The Devillier Family

Nicholas Antoine Coulon de Villier's son, Louis Coulon de Villier received the flag of surrender from Lt. Colonel George Washington at the Battle of Fort Necessity on 3 July 1754.  The Winnie Devillier’s descend from Nicholas Antoine Coulon Devillier’s son, Francois Coulon Devillier, also known as “The Chevalier” who after receiving a commendation during his military service at the Fort of Necessity was transferred to the Louisiana establishment and promoted to the rank of lieutenant in 1746. 

“They used the mules to pull the fresnos to build the levees. At first they just used shovels, then they got up town and used those fresnos,” laughed Jerry  “A fresno was a little old wooden scoop, I’m just going by memory but I think it was about six or eight feet wide and you would lock it in place to scoop up the dirt. When they got to the levee they would pull the lever and it would roll the dirt off to build the levee. They were farming the land on the Roedenbeck laterals at that time. That’s by where Stevie is now. I haven’t seen a fresno in a long time but I’m sure there’s still some of them around. Of course, then they had the binders to cut the rice, they’d be going around the field with the mules pulling the binders at first, then they got up town and got them some old tractors and went to using them. They had the guys shocking the rice and I was a water boy back then. I was just a little kid; I wasn’t but nine years old then. They had the pull-type combines then to cut the rice, there was a man up top who would sack the rice and then it would slide off. Someone would come by with the wagon and pick the sacks of rice up. That’s the way it was back then, you know. That’s how we cut the rice on my dad’s place when we were first there. When they first came out with the combines, they were about nine foot wide, now they’re 30 or 40 foot wide. It’s kind of like all the changes my dad saw in his lifetime, and he thought what kind of changes there will be in a hundred years. He never thought man would be going to the moon and such as that, you know. I never pulled a nine-foot combine, I pulled a twelve-foot and the last one I fooled with was thirty-foot. Now, I think they’ve got ‘em with forty- and sixty-foot headers, I’m not sure how wide. Little Halley would know. I did some custom planting for him a while back and he is a worker, he goes all the time, he’s a good guy,” Jerry said with admiration.

“Spindletop Bayou, it was part of that Rush ditch, it was a little bitty ole thing when my grandfather started farming here, dadgum, we could almost jump that ditch. Now it’s a big ditch running through our country. The Rush ditch starts on the Dugat land on 1663 and ends at the LeBland land where the Devers Canal crosses Hwy 65. Used to they’d take and ride the canals. They’d ride from Nome down this way checking them by horseback, you know. I know my dad would sell three or four horses a year to this one canal rider, ‘cause he would wear them out. They would ride all the way from south of Nome to the Anahuac 

road (Hwy 65). I can’t remember the old boys name but he’d get to the house every day about twelve or one o’clock on that Roedenbeck lateral. I wasn’t interested in that stuff back then, but I’m interested now. I regret I didn’t pay better attention,” Jerry said with a look of remorse. “Uncle Olide would have been the one to talk to.”  

“I farmed rice with my dad for a couple of years and started farming on my own in ’53, I was nineteen then. I had another job, so I started out with just thirteen acres. It was just a little bitty patch that was more of a nuisance, but it got me started. It wasn’t too many years after that I had a little bit of base built up, but not enough to farm, so me and my brother, Sammy, and my dad formed a partnership, and we bought a bunch of acreage. My dad never wanted to farm too big, he only farmed about 300 to 400 acres, but when Sammy and I went into partnership with him in 1958, we increased the acreage.” “What about when the government came in,” interjected Mary. “Oh yeah, they had acreage control,” answered Jerry. “You couldn’t farm unless you had allotments, but we were able to buy some from older farmers who were going out of the farming business. At first, we owned the allotments, but we didn’t own the land. Eventually we were able to buy our own land. We got up to about 1,400 or 1,500 acres, it was a good bunch of acreage. We raised a little cattle, each of us had our own cows and my dad had a few and we tended to his. We sold our cows and started raising soybeans, we farmed about 2,000 acres of soybeans, but it wasn’t too profitable for us. We had a couple of good years, then we went to putting fences back up and got back into the cattle business. Sammy had a heart attack during that time, and he opened up the feed store by the school in Winnie. He stayed and worked there, and I ran the farm for a while as my dad had gotten older. Then when my dad died, Sammy and I divided the land between us and each went on our own, that was in 1982. Sammy’s boys were coming on then and Yale took over and worked Sammy’s part of it. My boys, Culley and Randy and Stephen farm too.”

“We had our own dryers there in town. My dad, Louis Coulon and his brothers Olide Coulon, Jr. and Edward who is Richie’s grandfather, built that dryer about the early 40s and Oscar Sr. managed it after it was built. They had a seed warehouse and they got to needing a dryer” said Jerry explaining the need to build it. “It was the first dryer there in Winnie.” In an article on Louis Coulon Devillier by the Winnie Rice Festival they stated, ‘It was a complete operation in that they furnished the seed, cut, hauled, dried, and shipped the rice by train to the Supreme Rice Mill in Crowley, Louisiana, owned by a first cousin, Joe Dore. There the rice was sold.’ “They added onto it for several years,” continued Jerry, “and it gave me a pretty good job all through summer. I did carpenter work for them, rough carpenter work, not no finished work,” he clarified. “I worked for Mr. Lilton Sonnier. He did a lot of the welding work and I was kind of his helper at the time. He had two or three carpenters who couldn’t climb, and I could climb, heights never bothered me, but I couldn’t get in a hole. I’d start smothering right quick if I started climbing down in a hole,” laughed Jerry. “Now Sammy could get in a pipe and go half a mile in it and I’d get sick just knowing that he was in there,” he chuckled. “I had claustrophobia bad, it was terrible! I worked there after school. I could work from four o’clock to ten o’clock at night. I didn’t know what the beach was or nothing like that, heck, I had to be on the job. We worked ninety something days in a row one time. They paid me less ‘cause I was one of the kids. I was mad,” laughed Jerry, “but they thought because my dad was part owner, they could get me cheaper than anybody else. The old carpenter wanted me to quit and go to work for him and I told him my uncle would kill me if I were to quit. I worked there for fifty cents an hour for I don’t know how long, the other carpenters were getting a dollar an hour at the time, so you know that was a long time back,” laughed Jerry. 

“They kept building the dryer bigger and bigger to meet the family’s needs, they got up to four additions. Olide, Jr. Edward, and my dad each farmed three or four hundred acres and then their kids came along, and they kept getting bigger and bigger. Uncle Olide’s grandsons, the Rollo boys, they went into farming too and at drying season everybody was ready at the same time, and we just weren’t big enough to take care of everybody in the family then. So, some started going to the round tanks, they had come in about that time. We ended up selling our part of the dryer to Richard and we put up about fourteen of the dryer tanks. We had some smaller ones and some bigger. The bigger tanks would hold about five or six thousand barrels of rice. The smaller ones held about two or three thousand, if I remember right, and I might be way off. There was a lot of work to them, they had flat bottoms and there was a lot of scooping, and it was hot and dusty. We used them for soybeans too and that soybean dust would get you sick right quick. It would work on your lungs bad. Richard still owned the dryer when it burned in 1997.”

“My greatest joy of being a rice farmer was just seeing the rice grow, you know, and then seeing it at harvest time. I was always glad to see we had a good stand. Some of the farmers this year don’t have that, the drought hit them hard and there’s not enough seed for most to replant. I quit farming the first of last year. I had an old Mexican who worked for me, he was a good old man, but he had hernia surgery and got to where he was unable to work, I go visit with him now and then, he’s a good man,” Jerry proclaimed wistfully. “That left me working by myself out here and fooling with cows, and you get a little ole calf out on the road and it seems like it was always one of mine. I’d open the gate and they’d run by and look at it and go on past it and I’d run ‘em back again, and I thought, I’m fixin’ to get shed of all this. I’m impatient anyway,” he confessed. 

“The hardest part of rice farming was quitting. That’s the worst. I’ve been an early riser all my life, I’d always wake up at five o’clock in the morning before I married and make coffee for my mom and dad. It’s just a habit with me, I guess. When you wake up and you don’t have anything to do it’s hard. When you get as old as I am you don’t have many friends left to go visit. There’s a lot of young people but not many old folks anymore. I hate to be a nuisance, but I go up and sit at Gulf Coast Automotive and talk to Robert. He was behind me a little bit in school. I sit there for an hour or two and wart him then go to one or two places but then I get to thinking, those people have heard all my complaints,” chuckled Jerry. “I’ll sit and watch television and get three-day-old news. I still deer hunt, but this year it will depend on whether my sore back gets straightened up. I’ve sat and counted cars for I don’t know how long, over a year now, I guess, I’ve got now to where I can look at ‘em and not count ‘em,” laughed Jerry.” The laughter left Jerry’s eyes as he sadly concluded, “It’s tough when you’re used to getting up and having something to do and now you’ve got nothing to do,” concluded Jerry who turns 90 in September.