We arrived in Sugar Mill Pond on a hot, humid morning. The kind of weather that most people don’t want to hang around in.
But waiting on his granddaughter to get done with tutoring, we met Ted Moulard.
Moulard was waiting there with another one of his grandkids, one of 28 in total.
While we may have been in Youngsville for the morning, Ted tells us that he grew up a few hours north.
“In the little town that I grew up in, the town of Cottonport, there were two, the population then was only about 1,500, there were two cotton gins,” says Moulard. “That was the big crop then.”
His early years were spent on the family farm.
“It was leave early before school and go feed the cattle in the morning, and in the afternoon, the same thing,” he says. “Whether it was raining or not. We had to milk our own cow every morning.”
It was a time when mech ag was still fairly new.
“I can remember still back up until my teens some people were still farming with mules.”
Despite studying poultry at LSU and expecting to get into agriculture, Ted would end up working in a different field.
“I wound up in heavy construction, building a lot of levees, pump stations and roadways,” he says.
A profession that still has the same importance today as it had back then.
“And the Corps monitors those levees. And you know, they make sure nobody is up there doing something crazy,” he says. “I mean they patrol it all the time and they’re always looking for what we call boils.”
Ted’s retired now, and he makes sure to spend his precious time with his family.
So we let him get back to his grandson, but not before his grandson sent us to Jeff Davis Parish.
