Rails and mills opened western Louisiana

In 1880, before rails began to crisscross Louisiana, the top three lumber producers in the United States were Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Louisiana ranked No. 30, based largely upon the cypress lumber industry that sprang up along Bayou Teche and in other parts of southern Louisiana just after the Civil War.

But those northern states were running out of harvestable timber and the cypress industry had reached its peak at about the time that Louisiana’s pine forests were being opened.

Those forests would lead to the creation of towns, the opening of huge areas particularly in western Louisiana, and the creation of incredible fortunes for the men who reaped the profits from lumber harvests and sawmills that sprang up like mushrooms after a spring rain.

Many of the men who made those fortunes were northern lumbermen who moved to the pine forests of Louisiana — many of them to “cut out and get out,” but some of them to stay.

The first large mill in Rapides Parish was built in 1819 by two Pennsylvanians, J. A. Bentley and E.W. Zimmerman. The mill was named for Bentley, the town that grew around the mill was named for Zimmerman.

Throughout the Louisiana pine belt in central and western Louisiana, mill names as often as not reflected the origins of the owners. For example, the Hudson River Lumber Co. was far from New York; the mill was in DeRidder.

Following an early map of just one rail line running south from Shreveport to Lake Charles, there are dozens of names of towns that sprang up as mill towns, many of them company towns: Larosen, Keithville, Stonewall, Keatchie, Grand Cane, Longstreet, Oxford, Trent, Catuno, Benson, Pinewood, Rosepine, Ludington, DeRidder, Bon Ami, Carson, Longville, Fulton, Gaytine, Bradley, Marion, Barnes Creek, Ramsay, Penoyer, Town Line, Camp Store, Old Town, Lockmoor, Lockport, and more.

One of the biggest investors in western Louisiana was Arthur Edward Stillwell, who built a railroad through Caddo, DeSoto, Sabine, Vernon, Beauregard, and Calcasieu parishes, and then across the Sabine River to a place named for himself, Port Arthur.

His largest backers came from Holland, and he named some of the communities along his railroad after them — including DeQuincy, DeRidder, Zwolle.

His railroad and others like it had a profound influence on settlement patterns in southern and western Louisiana. 

Before the railroads, practically every town was built next to a navigable stream, because waterways were the highways of that time. 

But as the rails stretched across prairies and through piney woods, people were no longer reliant on waterways and instead moved next to the railroads.

Most of the first growth pine in Louisiana had been cut by the 1920s. Mills closed, and many of the towns around them were either shut down, if they were company towns, or simply faded away when the jobs and payrolls of the mills left the area. 

Efforts were made in the 1920s to replant some of the cut-over lands but lack of money, lack of interest, wild hogs that ate seedlings, and fires that burned the rest slowed reforestation until the Depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps began a tree planting program.

Since then, “second-growth” forest has recovered much of the land, contributing to an industry that today harvests billions of dollars worth of timber each year.