Long Leaf Sawmill (2)

The pond was only the last stop for the logs. They arrived by rail from timberland the company owned, and the supply behind them was thinning: the last stand of old-growth pine, in Evangeline Parish, lasted only until 1954. The company replanted seedlings as it cut, but local pine ran short and demand for big timber fell. In World War II the mill's longleaf heartwood went into Higgins boats, the landing craft, with estimates running to about 10,000 of them, and the museum later grew up around the sawmill that supplied that lumber.

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
• Red River and Gulf RR Locomotive #106 — steps away
• The "Roundhouse", The Machine Shop and the "Car Knockers Shed" — steps away