Harrison left lasting legacy at Chemin-A-Haut

A few weeks ago, the Enterprise asked readers to share information they might have about the history of Chemin-A-Haut State Park.

Brothers Steve Priest of Colorado and Don Priest of Florida saw the invitation on the Enterprise Web site and offered to share their memories of weekend visits to the park, where their grandfather, Sanford E. Harrison, served as superintendent for 21 years.

“I’ve got a lot of memories there,” said Steve Priest. “We were two of the luckiest kids in the world to have the park for our home.”

Sanford Harrison was a former Bastrop police officer who managed the park from 1949 until his retirement in 1969. The brothers recall their grandfather sawed wood for the cabins and made repairs to the facilities himself.

“He was a hands-on superintendent,” said Steve Priest. “He gave his heart and soul to that place.”

The brothers vividly recall the night circa 1951 when the superintendent’s home -- in a different location from the current house -- was destroyed by fire.

“I was two years old at the time,” said Steve Priest. “We were staying in the back room. My grandfather handed us out the back window to our grandmother who was standing in the snow, barefoot, to catch us.”

Don Priest said the fire “occurred during a violent snowstorm. The house burned to the ground and everything was lost. We lived in one of the cabins until the home was rebuilt.”

Don Priest still has one of his grandmother’s forks, the only item that was saved from the home. Visiting the park two years ago, he found bricks from the chimney and foundation of the original home were visible in the dry bed of Big Slough Lake.

He also found vintage soda bottles in the lake bed.

“People would go down there to fish and have picnics, and just throw their bottles in the lake.”

As a child, he used to collect discarded bottles at the park and redeem them for a few cents apiece.

The original park facilities were constructed by Civilian Conservation Corps Company 478 stationed at Camp Morehouse from 1935-38. Among the original CCC structures is the brick amphitheater, which has recently been cleared of brush that covered it for many years.

“Back in the ‘50s the amphitheater was a living, breathing, maintained thing,” said Don Priest. “There were several church groups who used it for campfires and sing-alongs in the evenings. I used to go down there and sit with them.”

Their grandmother, Alice Harrison, kept several pets, including a de-scented skunk, turkey and a raccoon the brothers used to take for walks on a leash.

“Animals had an affinity for her,” Steve Priest said of his grandmother. “There wasn’t any animal she couldn’t make friends with.”

The Harrisons kept two deer in a large pen near the superintendent’s home -- Bambi, a tame deer that had been raised by Alice Harrison, and Mike, a large buck with a violent personality.

“People were scared of him,” said Steve Priest. “They put a washtub in the pen and he would pick it up with his antlers and throw it all over the place.”

Don Priest said when he was about 12 years old, he heard his grandfather calling for help and found him pinned to the ground by Mike.

The majority of park visitors in the 1950s and ‘60s came for family reunions and barbecues. Don Priest also remembers an annual hunting event in which raccoons were released in the woods around the park and then chased down by the hunters’ dogs.

The first swimming pool opened in June 1957, in a different location from the current pool.

“Besides East Madison Park [in Bastrop], it was the only pool in Morehouse Parish,” said Don Priest. “We had everybody from the Bonita area come to swim there.”

When they were older, the brothers worked as lifeguards at the pool for 75 cents per hour.

Not all the memories are good ones.

One day in Aug. 1961, Don and his thirteen-year-old cousin, Douglas Burge of Springhill, were taking turns riding a Sears motor scooter around the grassy area in the front of the lodge hall.

For unknown reasons, Burge veered off the road and struck the corner of the building. Don Priest pulled his cousin from the wreckage and then used his T-shirt to put out the flames on the window shutters of the lodge hall.

“The crash noise was very, very loud and was heard at the house where my grandfather was,” he said. “Doug died shortly after, in the grass in front of the lodge hall. It will be 50 years ago this August -- the only sad day I ever had at the park.”

Steve Priest recalls another tragedy that occurred sometime in the 1960s, when park guard Freeland Johnston was murdered by persons unknown during his nightly patrol.

Sanford Harrison passed away in 1978. His legacy included many improvements at Chemin-A-Haut, according to Raymond Berthelot with the Louisiana Office of State Parks.

“While [Harrison] was superintendent of the park, Chemin-A-Haut went through quite a number of changes,” said Berthelot, “including a new group camp, equipment building, and a new swimming pool and bathhouse, which were built in the 1950s.

“In the early 1960s, Superintendent Harrison also oversaw the expansion of the tent and trailer camping areas, including the construction of shower and laundry facilities, and the renovation of the cabins and the swimming facilities.”

The park has continued to grow and change since Harrison’s tenure, including the acquisition of 247 acres by the Nature Conservancy in 2009 to increase the park’s size by almost 50 percent. Current park manager Russ Brantley has plans for further improvements and activities.

Steve and Don Priest have visited Chemin-A-Haut several times in the decades since each of them moved away from Morehouse Parish.

“There’s an old saying that you can’t go home again,” said Don Priest. “I just like to visit the park and to be a kid again.”