Of Shrimp and Petroleum
I am traveling south on Highway 1 through Iberville Parish, Louisiana. I pass fields of sugarcane, chemical factories, strange roadside cemeteries, and what appears to be a combination seafood restaurant and barbershop ambiguously advertising “‘Phresh Cuts.”’ It is Friday afternoon, the start of Labor Day weekend. It is a manageable 87 degrees outside, for now.,,, I’m headed to the annual Shrimp and Petroleum Festival in Morgan City. The festival is the oldest state-chartered harvest festival in Louisiana. It began in 1936 as a single day, when all the shrimp boats in Morgan City would line up in the Atchafalaya River to be blessed by a Catholic priest. In the 1960s, as oil became the dominant industry in town, petroleum was added to the name and the logo became a shrimp in a hard hat wrapped around an oil derrick. by Nick Chrastil click here to read the story 11:02
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