmarks and the influx of national change.

The differences between these communities are perceptible and steeped in history.

The sleepy town of Larcom, named after an 18th century Tar Inn pitch entrepreneur, is best known for its early Indian and French roots.

When St Tammany Parish was established in 1811, Governor Claimers named it after a well-respected Delaware Indian chief, a conciliar artery gesture to a fairly large Choctaw Indian population living along Bayou La Comb and Bayou Liberty.

A Catholic mission was established in La Comb in the 1800s by Father Adrian Emmanuel Roquette, a priest who lived among the Choctaws Father Puckett nickname Chowder.

Emma or he who was like a Choctaw, wrote extensively about the Indians and even compiled a dictionary of the Choctaw language by 1910 most of the North Shore's Choctaws have been relocated to Oklahoma by the government.

The few who stayed on in the parish were a colorful presence on Saturdays and Sundays the Indians would come.

The Choctaw who lived out between the village of Lake Home and the lake would come in and they would stand by the side of the road with stacks of baskets and boards that were covered with Spanish moss, and they'd put soft shell crabs on top, or they had little jelly glasses filled with ground sassafras fillet.

We would buy the baskets and there were some old pear trees on our property and we'd pay $0.50 for the Indian baskets and then pick the pears, take them to friends in New Orleans, and people would cook the players and throw the baskets away.

And of course today they're collector's items.

Well, when I was growing up, well, all I remember was the last fragment of the Indian to around here.

Like the Johnsons, they stayed, they didn't go.

But this is what I can remember about the Indians making baskets.

And my dad bought a whole lot of baskets and set up to when Lyndon Johnson was president on a peninsula that lives between Bayou Bound for kind by and Liberty East of Lake Home is a community of three to 400 people with names like Pechakucha Fossey in Toronto and Du Bazaar, who are the living legacy of the confluence of Native Americans, French, African and Spanish, who settled the area one member of this group is Edwin Coosa, a Bayou Vinson native whose great grandmother, Adele Dubuisson, was an emancipated slave.

He is also related to Francois, cousin of Lincoln, who in the early 1800s, was the largest single landholder in Saint Tammany Parish.

There's a group of people there who are known as Creoles, descendants of free men of color, and they speak this unique language, which a lot of people call a patois, which is about 80% French and 20% a mixture of Spanish and English.

That's the language that was used primarily between Mama and Daddy when they did not want us to know what was going on.

But they, what they did and we were catching on.

You know, I live in the home that I was born and raised in, which is over a hundred years, in fact.

And the neighborhood that I lived in, it was only Creole.

If you wanted a Creole, you didn't live in that neighborhood.

A lot of the children in the neighborhood, they said their parents didn't want them around when they spoke Creole.

But it was different in my family.

My parents let us learn the language, which I'm thankful for back over there, has a cemetery back in there, do beso on cemetery.

And the only way you used to be able to get to it was by boat.

And when they had a funeral, they put the casket in between two boats on a boat and paddle it up the bayou or down the bayou to the cemetery.

In a unique tradition, All Saints Day is observed by Catholic Creoles in the local area with a blessing and candle lighting ceremony with other customs in the Creole language fast disappearing, there has been an organized effort by Edwin Kooser, Doris Tura, Garneau and others to pass their heritage on to the children of the area in an attempt to maintain that culture in the language down here, we have started a club which was Creole Sony Meat, which means Creole Unlimited.

And we have classes and we have a play which is done in Creole, and it involves children.

We were the two gossipy ladies that sat on the front porch on Rocker, and the kids would pass by and say, Hey, you know, and we would speak back to them.

And then we had Edwin then Feldt and Firestone were going to work, and Edwin would say, Well, we'll pull it off.

And which is saying, I have to go to work.

And that's, say, hockey quality.

Why?

Why do you have to go to work?

And he said, We'll form a multi team, will form my Maggio Libertad, and we'll put up for Margie.

He said, Well, my wife likes pretty things and my children has to eat in 1905, the railroad came to Lake, home from Slidell, giving access to the timberlands of the area.

Marjorie Davis Moran, granddaughter of John H. Davis, who owned one of the Combs three sawmills, is a docent at the Luke Home Rural Museum, which is housed in a two room school that was built and donated to McComb by her grandfather.

In 1912, daddy was in the lumber business.

They had the Davis Wood Lumber Company and my grandfather had a large steam mill down on the bayou here in McComb, which is about 30 city blocks from where we are now.

Well, with the lumber business had a lot of bootlegging going on.

The man they would come around are probation agents.

They don't have too at the time would come by and they would always stay at our house and sleep in the bed with the bootleg liquor under the bed and you know they didn't know it I guess for the past 25 years, McComb has hosted the North Shore's longest running festival, the La Comb Crab Festival.

Three days of food music and fun, the proceeds of which benefit the nonprofit organizations in the small town.

The school board agreed to donate this building.

The oldest school building in the parish as a museum if the organization could support insurance, utilities and put a new roof on it.

So the proceeds of that 4th of July festival in 1976 went toward this building and it was such a rip roaring success that the newly formed Chamber of Commerce put a committee together, decided to have an ongoing festival our very first year 1976 we estimated about 5000 people came to the park.

It has grown from that little group to about 25,000 people over the Friday, Saturday and Sunday, now held under the centuries old live oaks of Lincoln Park Crab Fest has been named one of the top 20 events in the southeast, drawing visitors from all over the region and putting Larcom back on the map.

And one of the original organizers and I'm the Treasurer and have been for years and it's just been great fun.

It's a lot of work and some time just before the festival takes place, you wonder, what am I doing this for?

But as it comes together, it's all worth it.

In Saint Tammany, all roads and a couple of rivers seem to run to.

Covington, retired chief judge of the First Circuit Court of Appeal and author of A History of Saint Tammany.

Frederick S Ellis, the head of navigation on the river, was here right at the foot of Columbia.

History and in addition to that, the military road before that had been in the old Choctaw Trail and all Andrew Jackson's man did was improve it.

That road came in and then the this road, Highway 25, used to be the road home of the old Mississippi and that came down to come about a block from where we are right now is the old colonial straight landing.

And that was the head of navigation on the Boga Falana River.

So ships would come from New Orleans, enter the shifting to river, and then come up the Volga for a while and stop at the Columbia Street landing.

And so Covington became both an entrepreneur of goods from the South Shore.

It also became a distribution point for goods that were produced to vast areas of the hinterland above Covington.

Cotton, corn, sweet potatoes, pork, some tobacco.

And these things would be taken to Covington, then put on the schooner was going back to New Orleans first established in 1813 as Wharton for its founder John Wharton Collins.

Years later, the state legislature granted the town a charter and changed its name to Covington against the wishes of John Collins.

This was a great health resort in 1880s they did a survey that proved that Covington was the healthiest place in the United States and people would buy houses and come down here and for the air the ozone.

Now you think ozone today is being a layer up there but that's not what it was in those days.

You look up in an old dictionary, you'll see that ozone was the emanation from pine trees.

First they cut all trees down so it stopped being so healthy.

Covington was made the parish seat in 1829 and the old two storey brick courthouse and Boston Street, where lawyers and businessmen gathered, was where the action was in a thriving downtown.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Saint Tammany Parish was a quiet agricultural area that was not very thickly populated.

The towns were very small.

Covington was the largest community in the parish on Saturday.

It's the people from the rural areas would come in, sometimes drawn in horse drawn wagons, and they would park those wagons, much as they had since the founding of Covington.

In the ox.

Lots oxen were a preferred or a common mode of transporting goods.

So much so that our public parking lots in Covington are referred to as ox lots, which is sort of disconcerting to people when you try to give them instructions about where to park.

But as I understand it, when the town fathers of Covington, the founders, laid out a plan for the city, they set aside certain pieces of ground sort of in the center of blocks where the oxen could be pa retired Professor C Howard Nichols is remembered with great fondness for his years at Southeastern University in Hammond, but he may be better known as one of the Nichols from Nichols Toy Store on Columbia Street in Covington.

Nichols toy store became something of a local rallying point for generations of young people.

And I still meet people who, when they hear my name, say, Did you own a toy store?

But it was a very small town.

Everybody knew everybody.

And one of the most interesting things about the Maya bringing after we came to Covington was that everyone in the business community really operated a family business, and everyone in the family was expected to work in the business.

And everyone knew all the other families who occupied the other businesses along the street.

H.J.

Smith and Sons General Store and Museum is the oldest merchant in Covington.

This thoroughly unique store was started in 1876 as a cotton brokerage business by the grandfather of the current proprietor Red Smith.

The establishment is run by the current senior Smith and his five sons defies description part outdoor outfitter, part antique reproduction gift shop, part army surplus store and part hardware store.

But what's really unusual is the museum a top field trip pick for Saint Tammany Parish school kids who come to see the legendary petrified rat.

I found a petrified rack up in the attic and I brought him down and I didn't have anything to put him on that I could handle.

So I put him in a frying pan.

And for some reason the girls come in and they're fascinated by that petrified rat.

And one day I had a group, tour group in there, and one of the girls said, Where's the rat?

And I said, I don't know, it was missing.

So she said, I came all the way down here where my friends to see the rat is gone.

She started to cry.

I said, What?

What is it to fascinate you about a petrified rat?

That up to this day I've never gotten an answer to that, but I finally found a rat, and a rat is back in its original position and often overlooked facet of Covington is its appreciation for the arts.

Painters and writers have been drawn to the community for decades.

Famed novelist Walker Percy did all of his major writing in Covington.

Percy wrote the foreword to Frederick Ellis's history of Saint Tammany, and the two men were close friends for many years.

Walker was kind of a come here, but he came here in 1947.

Where else are ignored?

And while he was here and that's what he liked about it, you put a dog and truck drive down the post office in the morning and get mail and nobody even noticed.

And he's here.

His haircut, my local barber and Walker says, one day's in there and he says, Doc, Doc, what do you do?

Walker Well, he says, Yeah, I write.

He says, Yeah, I know about that.

Well, what do you do The town of Madisonville sits at the end of the old Choctaw Trail on the first piece of high ground on the West Bank of the Chipmunk to River about two miles north of Lake Pontchartrain, founded in 1814 from a 1798 Spanish land grant made to one Baptist Veum, the community was formerly known as Corky.

After the plentiful shells found along the riverbank, the chipmunk to river's 350 feet across and 35 feet deep in Madisonville, which accounts for its importance, is a navigable link between New Orleans and Saint Tammany Parish.

In the early 1800s, sloops and schooners were replaced by steamboats which carried freight and passengers across the lake to New Orleans.

The New Camellia was the most famous of the steamboats and featured a large dining room and a dance hall.

David Karen Babb, director of the Lake Pontchartrain Basin Maritime Museum in Madisonville at the Natural Resources here, which attracted people here, you know, led to a somewhat comfortable frontier because of the the the rich agriculture of the area, the swamps for furs and wildlife, and then the bayous and deeper rivers leading to the Gulf.

A lot of materials went through here on its way to New Orleans because that was before we had railways and roads East and west of Madisonville.

And also a lot of raw materials were were made here.

For instance, the bricks, a lot of bricks that built New Orleans in particular came from the North Shore.

What's neat about our own site here is that it was formerly the Yankee Shipyard.

So the ground that this building was built on once built many wooden ships and employed thousands of people here on the North Shore.

We've got photos of 300 footers that they built during World War One, and the boats themselves were too deep to actually be launched directly into the defunct river.

So they would build barges, would help float them higher until they could be dragged out into the Gulf on a smaller scale.

A lot of the early settlers used skiffs and pirogue and loggers and even up to Biloxi schooner size 70 footers.

A lot of that boat building activity occurred on the banks of the defunct the river and today we're helping to preserve and promote those early traditions and techniques through our boat building class here at the museum.

The boats built at the museum will be on display at the Madisonville Wooden Boat Festival, a colorful event that is always held in September the annual two day event attracts a fleet of wooden boats from the north and south shores and from as far away as Canada in 1834, Bernard de Maroni de Mandeville, a wealthy, French educated New Orleanian, became the North Shore's first real estate developer when he subdivide 22 chunk of lakefront property and created the town of Mandeville.

The development was a success.

Marina auctioned off $80,000 worth of lots and three days in New Orleans.

Melanie, who also owned Fountain Blue Plantation, which is now Fontainebleau.

Blue Park, quickly built a hotel and a gambling casino and arranged a regular run between New Orleans and Mandeville on the steamboat Black Hall.

Joan Doolittle is the fourth generation of her family to live in Mandeville, where they have been involved in the marine industry since before the Civil War.

My great grandfather and his Spanish wife came from the Isle of Ibiza, in their own ship and came to Saint Tammany Parish, and over time he owned a number of schooners that he would have used for freight, carrying the products of St Tammany into the city for sale, like timber and brick and firewood and things like that.

So for three generations the men in our family had a side business of of freight with schooners.

My grandfather had a grocery store, he Prieto and son, he had cattle, he had a sawmill at some point.

So I think it was pretty common for people to have other sources of income because in the the winter all of the restaurants wouldn't have anybody in them.

So you had to be very creative in what you did.

My mother tells the story around 1933 of 34 it was my father's job to sink the three or four schooners that the primitive family still had.

By that time there was no use for them.

The railroads had come in and the roadways were better and you could get to the city quicker by going by truck or by railroad.

So his his hope was that one day that he would thank them and, and that preserves them and that maybe one day he would pull them up and, and do them over, which of course never came.

But so those, those schooners are still in under water and that you found a river Traditionally, Mandeville has been a place, it's been a resort place, a place to get away from the stresses of a big city.

And in a sense, we're still that way, even though we don't have hotels now.

But sailing is a big industry now.

We have probably 600 boats in Mandeville mainly sailboats.

And there are people from all over South Louisiana and a few out-of-staters who come here to sail.

A number of all Mandeville original buildings still exist.

The magnificent homes that were some are havens for wealthy New Orleanians, the lakefront restaurants under new names and management even Primrose Grocery, which is now a popular eatery.

Another of Mandeville landmarks thinning is the Dew Drop Dance Hall, a small wooden building built in 1895 in an African-American neighborhood.

The building was the meeting hall for a benevolent group, as well as a popular site for dances in the 1920s and 1930s is that I do for a young girl.

Regina Gordon, who was born in Mandeville 100 years ago, frequented the Dew drop in her youth business and dances down here every Monday night.

But it used to come from New Orleans and now play music in in men.

The view is when they say that the party was coming to town and everybody would be trying to get their nickels together.

Some families 15 and 16 over from one call.

They come to here buddy Petey my brother book on the on the saint Tammany and the Madisonville with nothing cross the lake going in New Orleans on the boat and they'd always have a band playing music and some people would be dancing and things so it used to be a lot of fun.

But then in a white kitchen when it first started it was just a little building right on the corner of Robert and front that was back in the days when Slidell had two policemen and city marshal.

They worked the daytime and had a night marshal who drove a flat out at night.

And we didn't have radios back then, those days in a station.

So here are a row of light bulbs with numbers behind them.

And whenever that light came on above, the cop knew that that was his order.

But at one end of it, they had a red light and a red light would only be turned on.

When someone called in to the telephone operator says, we need a policeman, then a pole, the operator would plug into the white kitchen and tell him to turn on the red light.

So they turn on the red light.

And when the town light Marshall was riding around, you see the red light?

He'd come into the white kitchen and find out whether they needed are police.

There's enough interest in the history of Slidell to support to Slidell museums is one run by the city's Cultural and Public Affairs Department and one by a group of native Slidell Lions who are passionate about collecting memorabilia here.

From the beginnings of the town, this group of enthusiastic locals calls themselves the Guardians of Slidell History or gosh, Charles Fritschi, curator of the Gosh Museum, grew up in Eastern Saint Tammany and is the nephew of Homer Fritchey, who was mayor of Slidell for 32 years.

The city of Slight actually started about 1882 when a railroad was constructed between New Orleans and Meridian as part of a railroad running from New Orleans up to the Ohio River and learned from earlier railroad experience.

They would have to creosote all the piling used in saltwater, brackish water.

So what the first activity they did here was to build a crystal plant which lasted from 1882 until about 1960.

Fritz Selman basically set up the economic justification for the city by putting in a huge industrial brickyard because he'd been brickyard going back 150 years before that.

But he brought industrial power to the area and this attracted a large number of, of workers and their families, the settlements and later on the Kenya floods and other families built a shipyard too.

But the timber industry lasted from about 1885 until 1910.

By the time all the trees were cut, the virgin trees were cut and shipbuilding when the shipbuilding lasted as long as the trees lasted, and after that they went to steel, shipbuilding, slydell may seem like the Eastern Annex to the parish, but like its cousins to the west, it has well-honed survival skills that have allowed it to pull through a series of economic booms and bust over the years.

From brick making to space age technology.

Slydell has seen it all.

Nasser was a big part in slowdowns expansion after the 1960s.

The population went from something very 6000 in 1960 to 15,010 years later, and then 20,000 and so on.

When the challenger exploded, NASA just canceled all its local contracts.

I mean, nationwide, he canceled his contracts for a year and a half while they investigated and made things safe.

For people to go up again.

And Slydell at that point was so dependent on Nasser that people had to go off to other aerospace manufacturers Rosie to Pastorate as the spunky president of Gosh, who supplies a lot of the firsthand memories for the museum, including tales of her adventurous slideshow grandmother who traveled the area in the 1920s in her own private airplane.

My, my grandmother had a horse and buggy and she got around and that my uncle had a motorcycle and then he went to have aviation was starting then and I'd say in the twenties and so my grandmother and my uncle got together and bought an airplane and that was the first airplane in this area.

She had to have an airplane because she liked to go to the well and shopping.

My uncle stayed here with my grandmother and had developed their film, which very few people knew.

That was the first I here and that was the big thing in 1927, 1928, 1929 I, I was nine years old, so my Christmas present was to ride the airplane around fly though in 1887, an excited crowd of about a thousand people gathered in a beta springs to greet the first excursion train to arrive from New Orleans.

Approximately 500 passengers had plunk down $1 that day for a round trip ticket on the East Louisiana railroad, traveling two and a half hours each way up until World War Two, when car transportation provided people with more vacation options, visitors poured into a of springs the spot, according to Mayor Brian Gowland, which seeing Tammany's North meets Cinque Tammany's South.

The word to beat itself is taking from a Choctaw Indian word, which means the source of a stream.

And the Indians live actually in this area.

Where we are now.

And this spring was considered by them to be beneficial in that it had medicinal properties to health giving properties.

There was a ferry landing at Mandeville, and a boat like the Susquehanna would ferry people from New Orleans to Mandeville, and the train would meet them on a dock in Lake Pontchartrain and would come up to drop people off here in a beat up the town.

Was a very active community.

It didn't have a large native population, but the population would swell to as much as 10,000 people on any given weekend.

In order to escape the the ravages of yellow fever and other diseases that occurred more frequently during the summer months.

People would escape the city and come and stay in the springs and other places on the North Shore in order to to live in what they considered to be a healthier climate.

It was believed that because of the greenery that there was a higher amount of oxygen in the air and that the air that people was breathing was actually more healthy.

Doctors would prescribe people with respiratory ailments such as tuberculosis to come to a beat the springs to to be cured.

The two story gazebo that still stands at the site of the spring was built for the Mississippi Pavilion at the 1884 World's Fair in Audubon Park.

It was purchased by the Portsmouth family and brought to a B two springs as a tourist attraction, a boardwalk connected the pavilion to the Long Branch Hotel, a local landmark and functioning hotel until it was destroyed by fire.

Today, a beetle is on an upswing with a population of 2000 people nearly doubled in size from when the mayor took office in 1990 Somewhere between the Bennett Bridge Road and say Ramsay, there was a change in the in the feel that you got here you go south of that is kind of Catholic relaxed and you go north is kind of Protestant or not so relaxed.

It's fitting that at this invisible line of demarcation described by Judge Ellis stands a local landmark that had both religious and secular significance.

St Gertrude's convent, which today serves as a private reception hall, sank Arches Convent, which was located on Highway 25 between Covington and Folsom, was just sort of a mysterious place to me as a Protestant, but my family availed as did many in the area, availed ourselves of the laundry services that they offer there.

And they were incredible.

And I, I grew up sleeping on these wonderful laundered sheets that have been starched and ironed by the nuns who ran the laundry, I assume, to help support their convent.

And when I went off to college and I no longer had that at my disposal, it was kind of like, Welcome to the world.

In 1904, Folsom was established at the end of the line of the Green Law Railroad, 12 miles north of Covington.

But the village actually had its humble beginnings with a group of hearty Anglo Saxon homesteaders who moved into the area beginning in the 1870s.

Some of the early families were cause Finlaysons Yates garrets Blackwells and Willie's names, which can still be heard in Folsom today.

These were mainly subsistence farmers who raised sheep, cattle, hogs, chickens and an array of fresh produce.

Evelyn Pittman, one of the Blackwell plan, remembers how livestock were raised on the open range without fences.

The cattle would just roam the woods, you know, and get on the highways at night and sleep because there were many cars coming through the sheep were would sleep under the church and in one would start servicing and chase them out.

And you could hear the heads bump as the rent was nice and cool.

And they, you know, if my daddy was a farmer, a little farm and cross a river over there and I think he had 17 acres, the farm he trapped in one hour time and bad weather and what not fish from the river was one of the main foods plus the wildlife squirrels and rabbits we ate.

And as we grew up cotton was planted.

But the real cash crop of the community was timber and timber byproducts which were sent in wagons to Covington, then by boat to New Orleans.

Convoys of ox drawn wagons loaded with bales of cotton or other goods traveled south at a leisurely three miles per hour.

The sole surplus factories old barrels of sirup they sold tar from the yellow pond.

My dad did take a load of three barrels in the morning, is about seven miles from Covington right here, and he could make two trips a day.

That was 28 miles.

He'd travel and but it took him, took him all day.

Each bar was worth $3 a barrel for either sirup or tar they used the oxen to go into the marshy places.

Those oxen could go in there, see a horse and a mule.

They won't go in.

What they call the oxen can and will the great saw the long time they could come through here and cut the virgin timber.

So I was about six years old.

And I remember it because my dad had new teams in there picking it up.

Folsom was laid out by Mr. Sanderson, who was an ancestor president, Judge Donald Sanderson, and he built a brick works up there and now had a hotel and a station, and they really thought there was going to be a tremendous future up there.

And they they elected officers.

They had a mayor and a town council.

And by the time the first elections came up, they forgot to have them.

And the town just sort of disappeared as a functioning municipal organization until sometime in the fifties, I guess.

At the height of its commercial days, Folsom had several stores, a telegraph office, livery, stable sawmills, cotton gins, lumber and turpentine mills.

A freight train stopped in Folsom once a day.

A passenger train came in twice a day.

Every two weeks, the train offered an excursion to New Orleans for $1.

The arrival of the train was entertainment for the isolated community.

We would go and wait for the train to come so we could see who was coming in on the train.

You know, we may not have anybody that we knew, but that was a nice place to just go in and be really your friends.

As trucks and tractors replace horses and mules, Pitman Services soon became an institution owned and operated through the years by three generations of the Pittman family.

The station is still going strong, and we always laugh about my my father now.

He built furniture, too.

In the back, later and later years.

And we always like I said, he had the first self-service station because people would drive up and they'd pump their own gas and go and put the money in on the desk, you know, and he'd be back in the back, never come out.

They had this old bench on the front.

People sit there day old tables and drink coffee.

We got a little social gathering for people, simple pleasures like church socials and romps in the river filled the leisure time with the younger cept my grandparents would bring me to Folsom, and you'd go to the diocese grocery store, which was a great place ah, the local library that was run by women, IDC Pittman, who was just an incredible person, and the small church that they went to there, and that was their life.

We had the the little creek run through lamppost remote place.

We had a good swim home from the about mark before we even got warm.

Enough with the women and with swim till November.

Little Beauvoir, who is growing up, the church has had all the baptize and now all the churches in this whole area.

They would baptize in the summertime and my uncle kept the schedule so he wouldn't have to church if it one done.

We had orders to back up from swimming put our clothes on, keep our mouth closed till the baptism got finished in the people there, I guess when I was growing up the time I can remember till I was maybe 15, 16 years old.

So more people get baptized than anybody and when the pine forests were completely cut, the lumber companies failed and the transfer to Folsom was abandoned, businesses closed and people struggled to find new ways to make a living through creative use of its natural resources and stubborn resistance.

To change this one stoplight Village has managed to maintain its bucolic lifestyle in today.

Folsom, population 505, supports two thriving industries plant nurseries and horse forms.

In the early 1700s when the eclipse of Indians Vikings steam first supplied Bienville with fresh meat for his men in New Orleans, the seeds of a symbiotic relationship between the north and south shores of Lake Pontchartrain were planted.

The exchange of goods and services was like opening Pandora's Box.

However, with no way to stop the flow back and forth across the lake of ships, lumber, bricks and people.

Once it had started the North Shore is nothing if not adaptable, however, and as one opportunity for economic independence would be lost, like the depletion of the forest another moneymaking scheme was waiting in the wings.

There's always been an ability of, I think our people over here to make a living out of what we have and now it's land and development, you know, and, and, and that's that's fine.

We've taken care of our own through our own resources and through the, the fruit of the land, wherever it was.

At that point in time, there was a big push in the twenties to make us the next Florida in terms of the citrus industry.

And there were huge stories in the paper about trainloads of citizens contingen parts of Florida to study the citrus industry.

And there was an orange festival for a while.

And then Orange Queen to my knowledge, that was never a huge success.

I don't think it was.

The weather was conducive.

The other major industry was the reduction of tongue oil, and there was an oriental tree that was introduced in the parish between World War One and World War Two.

The trees grew very rapidly and the nuts were harvested and crushed and they produced an oil and it was used in the making of paint.

And with the onset of world War two, when Oriental sources of Tung Oil weren't available, the Tong industry became very important then you could drive from Covington to Bogalusa in the spring time and see nothing but miles and miles of beautiful pink blossoms that would eventually turn into the tongue lights upon the fall weather factors contributed to the demise of the tongue oil business in the late 1950s.

Self-sufficient or not, trips to New Orleans to shop on business or to go to Charity Hospital, the area's closest medical facility until Saint Tammany Parish Hospital opened were unavoidable all day or all night affairs at the Watson Williams Bridge or Highway 11 bridge was built in 1928 and the bridge in 1930 31.

Soon as those bridges were built all the traffic to the north and the east came to slide.

L Even before the bridges you had cars coming over by Ferris my dad he loved the opera, he loved the, the classical music.

And every other weekend we'd go to New Orleans and also get to New Orleans was to go through slide L Cross the Wrigley's and the Chef on a ferry.

The ferries were pull across the regular season.

The chef would a cable, a motorized cable, the tide through the chef lots of time was running real fast and we didn't get out of the theater till maybe 130 or 2:00 in the morning.

We had to come across and lots of times it was high waters across the highways crossing the Louisiana marsh.

It slide ill. Then there was no bridges.

The bridges had not been built yet.

And by the time we got to the ferries, I was pretty well upset about the the tide.

And the ferries were old and a lot of the decking was missed.

Our ferries and you see big holes and you had you had runways for automobiles they had to be real careful not to get off the runway.

And what I'd that's where I learned to pray at night.

The mosquitoes wait for the ferry because it only would take about three or four, maybe five cars.

At that time.

It wasn't very large.

And you had to sit and wait your turn.

And the mosquitoes were chewed up alive, wet, waiting.

And when I got out of high school, I went to work for a nursery and she started driving this delivery truck at least once a week.

I went, y'all go 25 and hit Highway 90 or 190 through Slidell, stop at White Kitchen for my coffee break and a piece of pie go on.

Steady at 40 miles an hour.

It took about 2 hours from here to New Orleans and you didn't speed because the road wasn't good enough to speed on and the vehicles were not made for the speed.

As the automobile became increasingly important people started talking about building a bridge across Lake Pontchartrain.

In the 1920s, there was a meeting at the old Southern Hotel and a group of civic leaders pledged $300,000 to sponsor efforts to secure the building of a of a bridge across Lake Pontchartrain connecting New Orleans with the North Shore.

The plan was very sophisticated.

They were going to dredge the bottom of the lake, create a series of islands build bridges connecting the islands, subdivide the islands and sell the lands to pay the cost of the project as picturesque as the original plan sounds, the unimpeded 24 mile bridge it was built 30 years later is an engineering feat that still holds the record for the world's longest bridge over water.

Robert Lambert, general manager of the Greater New Orleans Expressway Commission, has a long association with the causeway dating back to 1971.

When he started as a bridge patrolman, the first van was opened in 1956.

The estimated cost was in the area of $40 million for the first man and it took about a year and a half to build.

I still marvel at the the fact that they had the vision and the courage to to try to put something like this together, but they did.

And yes today that wouldn't sound like a lot of money.

You'd probably be talking about ten times that the unique thing about the causeway that made it fairly easy to build was the pre stressed concrete company was right there on the north shore and they would build and construct the slabs and all the necessary parts and barge them out.

So it was really a pretty simple method.

Once you got going.

Joan Doolittle's father Jay Clay Prieto, was mayor of Mandeville for 20 years.

Both spans of the causeway opened during his administration.

I was about 12 in 1956 when the causeway opened up.

And I remember our conversations over the dinner table at noon because in those days you ate at noon, I would hear my father talking that this was going to bring change.

And I remember him saying that some of the officials from from Jefferson Parish said Clay made a saint here and he's never going to be the same.

You're going to get all the problems that we have.

I remember us getting all dressed up and we were on the causeway on on the North Shore, and one of the big deals in our family was that my sister was among the younger the teenagers of the town who were asked to to throw rose petals as the official from Jefferson Parish came over.

And she did not really want to throw rose petals.

And that was a big issue in my family.

And my mother was very nervous still here that that it was important for her to throw the rose petals as the officials came over.

People couldn't wait to to get their cars on the causeway and get to where you can't see the other side.

Regina Gordon tells a different version about the first people to cross the causeway.

My mother in law and my husband was the first one to cross that bridge.

We were named in the news, but we didn't know we was the first one.

We'd have a chance that two people would wake on the bridge.

We'd get a hot meal.

My brother was a cook and a waiter and my husband was a cook in the waiting to take in the food.

Could people could get a hot meal the bridge would need and they couldn't go clean your cross and had to own a barge and take in almost immediately after the opening of the first span, traffic engineers predicted the need for a second span.

They are very accurate at projecting future growth and traffic, and they were projecting that obviously once the causeway opened and people got to experience the North Shore, that we would indeed see a great growth certainly in population, but also in transportation trucks and goods.

So it wasn't long before the projections began to pan out, and it was blatantly obvious that they had to have a second span and also for safety factors and other reasons the second span was opened in 1969.

I attended the 1969 opening.

I had the privilege of having my father precede me out here.

He was the chairman of the causeway back in the early sixties and he was very active at the time in getting the second span built a series of horrible accidents, fiery crashes and barge disasters in the 1970s and early 1980s alarmed Causeway commuters and led to sweeping safety reforms and reduce marine traffic, thanks in large part to Robert Lambert's emphasis on bridge safety.

Confidence is up and so is ridership which amounts over 30,000 cars each day as it is right now they have projected sometime in the next 15 to 20 years we're going to be at capacities that would call for something to change either more another bridge or some other type of transportation.

But you have to wait and see.

When the first van opened, civic leaders on the North Shore shared their views on the causeway in a special edition of The Saint Tammany Farmer published on August 31st 1956, one police officer wrote I believe that the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway will have a powerful effect on the economy of Saint Tammany Parish.

It will break its present semi isolation and that one fact alone will change our way of life.

Another cautions people that besides the benefits of the bridge, there will come many problems with which we are not familiar with growth in Saint Tammany Parish up 32% from the past decade, local sentiment about the impact of the causeway ranges from nostalgia for a bygone era to cautious optimism for the future.

The causeway was huge.

It's an engineering marvel and it opened up a whole new world for us.

And it ended a world in some ways.

But it's certainly, I think probably is the lifeline that has kept our community, the communities of the North Shore going.

Its popularity was almost immediate.

All of us on the North Shore saw it as a way to go to Canal Street and shop and maybe go to lunch at Galatoire's and and come home easily rather than driving through Slidell and around the lake.

It never occurred to us that people in New Orleans were going to use it as a way of coming over here.

And the results have been demographic explosion in Saint Tammany Parish and of course, the quiet country life of croaking frogs and crickets and smog free air is now part of our past Saint Tammany B.C before the causeway.

Progress is progress.

And you can't get away from it.

I don't resent the people that come over here.

I like it better when the population is 26,000 and I do now and is 200,000 but the nothing you can do about that.

And I just hope that the people who come here come to understand what a wonderful place this really is.

Saying town is in good enough shape lately.

Like I say, I got off the horse and wagon and of the car and I flew through the jets and everything.

So, so the world moves on and this is, this is one of the better places you can lay out, right?

The day I think that's how people looked on this air on the other side of the lake, like it's the other side of the world.

Oh, it was I had a wonderful childhood.

I really enjoy.

I guess that's why I don't want to leave Slidell.

I love my life.

Yeah, it was great.

I mean, swimming wherever you whenever you got a little overheated, you got rivers all around colleges.

You know, you go down to the trestle and dove off to Russell.

My mom's sister, Margaret Hussain, was the first principal of that one room schoolhouse.

Probably the come here have a greater appreciation for what makes St Tammany a good place to live because they they have lived elsewhere.

People take time to enjoy the water, to look at the wildlife, to listen to the birds, relish their friends and celebrate life North Shore Stories is made possible by the WUIS Producer Circle, a group of generous contributors dedicated to the support of channel dubs, local productions, corporate sponsorship is provided by Fleet Core Technologies, a provider of fleet card and related information services for business fleets and petroleum retailers, and buy locally owned American Bank and trust large enough to serve and small enough to care.