Cane River Bohemia: Cammie Henry and Her Circle at Melrose Plantation

by Patricia Austin Becker

A National Historic Landmark with a complex and remarkable two-hundred-year history, Melrose Plantation near Natchitoches, Louisiana, was home to many notable women, including freedwoman and entrepreneur Marie Thérèse Coincoin and artist Clementine Hunter. Among that influential group, Cammie Henry, the mistress of Melrose during the first half of the twentieth century, stands out as someone who influenced the plantation’s legacy in dramatic and memorable ways. In Cane River Bohemia , Patricia Austin Becker provides a vivid biography of this fascinating figure.

Born on a sugar plantation in south Louisiana in 1871, Cammie Henry moved with her husband to Melrose in 1899 and immediately set to work restoring the property. She extended her impact on Melrose, the surrounding community, and the region when she began to host an artist colony in the 1920s and 1930s. Writers and painters visiting the bucolic setting could focus on their creative pursuits and find encouragement for their efforts. The most frequent visitors―considered by Cammie to be her circle of “congenial souls”―included writer/journalist Lyle Saxon, naturalist Caroline Dormon, author Ada Jack Carver, and painter Alberta Kinsey. Artists and artisans such as Harnett Kane, Roark Bradford, William Spratling, Doris Ulmann, and Sherwood Anderson also found their way to Melrose.

In addition to hosting well-known guests, Henry began a collection of history books, nineteenth-century manuscripts, and scrapbooks of clippings and memorabilia that later brought her attention from the wider world. Researchers and writers contacted Henry frequently as the reputation of her library grew, and today the Cammie G. Henry Research Center at Northwestern State University houses this impressive collection that serves as a lasting tribute to Henry’s passion for the preservation of words as well as for the South’s material culture, including quilting, spinning, and gardening.

240 pages, Hardcover

Published October 10, 2018

About the author

Patricia Austin Becker is an English and Creative Writing teacher in a Bossier City high school. She has been published in The American Thinker, The Shreveport Times, the Bossier Press Tribune, and has photographs published in The Forum and in Bayou Bucks Magazine. In 2003 she won the Aaron and Peggy Selber Red River Writing Competition with her paper on Caddo Lake. She has been blogging since 2008 at And So it Goes in Shreveport and since 2015 as a contributing blogger at DaTechGuy Blog. Her first book was published October 2018 and is titled Cane River Bohemia: Cammie Henry and her Circle at Melrose Plantation. She lives in Shreveport with her husband, two dogs, and five cats.

Reviews

[Steph Post · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love a well-written historical biography and Cane River Bohemia is not only fascinating, it reads like a novel- captivating and engaging. Becker thoroughly transported me to Melrose Plantation and shed a light on a place and group of people, particularly Cammie Henry, of course, but her cultivated 'salon' of sorts as well, that I would never have known about. History buffs, but also those interested in learning more about American artist colonies and some of the creative 'influencers' of the '20s and '30s who have slipped under the mainstream radar, will definitely appreciate this book.

[Anne Marie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent summary of a unique Louisiana woman who single handedly nourished a writers colony and worked endlessly to preserve antiques, artifacts and historical records of Louisiana and the Cane River region.

[Bso6113]

Didn’t finish.