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

Many notable women share a history with Melrose Plantation—freedwoman and entrepreneur Marie Thérèse Coincoin, artist Clementine Hunter, and "the mistress of Melrose," Cammie Henry. In Cane River Bohemia author Patricia Austin Becker adds Henry's biography to the growing list of books dedicated to the heritage of central and north Louisiana.

Cammie Henry is remembered today for the artist colony she hosted in the 1920s and 1930s in the bucolic setting of her plantation, Melrose, where the slower pace of the previous century prevailed. The most frequent visitors—and considered by “Aunt Cammie” to be her inner circle of “congenial souls”—were writer/journalist Lyle Saxon, naturalist Caroline Dormon, author Ava Jack Carver, and painter Alberta Kinsey. Harnett Kane, Roark Bradford, William Spratling, Doris Ulman, Sherewood Anderson, and more were among the many other creative talents who found their way to Melrose.

Henry’s collection of history books, nineteenth-century manuscripts, and her own scrapbooks of clippings and memorabilia also brought her attention. Researchers and writers wrote to and visited Henry in a steady stream, inquiring about her library. Today the Cammie G. Henry Research Center at Northwestern State University houses this impressive collection and serves as lasting testament to Henry’s passion for preservation. Beyond the written word, she was an early proponent of salvaging the South’s material culture as well, including artisan practices of quilting, spinning, and gardening.

Patrician Austin Becker admirably mines Henry’s papers as well as the correspondence of her inner circle to uncover the person behind the storied figure.