Today, the Louisiana State Quarter Coin remembers the landfall on August 10, 1856 of the hurricane that destroyed all of Last Island, Louisiana and killed over 200 people.
The Louisiana Planter and Sugar Manufacturer Volume 36 of May 1906 included information about the “Last Island Hurricane.”
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Some of us can dimly remember the howling hurricane of 1856, whirling about our coasts and over our cane fields for nearly 36 hours, sweeping away and drowning by hundreds sugar planters and their families at their favorite summer resort of Last Island, out in the Gulf, and driving the sugar industry permanently from our former two productive islands of Grande Terre and Grande Isle.
More of us can recollect how the hurricane again celebrated the anniversary of “Last Island” on August 10th, 1860, swept away the crops and cattle of the lower coast below Pointe-a-la-Hache and drowned some of the people of Grande Prairie.
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But before the hurricane became remembered as the “Last Island Hurricane,” a New Orleans newspaper called the Daily True Delta printed a description of the storm’s damage to the city just after it happened in August 1856:
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The effects of the storm on Sunday and the early part of yesterday were visible last evening in almost every portion of the city through which we passed.
The incessant rain which flooded the streets all the time prevented anything like a reportorial promenade, and when we did start out, last evening, for a stroll, the majority of the streets were in an almost impassable state.
The deposits of mud left by the heavy rains rendered the sidewalks, where a footing could at all be made, so slippery, so greasy, that is was next to an impossibility to keep one’s feet at all.
Fragments of slates, shingles, bricks, mortar, glass, carpenter work, etc., strewed the sidewalks; signs gone to smash, awnings disabled, and galleries unfloored and unrailed.
Windows and doors hanging on one hinge, each at an angle of 45 degrees; ornamental shade trees and their latticed protectors prostrated into the very ditches; wooden sidewalks strewn about everywhere but where they were originally placed; bridges uncovered, and the weighty planks which once rendered them passable, scattered broadcast along the paved and unpaved streets; every variety, in size, of green boughs being interspersed between them.
Houses unroofed, chimneys rent, pigeon-boxes ready to demonstrate the law of gravitation in their descent, weather-vanes pointing in every direction, which the wind did not indicate; in fact, every conceivable result producible by a severe storm, was to be found, here, there, and everywhere, as we passed along.
In the extreme rear of the city, the majority of the fences, boarded, picketed and so forth, “bit the dust,” which was not a very difficult thing for them to do, considering the state of muddy softness to which the heavy rains had reduced it; several buildings and churches, in course of erection suffered considerably, having many of their architectural and ornamental proportions considerably curtailed; and many of the wharves were injured, and a goodly portion of the principal wharf of the Third District, was carried away.
The disasters on the river, though not so numerous, were still more serious.
Barrels of flour, boxes of merchandise, in fact, everything of which a steamer or a flatboat, reasonably in distress, could be disencumbered, floated hither and thither, and gave the “Mississippi wreckers” a prospect of profit such as their wildest hopes, in the month of August, could have never promised them.
Dismantled steamers, upturned flatboats, unclaimed craft of every description, rose with the froth-crowned surge, and gave an appearance of chaotic regularity to the scene, which to fully appreciate, should be looked on.
It was the festival of the water king.
On land, the wrecking was quite in keeping with the festival of the genii who delight in roofless houses, dismantled churches, uptorn trees, and never calculate or care what trouble they give the itemizer to follow in their destructive track.
Well, considering that it was the month of August, that storm was a—storm.
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The Louisiana State Quarter Coin shows against a background of a storm over the ocean moving inland.
