Vivian Railroad Station

Vivian exists because of the railroad. When the Kansas City Southern was built through northwest Caddo Parish in 1898, people from around Caddo Lake moved closer to the station, and the town was incorporated that year. Louisiana Highway 1 now runs through the middle of it, about 30 miles from Shreveport and 11 from the Texas line. The Louisiana Redbud Festival, founded on March 26, 1964, is described by the town as one of the longest-running in the state. Scenes for The Mist and Straw Dogs were filmed here.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Louisiana State Oil and Gas Museum — 8.4 mi
  The state's first public petroleum museum in Oil City, on the 1905 Caddo Parish strike and the 1911 over-water well on Caddo Lake, with a derrick and a log-jam exhibit.
• Caddo Lake State Park — 17 mi
  A Civilian Conservation Corps park on the Texas shore of Caddo Lake, where the Caddo told of a lake made by wind-driven water and visitors now paddle Big Cypress Bayou past moss-hung bald cypress.
• Caddo Lake National Wildlife Refuge — 18 mi
  Wetlands and woods on part of a former ammunition plant, now a refuge for wood ducks, prothonotary warblers and alligator snapping turtles, with four easy trails and a free visitor center on a Ramsar lake.
• Excelsior House Hotel — 22 mi
  A brick-and-timber hotel at 211 West Austin that began as a river captain's boarding house in 1858 and was revived by a garden club in 1959, and still takes guests with rosewood furniture.

More markers nearby

• Discovery-Rodessa Oil Field — 6.9 mi
• Potter's Point — 7.8 mi
• Oil City — 9.0 mi
• Trees City Office & Bank — 9.1 mi