The Commissary

Lumber towns were built to be temporary, and most lasted about twenty years, until the pine ran out. Long Leaf outlasted that pattern, running to 1969 with nearly seven decades under one family, and the company kept roughly 140,000 acres of its own timberland. A mill town of this kind still supplied a good deal beyond wages: housing, a school, churches, medical care and a store, to Black and white workers alike, though not on equal terms. The commissary was only the most visible of those company duties.

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 Depot — 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