May 1, 2011

Harriston Woman Louise Cadney’s Creations On Display At The Frog FarmBy Gordon CottonClarionLedger.com

HARRISTON — “Stop! I see an alligator,” Louise Cadney excitedly told her husband one day as they were driving.

That alligator was a piece of wood, part of a tree limb, and it’s now painted green, has teeth and eyes and stands on its haunches in Louise’s gift shop at Harriston in Jefferson County.

Her place, called The Frog Farm, is home to her many imaginative creations, all made from sticks and limbs and discarded and broken pieces of lumber.

“I’ve done this all my life, ever since I can remember,” the 64-year-old artist said.

She started making stick dolls when she was a child, growing up in a house on a hill not far from her Frog Farm.

“I named every one of them – and dressed them.”

There were 11 children in the Cadney family, and buying dolls and toys wasn’t a priority for the parents. There weren’t enough toys for everybody, and, “sometimes we didn’t get any, so I made my own.”

Louise made stick dolls, and she had a good collection but lost it all when the family home burned when she was in high school in Fayette. She went to college at Southern University in Louisiana, married and lived in many places – Gulfport, Chicago, Memphis and in Michigan and Maryland as her husband was in the military. They came home in the 1990s.

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