Long Leaf Depot

For a company town, the depot was the connection to everything else. In the 1920s the Red River and Gulf ran a passenger train, mixed trains six days a week to Lecompte, Kurthwood and Meridian, and extra freights almost daily. The Meridian service ended after the mill there burned in May 1928, and the Depression cut the rest. After the war the timetable promised three days a week, but trains ran only when cars needed moving, kept alive by an interchange with the Rock Island at Lecompte.

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

• The Commissary — steps away
• Long Leaf Sawmill (3) — steps away
• The "Roundhouse", The Machine Shop and the "Car Knockers Shed" — 0.2 mi
• Red River and Gulf RR Locomotive #106 — 0.2 mi