Long Leaf Sawmill (3)

The mill stopped on February 14, 1969, and then simply sat. For about 25 years the buildings stood as the crews left them, workers' lunch pails included. That neglect is why the site reads as a time capsule: the National Register listed the Crowell Sawmill Historic District on February 11, 1993, and the museum opened in 1994. Long Leaf was never the biggest operation, cutting around 125,000 board feet a day against a million at Bogalusa. Its value now is rarity, since a 2008 review judged it a state-level example of a historic sawmill complex in Louisiana.

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

• Red River and Gulf RR Locomotive #106 — steps away
• The "Roundhouse", The Machine Shop and the "Car Knockers Shed" — steps away
• Crowell and Spencer Engine #400 — steps away
• Clyde Log Skidder — steps away