Long Leaf Planer Mill

A board leaves the saw with a rough surface, and the planer mill is where it became a product. The machines smoothed planks into dressed lumber and also cut moldings, beaded sheathing, drop siding and tongue-and-groove flooring, which earned more than plain boards. The building stands on a raised floor so power shafts could run beneath it and boxcars could be loaded from it, and its heavy timbers were chosen to resist fire. Wood waste from the machines was burned in the boilers that turned a 120-foot line shaft.

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
• Crowell and Spencer Engine #400 — steps away
• The "Roundhouse", The Machine Shop and the "Car Knockers Shed" — steps away
• Long Leaf Sawmill (1) — steps away