Parish’s First Rice Mill located in Rayne
By the Mid 1880’s, the prairie grasslands of southwestern Louisiana were rapidly being replaced by golden fields of rice. Bountiful harvests of the wetland grain crowded the depots of the Southern Pacific Railroad, awaiting transport to distant markets.
The big problem was: every single grain of rice produced in what is now Acadia Parish had to be expensively shipped to New Orleans in order to be milled. This situation changed in 1887, when a group of forward-thinking Rayne businessmen constructed the first rice mill in the state of Louisiana outside of New Orleans.
The Rayne Rice Mill and Manufacturing Company was chartered in 1887. Anselm S. Chappuis served as its president, Mathias Arenas its treasurer and the secretary was August L. Chappuis. Besides the new firm’s officers, its board of directors consisted of early Rayne businessmen Benson H. Harmon, Benjamin Avant, Rudolph Beer, H. Lagroue, J. H. LeBlanc, Mervine Kahn and Joseph D. Bernard.
The Crowley Signal newspaper gives a vivid description of the new mill. The main building had dimensions of forty by ninety feet and stood at a height of thirty-four feet, not counting the crowning cupola, which raised the overall elevation to fifty feet. Adjacent to the mill was a 40 by 60 by 14-foot rice warehouse, used to store sacks of rice in those days before rice bins and dryers. Driven by a 100 horsepower engine, the mill could produce one hundred barrels of clean rice per day. The Rayne Mill opened for business in time for the 1888 harvest season.
Either the small town shopkeepers were overwhelmed by the rice business or they were offered a deal too sweet to refuse; they sold the mill in 1890. The new buyer was a partnership consisting of the R. B. Hawley Company of Galveston, Texas and Emile Daboval, Jr. The new owners wanted a new name, so the Rayne Mill was re-christened as the Acadia Rice Milling Company.
The Daboval-Hawley concern enlarged the rather small mill. They constructed more warehouses, enabling the rough rice storage capacity to increase from 18,000 to 30,000 sacks. A conveyor system was added to supply rice to the pounders, along with a new polisher with a capacity of 22 barrels per hour. A brand new 150 horsepower Shakespeare engine now powered the mill. Five thousand dollars worth of improvements were added in 1902.
The company took great steps to prevent a fire from destroying the mill. It maintained its own steam pump, “which is at all times connected and ready for instant operation,” reported the Crowley Signal. Throughout the mill were scattered “Lewis fire extinguishers” and large barrels of water. The future would totally justify the owners’ fear of fire.
Arriving in Rayne to manage the Acadia Rice Mill was the 33-year-old Emile Daboval, Jr. Born in 1857 in New Orleans, Daboval was the son of a prominent merchant and rice miller, Emile Daboval, and Angela de Lesseps.
After graduating from Jefferson College, Emile, Jr. joined his father in the New Orleans rice milling trade. Five years later, the young miller took for his bride Marie Lydia, the daughter of Joseph Deynoodt and Solidelle LeGardeur de Tilly.
Emile Daboval, Jr. would spend the rest of his life in Rayne, becoming one of the prairie town’s most versatile businessmen. Besides running the rice mill, he wore some of the following hats: rice broker; real estate agent; owner of the Valverde Hotel; and farm implement dealer at his Rayne Machine Agency. During the oil boom following the discovery of petroleum in Acadia Parish in 1901, he served as drilling supervisor for both the Rayne Planters Oil & Development Company and the Great Southern Petroleum Company. He also threw his immense talents into the Rayne egg trade by designing an egg-shipping container made from straw and wood pulp.
Daboval also participated whole-heartedly in to the civic development of his adopted hometown. He served several terms as a Rayne town alderman and was the Frog City’s mayor from 1895 to 1898. In 1914, he unsuccessfully promoted the dredging of Bayou Queue de Tortue to connect Rayne to the soon-to-be-built Intracoastal Waterway.
The first five Daboval children were born in New Orleans, but quite a few Rayne-born siblings followed them. The fourteen children were: Gaston; Deynoodt; Solange; Germaine; Elise; Lydia; Emile; Beatrice; Manette; George; Maurice; Alexandre; and Yolande. After Gaston and Solange passed away, his widow, Bessie Ritter, and her widower, Dr. Mike Clark, married each other.
In 1892, Emile Daboval, Jr. built a large, commodious home in Rayne to house his ever-growing family. This structure still stands and serves as the Maison Daboval, a bed and breakfast owned and operated today by Martha and Gene Royer.
Daboval’s 1916 obituary in the Crowley Signal contains the following statement: “The early venture [the Acadia Mill] was not a financial success.” So the mill was sold once again in 1903. The new buyer was a stock company headed by Jefferson Davis Marks, who would also be the mill’s manager. The name also changed again: now it was the Ida Mill, named after Marks’ young daughter.
The mill was greatly enlarged by Marks and reached a capacity of 800 barrels of rice per day. The main mill building was four floors high and the warehouses were now two storied. Employees in 1905 were: Kate Mudd, stenographer; J. Breaux, clean rice department; Frank Gilbert, grader; Ernest Petitjean, assistant warehouseman; Theodore Dickerson, miller; and W. S. Casey, engineer. Two years later workers included: J. B. Gros, assistant manager; C. O. Keeffe, shipping clerk and warehouseman; Dickerson was still the miller; and W. D. Petty served as the engineer.
Jefferson Davis Marks lived and invested in Acadia Parish before he opened the Ida Mill. He ran a store when he first arrived in Crowley and married Carrie, the daughter of Louis Sternberger, another early Crowley merchant. J. D. Marks built the Marks Mill in Crowley in 1898, with his father-in-law serving as vice president of the company. This mill was sold in 1901, but would continue operating under different names until 1960 (the Star B, then the La. Irrigation and Milling Co., and finally the American Mill). He was also a stockholder in the American Brokerage Company in Crowley.
Tragedy plagued Marks and both of his Ida’s. On a cold December day in 1904, 9-year-old Ida Marks sat before an open fireplace arranging her hair. The child’s clothing caught fire and she ran screaming into the front yard, where the flames were extinguished too late to save the little girl’s life. Four years later, the Ida Rice Mill suffered the same fiery fate as had its namesake. A nighttime blaze completely destroyed the mill, along with $40,000 worth of rice, the nearby Mervine Kahn warehouse and quite a bit of lumber at the Lewis and Taylor lumberyard.
In 1909, J. D. Marks bought the Morse Rice Mill, but had it dismantled two years later and shipped to Memphis, Tennessee. Around that time, he moved the remainder of his family to Amite, where he remained until his death in 1940.