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flowers and worried about nothing. Some of his children, however, were very energetic workers. Of his sons, Alston became a physician; Blanchard was a school teacher and photographer, and lolause, a successful artist.
The oldest daughter, Rosabelle, who was born on Dec. 19, 1842, died at Shelly, Sept. 15, 1850. She was buried by the cedar trees near the house. Her father placed a marble angel, which was imported from Italy, on her grave. This disappeared after the family moved away. Mrs. Whitfield and another daughter, Irene, and several slaves were also buried there.
As for the later history of Shelly, around the turn of the century, or later, the Gulfport and Mississippi Traction Company attempted to extend an electric line from Mobile to New Orleans. The line was to skirt the
bay of St. Louis, because no other railroad could build a bridge within a mile and a half of the L and N bridge across the bay. The line was to go through the Shell Bank Plantation, then owned by Northern capitalists. The company owned 26,000 acres in a body and originally planned to establish a Chautaugua ground there. According to a newspaper clipping dated March 17 (no year given), "Saw mills are to be introduced to cut away and utilize the timber and?the cut-over lands are to be made into truck farms and gardens, and canning factories are to be established for the canning of vegetables in the summer and products of the sea in the winter."
Eventually, neither the electric line to New Orleans nor the canning factories were successful. For the record, neither was a highly publicized hotel. What happened to Shelly? Perhaps it was torn down by new owners. Maybe it became one of those lonesome houses that are seen, now and then, in the country lands, abandoned in the middle of a sea of wheat or corn, disintegrating. Shelly Bank became a lonely place. The house once stood on a high shell bank that extended out several feet into the bay. The words of the above cited article form a fitting epitaph: "After the plantation was abandoned by the owners, New Orleans schooners went there and dug and carried away ton after ton of those shells because there was no one there to say they should not."