Dry Kilns, Old & New

The older kiln was a brick building with three long chambers, and steam did the drying. Lumber came to it stacked by length from the sawmill, and what came out went on to the planer mill to be dressed for market. A larger concrete kiln followed in the 1956 modernization, the same overhaul that put the sawmill on electric power. Standing together, the two buildings show how the mill added capacity and changed materials while the job of drying freshly cut pine stayed the same.

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

• Long Leaf Sawmill (1) — steps away
• Long Leaf Sawmill (3) — steps away
• Long Leaf Sawmill (2) — steps away
• The Commissary — steps away