Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Black Hawk, Louisiana


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was keep‎__EXPECTED_UNCONNECTED_PAGE__. The issue of the spelling can be handled editorially. There is consensus to keep the improved content. Star  Mississippi  03:11, 17 December 2023 (UTC)

Black Hawk, Louisiana

 * – ( View AfD View log | edits since nomination)

This is another GNIS mess lie, created by a sock-puppeteer, that we've been telling the world for 10 years. There's no "unincorporated community", a phrase that has been debased of any meaning, here. The 1880 Lippincott's confirms that this was a post office. Not a post-town nor even a post-village: a post office. And one that is non-existent in any history books that I can find. Ironically, once one knows how the GNIS is badly constructed by basically calling every single building a "populated place", it becomes apparent from the GNIS itself that this is a post office, as it lists it twice in two separate records: once as a building taken from a building on a map and once as a post office taken from a list of post offices. Surprise! The building is the post office. When they say that the GNIS removes duplications, it is a lie. I cannot find any history of Black Hawk railway depot nor Black Hawk plantation, either. I only know that they exist at all because a hypsometrist measured various precisely described nails and pieces of wire (I kid you not!) near to them. Simply, no-one has documented these things and they are undocumented dots on maps now. Uncle G (talk) 21:24, 1 December 2023 (UTC)

*Delete Not a community, no coverage in any source other than GNIS, never a recognized populated place, and a redirect is pointless because nobody would think to search for such a place on WP, and there is nothing that could be said about it in the target article anyway. WeirdNAnnoyed (talk) 00:07, 2 December 2023 (UTC) Redirect to Concordia Parish, Louisiana. The information given in the article convinces me that this is a place (broadly speaking), with some at least local recognition, but we can't say much more than that. And when we have to rely on OR just to determine whether our sources are all talking about the same place, we are in no position to have a standalone article. WeirdNAnnoyed (talk) 21:42, 9 December 2023 (UTC) Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, signed,Rosguill talk 15:51, 9 December 2023 (UTC)
 * Redirect to Concordia Parish, Louisiana as a WP:ATD. estar8806 (talk) ★ 22:19, 1 December 2023 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: Geography and Louisiana. Shellwood (talk) 22:46, 1 December 2023 (UTC)
 * Redirect as suggested above. I can't find much otherwise about this place. Oaktree b (talk) 22:56, 1 December 2023 (UTC)
 * I could tell you about top of 30d wire nail driven vertically into bench cut on E. root of a 3-foot chinaberry tree standing in road 5 meters back of levee, and 20 meters above negro church standing just outside of levee on Black Hawk plantation. Who says that the U.S. doesn't use metres?  &#9786;  Apparently there was a Mississippi steamboat named the Black Hawk that sank almost 100 years before the hypsometrist, but contemporary 19th century sources (only 20 years after the event!) had it happening at the mouth of the Red River of the South and I couldn't match their maps of the area between the Homochitto and the Red River to the modern positions at all, to even say for certain that it was even roughly the same place.  Uncle G (talk) 01:08, 2 December 2023 (UTC)
 * Keep. I'm finding census data for Black Hawk, Concordia Parish, Louisiana in the 1890, 1900, and 1940 censuses. I haven't checked the 1910 and 1920 censuses yet, but the 1890 census calls Blackhawk in Concordia Parish a village with 323 residents; the numbers for 1900 and 1940 are smaller. More research is needed, and I'm working on it, but this was a real community. Firsfron of Ronchester  02:45, 2 December 2023 (UTC)
 * How big an area did this census unit cover? A census taker will assign every household some sort of location but it may not be a real community. Larger, purely rural areas with low population density are still going to have some sort of name in the census. If there are 160 40-acre farms spread across a 10 square mile (6400 acres) that’s very different from 160 homes clustered together in a community. —  A. B. (talk • contribs •  global count)  03:42, 2 December 2023 (UTC)
 * This is like the Black Hawk plantation and the Black Hawk railway depot. It's another description of something else that drops the name without telling us a thing.  Firsfron's source merely says Ward 1, including Blackhawk village and gives the populations of wards 1 to 10, and sub-population for the village.  Speaking as someone who regularly fixes these damned GNIS lie articles, that's not enough for keeping.  For starters, we don't know how this relates to the random "populated place" GNIS rubbish.  Was the village at the GNIS "Black Hawk"?  Or was it the plantation?  Or the railway depot?  Or the sunk steamboat?  The GNIS itself says it was none of them, because its co&ouml;rdinates are for the post office.  We know all of these things existed, but barely and only because what we have is documentation of a census population figure somewhere in the same county, nails in trees (sic!) that were just outside of them, and a steamboat that sunk somewhere in the area but the river courses have changed so drastically that I couldn't tell you where things are now that the 19th century maps (no co&ouml;rdinate systems on them) were mapping.  The Red River doesn't even have a mouth on the Mississippi any more.  There's nothing that &mdash; literally &mdash; connects the dots to go on. Uncle G (talk) 08:44, 2 December 2023 (UTC)
 * Keep per WP:GEOLAND and move to Blackhawk, Louisiana (the correct spelling in current use). The biggest disservice done by GNIS was to spell it "Black Hawk" (two words) – a spelling replicated by Wikipedia which then misled many readers into thinking that "no coverage exists" (per discussion above). The current version of the article (still called Black Hawk, Louisiana for now) now includes the information about Blackhawk, which we find was one of the last three rural pockets in Louisiana to receive reliable phone coverage (wireless or wired – they got wireless first) in 2005. (Lots of news coverage about the political battle leading up to this, but for this discussion see this Alexandria, LA newspaper.) Blackhawk, LA is frequently mentioned in conjunction with the work the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Vicksburg District) does in shoring up the nearby levee on the Mississippi River (e.g. 2018 news alert), and going back over 100 years, we find several newspaper articles about flooding in Blackhawk (referred to as a "small town" in this 1912 article). The more you search, the more you find, and even I find it baffling that it wasn't until the half hour or so that I found this 2017 Associated Press article about sugarcane farming in Blackhawk, which was also syndicated by the USA Today Network. Cielquiparle (talk) 05:44, 5 December 2023 (UTC)
 * There is still more work to be done to improve this article, but this can be done in the course of normal editing – e.g., the question raised by above "Where exactly was Blackhawk Plantation?" is spot on. My hypothesis (requiring further research to verify) is that Blackhawk Plantation covered the area labeled in ALL CAPS on the helpful map provided by, and that we have Black Hawk Lodge (on the same map) to thank for the two-word spelling. (There are also MANY "Blackhawk Hunting Club" notices in Newspapers.com that suggest that "Black Hawk" was a small subset of "Blackhawk".) As always, well done to all for raising great questions and sleuthing – I have suspected for some time that single-keyword searching on Google.com is "dead" but I'm increasingly worried that it's too hard to find the actual "web of trust" articles even if you use multiple search parameters. Cielquiparle (talk) 05:44, 5 December 2023 (UTC)
 * I enjoy the argument that you are making that the GNIS is unreliable for names. However, you highlight the problem, which is synthesis. The 1856 Lloyd's Steamboat Directory (No, not that Lloyds.  Someone named James T. Lloyd.  No, not that James T. Lloyd either.) says that a Black Hawk steamboat sunk on the Mississippi river in 1837 having "just reached the mouth of the Red River", and modern tourist guides reference this and say that that's where the name of Black Hawk Point comes from.  Obviously, the place where the rivers met is inland, now, as there isn't even a Red River mouth on the Mississippi any more.  I even have an 1881 USACE report definitely stating that the mouth of the Red River in 1881 was roughly 14 mile downstream of Black Hawk Landing. In trying to reconcile all this and Lloyd's hand-drawn map with the GNIS post office, which is based upon middle 20th century maps, I checked the USACE navigation charts for the Mississippi River.  They'll at least show where this Black Hawk Point is nowadays, right? They indeed do.  But they show two other places with this same name.  So the problem is that we still don't know whether stitching together a lot of newspaper clippings hasn't conflated a bunch of stuff.  We know that there was a post office from the GNIS.  We know from the hypsometrists that there were a Black Hawk plantation and a Black Hawk railroad depot, with a "negro church" somewhere.  Ironically, your very own 1902 map has two distinct places, both with this name. Well the modern USACE navigation charts from 2007 have three (map #64), those two and the Black Hawk Point.  Furthermore, Black Hawk Point and Black Hawk Landing are still on the riverbank even though we know that this isn't the 1837 course of the two rivers.  I'd guess that the article actually currently is at the correct title, and that the plantation, railroad depot, landing, post office, and village 60 years later took Black Hawk the steamboat's name with Black Hawk being mis-spelled as Blackhawk, and that they are all in fact the same place and the Landing and Point have moved with the river.  But I don't have a source that says this and connects up the literal dots here, and nor have you yet.  None of those newspapers do.  We could be synthesizing this for all that we know. You're already synthesizing a bit.  The first 'phone newspaper article says that Shaw didn't have 'phone service.  Blackhawk is where someone's friend named Grady Weeks had a lodge, and there's a nice handy map in the newspaper article showing that Shaw isn't at any of the Black Hawks.  The second 'phone newspaper article says that it's called Shaw-Blackhawk, and has the same map that only shows Shaw.  And your road construction article tells us that Shaw and Black Hawk are almost 3 mile apart, because it's all about building a road between them.  We know from another of your newspaper articles that Black Hawk Plantation stretched for 7 mile "along the Mississippi River" somewhere in Concordia.  The USACE report in 1881 had Black Hawk Landing 2 miles south of the Grand Cutoff Bayou.  USACE map #64 has the Grand Cutoff Bayou at Shaw with the three places downstream, Black Hawk to the south, Black Hawk Landing to the south east and Black Hawk Point to the east-south-east. Well at least we can trust that the GNIS is correctly including a Black Hawk post office to start with, right?  Well, no.  The 1855 USPS post office directory has this as Black Hawk Point post office. This is all very mixed up, and as I said, could be a synthesis.  Oh for a decent history of Louisiana that simply connects the dots!  But as I said, there isn't one. I've checked in the Southern Publishing Company's, the Bunner one, the Gayarré one, and the King one.  I ignored the 1827 one, for obvious reasons. Fun fact: Two of your newspapers and three of your books, including for the attorneys and the catholics, are inaccessible to me. Uncle G (talk) 08:34, 5 December 2023 (UTC)
 * It is OK. "Borders" are often fluid, especially over long periods of time (in this case spanning 130+ years). This is an excellent discussion for the Talk page. Cielquiparle (talk) 09:40, 5 December 2023 (UTC)
 * Keep: and rename per . More than enough evidence to meet GEOLAND. Owen&times; &#9742;  15:11, 9 December 2023 (UTC)
 *  Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
 * Delete as not meeting WP:SIGCOV and a blatant violation of the policy WP:NOTDIRECTORY.
 * बिनोद थारू (talk) 02:14, 16 December 2023 (UTC)


 * Keep, per the expansion by Cielquiparle. BeanieFan11 (talk) 19:43, 16 December 2023 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.