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Guerin: If you look due south from the marina, and you see a stand of tall pine trees, is that it?
LaFrance: Yes. What I did was, I had some piney woods hogs running all over the place -1 had a bunch of hogs out there in the swamp - so I come out here and I got about five females - sows - and I carried them out there and I put them on that island, and I bought a good boar - a male - he was half Guinea and half Poland-China and I?d go over there every other day and feed them. I?d bring some com over there and feed them. I?d carry my rifle - if I?d catch a wild boar over there I?d kill him. He would take up with the sow and I wouldn?t get no good pigs out of them. They wouldn?t amount to anything; they wouldn?t have the weight. They was wild hogs, you see. But the ones from the Guinea and Poland-China I would go over there and get them and put them in the boat -tie them down - and I had a pen at the house and I would put them in that pen for two or three days and feed them a sack of com and then bring them to New Orleans. For you see, they had com and they would figure they were com fed, but on that island they had acom trees, hundreds and hundreds of acom trees and they had a grass over there - they called it three-cornered grass with a nut on it, like a little ? on it. Them hogs loved it.
Guerin: This was on Campbell?s Island? How did it get its name?
LaFrance: I knew Robert Campbell and his sister, Miss Tattie Campbell. They lived in Hattiesburg after they left the island. The house [had] burned down. He had two uncles from Scotland and they had got that land from the government and what they?d do, they?d use that live oak there for bow stems for boats - that wood, it was hard. One brother died and the other was getting old, so he wrote to Scotland for some of them to come over to work there, so Campbell said him and his daddy and mother and his sister, Miss Tannie was the baby, they left Scotland and it took them three months or longer to get there at that time. So they raised a family -.they got a cemetery over there. It?s a family cemetery, six, seven eight, maybe more of them are buried over there. They are all Campbells. The last one that died, Miss Edna, I took her body from the [island?] and carried her body down to the camp on that same boat I showed you [the 35-foot Biloxi Schooner], Myself and LaFontaine over there, we dug the grave for her. We carried her over there and buried her. That was about sometime in the 60?s.
Guerin: I want to go back to the camp. When you took it over, was it already a fishing camp? Were people launching boats? Was there bait to buy?
LaFrance: No. This old man that I was telling you about, Mr. Green, he had dug a ditch by Bayou ? . The ditch was about, say a hundred feet and he took the mud from the ditch and made a little roadway and he had one skiff. And my daddy, he used to get that skiff every other day to go fishing down there, crabbing, fishing. At that time it was hard. We didn?t have nothing to eat but fish and crabs and whatever we could get. So, when I started down there, I started finding boats. If I found a skiff somewhere I would buy an old skiff second-hand, work on it, patch it. I started off like that. I got some lumber. I got my uncle down there. He knew how to build skiffs, so he come down there -1 think he
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LaFrance, Jules (Poss) Interview-2004-03
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