The Kate Chopin House in Cloutierville, Louisiana, United States

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The abandoned Highway 1 Hardware store is in Cloutierville, La. 

It’s a little “fixer-upper”, but the wife drove it over to the grocery store just last week and it ran like a champ.......     It’s in Cloutierville, La.  

The porch of this abandoned store in Cloutierville, La, looks like it will soon collapse.   

An abandoned restaurant in Cloutierville, La.   

Livingston General Store, Cloutierville, La. Remnants of a once great mercantile store teetering on disaster, threatening to plunge into Cane River at any moment. Famous author Kate Chopin shopped here, her residence only a few blocks away. It stands as one of a limited number of surviving rural mercantile stores in the region. General mercantile emporiums played a vital role in the system of cotton production and plantation agriculture during the post-bellum years through the 1930s. With the end of the Civil War and the loss of slave labor, planters were forced to find other means to get crops planted and harvested. In the cotton growing parishes of  Louisiana the plantation system shifted to a practice known as share-cropping in which a landless farmer worked a portion of the planter's land for a share of the crop, generally one-third. Of course, the cotton cash crop would not come in until late in the year. In the meantime, the farmer and his family needed food and other provisions. Banks where he might have borrowed money were virtually unknown in rural Louisiana during the period. So a common pattern emerged in which the sharecropper would pledge his crop to a country mercantile store in return for a line of credit that would enable him to buy what he wanted. Under this system, known as crop-lien, share-croppers often found that when the cotton was finally in, their store purchases exceeded the value of their share of the crop. The result was mounting debt leading to virtually peonage.  And as historian William Ivy Hair has noted, they too often became "enmeshed in the crop-lien cycle of debt."