Village of Dry Prong

Dry Prong's name comes with competing stories. One tradition says a family ran a sawmill here in the 1870s, its water wheel set over a creek that dried up every summer, so they moved the mill to a creek that never failed and the name stayed behind. Another tells of a grist mill. Even the date it became a village is given as 1945 and as 1947. The place sits inside Kisatchie National Forest, which the Forest Service built from abandoned cutover pine land after loggers cleared the yellow pine in about twenty-five years.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Colfax Massacre Memorial — 11 mi
  The 2023 granite memorial in Colfax to the Black men killed at the Grant Parish courthouse on April 13, 1873, which carries 57 names and replaced a state marker that called the massacre a riot.
• Louisiana Maneuvers and Military Museum — 16 mi
  A National Guard museum in a replica WWII barracks at Camp Beauregard, built around the huge 1940-41 war games in Central Louisiana. Free.
• Forts Randolph and Buhlow State Historic Site — 18 mi
  Two Confederate earthen forts on the Red River at Pineville, built with enslaved labor and never attacked, beside the remains of Bailey's Dam.
• Kent Plantation House — 19 mi
  Rapides Parish's oldest known standing building, a Creole house with a February tour and a 2023 memorial that put the enslaved first.

More markers nearby

• Town of Pollock — 7.9 mi
• Grant Parish and Town of Colfax — 11 mi
• Colfax Riot — 12 mi
• Battle of Calhoun's Landing — 12 mi