Clyde Log Skidder

A skidder dragged logs to the railroad, and what the loggers left behind was a landscape. Louisiana's pine country was largely cut between the late 1880s and 1920, and observers described brushfields so open that you could see from Alexandria to Lake Charles. Stumps, brush and grass remained, cattle, hogs and sheep took over, hogs rooted up seedlings, and burning for pasture grass was routine. Some of that ground the federal government later bought, worn out, for Kisatchie National Forest.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Epps House: Solomon Northup's Gateway to Freedom — 15 mi
  The Creole cottage Solomon Northup helped build for the man who enslaved him, moved twice and now a small museum on the LSU Alexandria campus.
• Valentine Lake Recreation Area — 18 mi
  A 46-acre Kisatchie National Forest lake dug by Civilian Conservation Corps crews in the 1930s, with a campground and the head of the Wild Azalea Trail.
• Kent Plantation House — 21 mi
  Rapides Parish's oldest known standing building, a Creole house with a February tour and a 2023 memorial that put the enslaved first.
• Arna Bontemps African American Museum — 22 mi
  The restored Alexandria house where the Harlem Renaissance writer Arna Bontemps was born in 1902, on the Louisiana African American Heritage Trail.

More markers nearby

• Crowell and Spencer Engine #400 — steps away
• The "Roundhouse", The Machine Shop and the "Car Knockers Shed" — steps away
• Red River and Gulf RR Locomotive #106 — steps away
• Long Leaf Sawmill (3) — steps away