Friday's webbing

[gene]

On this day, Friday, Halloween 2014, a different kind of webbing:

old Petit Paris (St. Martinville, Louisiana)

It seems that just after the Civil War, two of the Durand daughters became engaged at the same time: Marie Lucille Heloise Durand to James E. Mouton, and Corinne Marie Philomene Durand to Zachary Fournet. The proud father promised his daughters the most beautiful, elegant, and unusual wedding ever seen in Louisiana.

To fulfill his promise, as the romantic (and perhaps embellished) tale is told, he ordered a million spiders sent from China and sent courier to California to fetch hundreds of pounds of silver and gold dust.

Shortly before the wedding day, the spiders were set loose, and soon had spun millions of yards of delicate webs among the limbs and mosses of the oak and pine trees leading to the mansion. On the morning of the wedding, May 21, 1870, servants armed with bellows filled with silver and gold dust sprayed the cobweb canopy to set it glittering in the sunlight like something from a fairy tale.

http://durandhistory.blogspot.com/2010/05/pine-and-oak-alley.html

And just think... every single person who attended that wedding is dead!!!  :o

Happy Halloween.

gene