Happy New Year – it’s the first day of 2025! Have you come up with your New Year’s resolutions? If you’re the trendy type, perhaps you’ve eschewed New Year’s resolutions for a business or even personal “rebranding.” Let’s take a look at a historical rebranding in Bossier, when the community of Guernshein became known as the town of Plain Dealing in 1890. The names themselves represented two very different images of life in America in the late twentieth century.
The name Plain Dealing came from the expansive cotton plantation (5000 acres) owned by James Oglethorpe Gilmer, whose land became the subdivided site for the town. The name was meant to represent Gilmer’s honesty to potential cotton traders and represented a more agrarian society.
In the 1880s, prior to Plain Dealing’s incorporation, but when its train depot for the Cotton Belt Railroad was already built and busy and the subdivision home lots were being sold, the community was named Guernshein or Gernshein. According to local histories, the name was for a prominent railroad investor, sometimes noted as an investor in the Jay Gould railroad syndicate (of which the Cotton Belt eventually became a part).
Jay Gould controlled railroads from coast to coast by sometimes underhanded (to put it mildly) tactics. He was known as one of the original Robber Barons, or less-scrupulous titans of industry of the Gilded Age. The Gilded Age in U.S. history, from the late 1870s to the early 1900s, was a time of great industrial growth and accumulation of massive and ostentatious new wealth among industrial owners. It was also a time of growing economic inequality and of political corruption. Railroads that Gould owned included the Missouri Pacific railroad, the St. Louis and Iron Mountain, the International and Great Northern, the Richmond Terminal, the Texas Pacific, the Union Pacific, the Wabash, the St. Louis Southwestern (the official name of the Cotton Belt), and the Manhattan Elevated Railroad. He also owned the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, and the Western Union Telegraph Company.
Gernshein himself was not identified in Plain Dealing histories beyond his last name and the simple description of “railroad investor”, but research into railroad investors of the time points to Michael Gernshein (spellings varied) of Manhattan, New York City. He was a German immigrant who worked as a banker, stockbroker, and railroad investor. He was an early general partner (from 1875 – 1881) of the most influential investment banking house of the Gilded Age in New York - Kuhn, Loeb and Company. It was a major competitor of the J.P. Morgan Company in financing America's swiftly growing railroad industry. The bank has since merged with Lehman brothers, and later with American Express.
Despite changing its name from Gernshein, which harkened back to its railroad, and not its agrarian roots, Plain Dealing’s history with the railroad was inextricably linked. The young town prospered due to its connection to the Cotton Belt. Ornate Victorian homes sprung up in the town in an area previously known for simple, practical dog-trot style log cabins (with two living areas separated by a wide-open hallway) and it became the site of the parish’s first brick building, Plain Dealing High School. The first high school building was actually funded by the vice-president of the Cotton Belt, S.J. Zeigler, whose daughter was among its first pupils.
From the staff of the Bossier Parish Libraries History Center, we wish you all a happy New Year. If you have any information, stories, or photos of old Plain Dealing or other communities in Bossier Parish, we would love to add them (or scanned copies) to our History Center’s research collection. We are located at 7204 Hutchison Drive (formerly called 850 City Hall Drive) just across Beckett Street from the old Central Library and History Center in Bossier City, LA. All Bossier Parish Libraries locations will be closed Wednesday, 1/1/2025. Normal operating hours for Bossier Central Library and History Center are M-Th 9-8, Fri 9-6, and Sat 9-5. Our phone number is (318) 746-7717 and our email is history-center@bossierlibrary.org
For other local history facts, photos, and videos, be sure to follow us @BPLHistoryCenter on FB, @bplhistorycenter on TikTok, and check out our blog http://bpl-hc.blogspot.com/.
Images:
- Jay Gould clipping from Bossier Banner-Progress January 27, 1887
- Bond of the St. Louis Southwestern Railway Company 1891 Image By Edhac-Edham - Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=53837122
- Map of the St. Louis Southwestern Railway (Cotton Belt) system as of 1918, with trackage rights in purple. modified 2008 from Bureau of Transportation Statistics North American Transportation Atlas Data). Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5283506
- Lyndhurst, Jason (Jay) Gould mansion, Tarrytown, NY, Photo by Elisa Rolle, Shared under the Creative Commons license https://creativecommons.org/
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