Big Bend: Development of a Community

The railroad that reached Big Bend around 1905 belonged to William Edenborn, a Louisiana builder who created the Louisiana Railway and Navigation Company in 1903. His line began New Orleans service in 1906 and passenger service the next year, hauling timber, cotton, sugar and oil and billing itself the Short Line Through Louisiana. In Avoyelles he named a depot Hessmer for his mother's maiden name, and Mansura's depot, listed on the National Register in 1996, belonged to the same system. The 1927 flood later destroyed the nearby railroad town of Naples.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Louisiana State Penitentiary Museum — 14 mi
  The Angola museum outside the penitentiary gate, opened in 1997 on the history of crime and punishment in Louisiana, on ground where convicts were leased out as what 64 Parishes calls legal slave labor.
• Tunica-Biloxi Museum — 16 mi
  The Tunica-Biloxi Tribe of Louisiana's own museum at Marksville, built around the Tunica Treasure that the tribe won back in court.
• Avoyelles Parish Courthouse: Solomon Northup Marker — 17 mi
  The Marksville courthouse where Solomon Northup was freed in January 1853, with a marker and a 2026 bronze that shows him rising from the mud.
• Rosedown Plantation State Historic Site — 31 mi
  A cotton plantation worked by hundreds of enslaved people, whose names survive in an 1862 succession list; the Turnbull house and gardens, and the quarters nobody has yet found.

More markers nearby

• Bayou Des Glaises — steps away
• A Historic Landmark — steps away
• Sarto Old Iron Bridge — steps away
• Battle Of Yellow Bayou — 6.4 mi