MUCH ABOUT MOON PIES

Yum! Yum!

Last month I spent several days in Chattanooga, Tennessee and accompanied my daughter and her husband on a shopping spree. Mostly, I watched them shop, but when we went into a bookstore, my shopping spirit suddenly came alive. I picked up a copy of David Magee’s MoonPie: Biography of an Out-of-This-World Snack and began reading about one of the snacks that has been consumed by millions of southerners since a recipe was created for the pies in 1929 at the Chattanooga Bakery.

My experience with MoonPies dates back to fishing trips in the late 1950’s, which I'll mention in a subsequent blog. MoonPies were an indispensable part of lunch when we floated the Bogue Chitto River fly fishing near Franklinton, Louisiana. We didn’t take along RC Cola, but I’m told that this drink was a popular and inexpensive complement to the pie. During the 50’s the song “Gimmee an RC Cola and a MoonPie” became popular and celebrated the success of this inexpensive workman’s lunch.

The MoonPie is a dessert sandwich that consists of two moon-shaped graham cracker cookies, filled with marshmallow and coated in chocolate, banana, or coconut. It isn’t a high fat concoction but the sugar in it is deliciously high. It was first concocted by a chef at Chattanooga Bakery in Chattanooga, Tennessee following the instruction of Earl Mitchell, a salesman for the bakery, who had learned from miners in Kentucky that they wanted a filling snack shaped like the moon for their lunch pails. Mitchell returned to the Chattanooga Bakery with the idea to stack one round graham cookie on top of another, sandwiching marshmallow in between and covering the snack with a layer of chocolate. The concoction sold for a nickel and was a big seller in the coal fields, later becoming popular throughout the South, from the Carolinas to Georgia and Tennessee.

David Magee reports that the Chattanooga Bakery doesn’t expend large quantities of its time and resources telling customers how great their product is – the little round dessert pie, about four inches in diameter, sells itself. Of course, there’s the famous MoonPie festival in Bell Buckle, Tennessee, approximately an hour’s drive from Sewanee, attended by more than 20,000 festival goers. It features a run, a parade, and the crowning of a MoonPie king and queen. I’ve always been a week late for the Bell Buckle celebration, but when I want to ship this dessert to my daughters, I shop in Bell Buckle for the snack. I don’t know whether New Orleanians throw the pies from their parade floats, but Mardi Gras krewes in Mobile, Alabama have been known to throw MoonPies, in addition to the traditional beads, to clamoring crowds.

According to David Magee, 100 million MoonPies are produced annually, and the Chattanooga Bakery is believed to be one of the largest producers of marshmallow in the world. The MoonPie has a phenomenal shelf life of four months.

In the introduction to MoonPie: Biography of an Out-of-This-World Snack, David Magee quotes from one MoonPie consumer in Clayton, North Carolina who claims that the first breakfast she ever fixed for her husband was a MoonPie and an RC Cola, and his book is filled with similar anecdotes extolling the flavor of this snack.

When Magee questioned Sam Campbell IV, third generation leader of the MoonPie company, concerning the number of MoonPies that have been produced in its history of over eighty years, he estimated that three to four billion of the flavorful snack have been produced since the first pie was baked!

Author David Magee is a newspaper columnist and non-fiction author who lives on Lookout Mountain, Tennessee. He has also authored The John Deere Way and Turnaround: How Carlos Ghosn Rescued Nissan.

“NOTHING WILL WORK UNLESS YOU DO”...Maya Angelou

Jarod's grandmother remembers

Sunday afternoons on The Mountain here at Sewanee are desultory, particularly during the Spring break on the University of the South campus where we live in a modest cottage. The solution to ennui usually takes the form of a “field trip,” and yesterday we drove down the Mountain to the valley where the town of Cowan has been offering a unique Smithsonian exhibit entitled “The Way We Worked” at the Cowan Center for the Arts.

Cowan is a city with a population of 1737 people, and its claim to fame is as a railroad town, the site where the Nashville, Chattanooga and St. Louis Railway formerly employed 600 people from the area. It was the last stop before a steep uphill climb onto the Cumberland Plateau, and pusher locomotive engines were required to help the trains make the ascent, a 2228 ft. grade which had to be mounted before reaching a tunnel which ran through the Cumberland Mountains two miles from the town.

St. Mary's Station on the railway route

As a companion exhibit to the Smithsonian, the Cowan Railroad Museum offers a display showing railroad tools, methods of train travel, as well as photographs of Cowan’s largest employer between 1916 and 1928: the Davidson, Hicks, and Green Lumber Company which operated three sawmills and 25 miles of railroad. The coal and iron industries near Cowan are also featured in this exhibit.

The Smithsonian Exhibit includes kiosks with photographic essays of The Way We Worked, Where We Worked, How We Worked, Who Works, and Why We Work, including an interesting study of “Women Against the Odds,” documenting the war effort of women at work during WWII. An interesting statistic from the 20th Century: 37 percent of the workforce in 1975 involved women, and 63% were involved by the year 2000.

Jarod Pearson on board of Cowan RR Museum

One hundred eighty six photographs, with accompanying text comprise the exhibit, along with flip books, audio clips, and video screens. While we enjoyed the exhibit, we renewed our friendship with Jarod Pearson, proprietor of Sernicola’s Restaurant and the Franklin-Pearson House, a Bed and Breakfast facility. Jarod is on the Board for the Cowan Railroad Museum and told us that he helped write the proposal for the grant funding the exhibit. “We were pleasantly surprised when we received word that our proposal was the best proposal submitted,” he said. “I wrote the texts describing photographs and was told to put the stories in language that could be understood by fifth graders as school children would be primary attenders. I had to scan the photographs in high resolution for presentation, and create the stories that feature Cowan industries.”

In addition to the Smithsonian Exhibit and the Cowan Railroad Museum Companion Exhibit, an Arnold Air Force Base Display, Falls Mill Display, University of the South Display comprise exhibits in the Cowan Center for the Arts Theater. Next door in the Training Center, displays from the Crow Creek Heritage Preservation Society show how people of the Crow Creek Valley made a living as miners, railroad workers, farmers, brick makers, and as workers in the logging and tanbark industry. Photographs from The Grundy County Historical Society Heritage Center are featured, the latter showing photographs of the Swiss Colony at Gruetli, the Sam Werner Lumber Company, and a display about Dr. Lilian W. Johnson, Advocate for Agricultural Cooperatives. Franklin County Historical Society and Kokomo Grain Company also carried out the theme of how workers form the backbone of Franklin County.

I know the work ethic is strong in Franklin County as we have had carpenters, plumbers, electricians, and housekeepers working on the cottage during the past four years, and while they have been sometimes sporadic about showing up to do the work, when they appear, they crawl under the cottage, climb on the roof, remove windows for cleaning, working in teams of four or five, sometimes in blazing August temperatures that would fell a Louisianan.

I was amused last week when I bought groceries in Kroger's at Winchester, Tennessee and as I was checking out, an eighteen-year old man struck up a conversation (another facet of Tennessee workers-- garrulousness. They make you a part of their lives immediately). “How are you?” he asked. When I replied that I was doing well and how was he, he was off and running. “I’m so glad to be working,” he said. “Everyone should be glad to be working. I graduated from high school this summer and was sitting on the couch doing nothing and thought to myself, ‘Man, you are poor; what are you doing sitting on the couch?’ So I got up and came down here and got this job bagging groceries. I’m glad to have a job.”

No, I didn’t ask for the story, but such accounts are characteristic of the workers around these parts, and I applaud them for their work ethic. “The Way We Worked” display at Cowan illustrates the strength and endurance of workers in middle Tennessee who have kept our society and economy running despite downturns, politicians who make false promises, bank crashes, inflation, and wars.

“The Way We Worked” exhibit, offered in partnership with Humanities Tennessee, Museums on Main Street, the Smithsonian Institution, Cowan Railroad Museum, and State Humanities Councils nationwide, will be open until April 21. Lectures will be offered Sundays and Thursdays every week until April 19. The exhibits are free, but donations help support ongoing work of these organizations.

NEW IBERIA’S FOUNDING FATHER

This morning, an invitation for me to attend a fundraiser at the Bayou Teche Museum in New Iberia, Louisiana, where I live part of the year, inspired many thoughts about New Iberia’s founding father, Don Francisco Bouligny. Although I’m at my desk in Sewanee, Tennessee, I have a lot of material about this visionary in my files here on The Mountain.

Visitors to New Iberia, Queen City of the Teche, frequently and mistakenly view the city as a town settled by Acadians, but the flatboats that came up the Teche in 1779 were, in fact, propelled by Malaguenos who arrived at the bend in the bayou near the upper limits of New Iberia. A former New Iberia historian, Maurine Bergerie, who wrote They Tasted Bayou Water, tells us that the Malaguenos camped under a large live oak that stood at the intersection of Darby Lane and the St. Martinville highway. Members of the Romero, Villatoro, Segura, Ortiz, and other families from Malaga were led by Lieutenant Colonel Don Francisco Bouligny who had been sent by King Charles II of Spain to the Attakapas District of Louisiana to establish a settlement.

Today, at a different location on Main Street in New Iberia, a bust of Bouligny and a historic plaque, located behind the gazebo in the city plaza, identify him as putative founder of Nueva Iberia, and other historians claim that the City Plaza marks the gently sloping site of the original Malaguenos landing on Bayou Teche. Regardless of the site designated for the original settlement of New Iberia, Bouligny is honored as the visionary leader of the Queen City.

Who was this man who empowered a small group of Malaguenos to leave their sunny country and travel to a swampy, uncharted area of Louisiana where floods, hurricanes, and mosquitoes abounded, to build huts constructed of sticks stuck in the ground and covered with palmettos? Bouligny, their intrepid leader, wrote to Louisiana’s Spanish governor, Galvez, that Louisiana was an area which contained grass so thick that a single team of oxen couldn’t make an opening to the prairie stretching beyond.

Earlier in the year of 1779, Bouligny had attempted to establish a settlement close to a tribe of Chitimacha Indians and near the town of present-day Charenton. However, during a typical rainy Spring in April, Bayou Teche inundated the settlement and the tribal Native American villages with almost eight feet of water. Undaunted, Bouligny and his band of Malaguenos moved to the present site of New Iberia, which was then ten feet above the cresting level of Bayou Teche. After overseeing the building of rude shelters, he ordered flax and hemp seeds from Governor Galvez, and the settlers planted them. When these crops failed, they turned to raising cattle in an area near what is now called Spanish Lake. According to Maurine Bergerie, the colonists who settled New Iberia were not granted concessions but gained possession of their land by the public surveyor. Later, following the Louisiana Purchase, these families had to obtain recognition of their land titles from the U.S. government.

Just before Bouligny began his adventure to Louisiana, his wife gave birth to Francisco Joseph Ursino, and Bouligny was able to witness the baptism of his son before departing for the New World. After the settlement became established, Governor Galvez offered to bring Dona Bouligny to New Iberia to live. Bouligny thanked him graciously and never brought his wife to the primitive town on Bayou Teche.

In 1853, a single account describing Bouligny’s appearance was written by Benjamin French in his Historical Memoirs of Louisiana. He describes the Colonel as “rather tall and slight, with a noble military bearing, easy and dignified in his manner and warm in his friendship. So mild and conciliatory were his actions that obedience went hand in hand with his command; while his ardor and zeal for the service of his country seemed rather to reach the post of danger than to avoid it.” Historians question the accuracy of this flowery description, but the words certainly imbue Bouligny with a heroic persona.

An unknown artist also painted a portrait of Bouligny and his wife Marie Louise, which is now in the Historic New Orleans Collection. No one knows the date the portrait was rendered, but historians surmise that it was painted when Bouligny came to Louisiana in 1777 as Lieutenant Governor of the State. An inventory in Bouligny’s succession indicates that he had numerous books in his personal library and that he was a cultured man of the 18th Century Enlightenment. Others alluded to him as a man of confidence who was determined to make a name for himself.

Bouligny encouraged the struggling Malaguenos to build new homes of mud and moss, to construct a Royal warehouse, and to raise stock. Fifteen years after the founding of New Iberia when Etienne Bore revolutionized the sugar industry by converting cane juice to sugar, the settlers began to grow the prolific sugar cane that remains a stable industry in Teche country.

In August, 1779, only a few months after Bouligny had secured a permanent settlement on the banks of the Teche, he received a report that Spain had declared war on England and that Governor Galvez had begun marshalling forces against the British forts on the Mississippi River. Bouligny gathered a group of the new settlers of New Iberia and joined the Governor’s forces. By September 3, he was at Plaquemine with a small army of twenty-five slaves, five soldiers, two deserters, two farmers, one militiaman, two volunteers, and two Americans, according to Gilbert Din, author of Lieutenant Colonel Francisco Bouligny.

While fighting the War of the Revolution, Bouligny received word that Nicholas Forstall had replaced him as commandant of Nueva Iberia. In 1800, he died in New Orleans just before becoming a brigadier general. After the war, he never returned to his little colony on Bayou Teche, but his settlement gradually flourished and has now become a city of 32,000 inhabitants. Today, New Iberia a model in acculturation of descendants of Spanish, French, Acadians, Indians, English, German, and Creoles who live side by side in a city settled by Don Francisco Bouligny and his courageous band of Malaguenos.

Note: My young adult book of fiction about Bouligny and the Malaguenos settling of New Iberia, entitled Flood on the Rio Teche, has been placed in the library at Alhaurin de la Torre, Spain, a place that has been twinned with New Iberia. The book was purchased and taken back to Spain by Manuel Lopez, an employee of the Department of Culture in Alhaurin de la Torre who visited New Iberia several years ago. Copies of this book can be purchased online with Border Press (www.borderpressbooks.com).

Photograph of Bouligny’s statue by Kelly Roark, VP of Operations, Greater Iberia Chamber of Commerce, New Iberia, Louisiana.