From the Editor: Piece of history awaits local funding

This is no joke. But you’ve probably heard it before.
When I got to work early Thursday, there on my desk was some paperwork. The subject: efforts to fix up the Gathright House, the second-oldest existing building in Morgan City.
If you give up to $99, you’ll be a Benefactor. If you write a check with at least five digits, you become a Historian.
Hey. It’s a better deal than you’ll get at a university.
You could also be an Advocate, Patron, Curator or Conservationist.
The object of this longed-for largesse was moved from Bayou Ramos to what is now the dowtown are in 1855 under the supervision of Col. Zebulon Gathright, according to the written material provided.
The colonel opened the Gathright Grocery Emporium a year later. He also bought land from the Tiger Island Plantation because, the story goes, he knew what the approaching New Orleans, Opelousas and Great Western Railroad would mean for what was then the community of Brashear.
Gathrights continued to live in the house until 1952, and it stayed in the family until 1964.
Remember I said that you’ve probably heard this before? One of the items left on my desk was a piece from this newspaper about an effort by the Morgan City Historic Commission to move the house to Lake End Park and make it a visitor information center. The piece was published in May 1988.
The commission was asking for individual donations of $18.55. Adjusted for inflation, that would be $37.29 in today’s dollars, which isn’t as poetic as $18.55 but it’s still enough to make you a Benefactor in the more recent plan hatched by Save Historic Morgan City Inc. and the city government.
They have a four-phase plan: renovate the structure, renovate the interior, create a museum, and support and maintain the museum. The total price tag would be $105,000.
Please consider making a donation — $18.55 or otherwise, even if you’re a newcomer to Morgan City, and even if city history isn’t your thing. Here’s why.
In the 1970s and 1980s, cities as big as Detroit and Pittsburgh and as small as Arnaudville were forced to confront the fact that their central business districts, and the older, central portions of their cities generally, had become hollow cores. In the big cities, white flight and suburban sprawl were the villains.
In smaller towns, a different sort of sprawl was at work. Newcomers were looking for cheap land on the municipal fringes, and sometimes big box stores were moving to the edge of town, sometimes with breaks from the property taxes that mom and pop stores downtown were forced to shoulder.
Eventually, the property taxes took care of themselves. Many of the mom and pop stores closed, and property values went down as the plywood and iron bars went up over doors and windows.
Efforts to revitalize small towns have met with varying levels of success. My observation would be that in south Louisiana, they’ve worked pretty well. And they all have things in common.
They’ve turned their business districts into entertainment destinations at least one night a week with events like Morgan City’s Rhythms on the River. They’ve tried to lure good places to eat back into the central business district.
They’ve fixed up their public facilities. They’ve tried to turn their downtowns into arts and crafts colonies.
And, in ways large and small, they’ve turned their central cities into points of focus for local history.
In downtown Lafayette, where I worked as a reporter and editor for 15 years, you can see the historic Sans Souci building, which is now a home for an arts and crafts guild, as well as the beautiful murals of Robert Dafford, which touch on natural history and the Acadian immigration, among other topics.
Although the Gathright House really isn’t downtown now, it can play that history role by telling a fascinating story: the coming of the railroad; the timber industry; Civil War battles on land and water; the African American experience through the Civil War, Reconstruction and Jim Crow; the experience of immigrants all the way down through the Southeast Asian diaspora of the 1970s; the natural history of the local bayous and marshes; and, of course, the offshore energy industry.
And that slice doesn’t include the story of Indian culture here, a story that’s richer and more complex than most of us know.
The Gathright house has seen a century and a half of that story. Morgan City will be richer if the house continues to help tell those stories for generations to come.
Bill Decker is managing editor of The Daily Review.