View Obscura

 Story and Photos By Ken Hulsey During my lunch break, I explored the sites where the old Louisiana & Arkansas (KCS) and Southern Pacific railroad depots once stood, just south of downtown Alexandria. These sites were once bustling railroad hubs, but today only their foundations remain, the structures having been demolished. To the casual observer, the sites would appear to be nothing more than an abandoned parking lot or old car dealership - in fact, I drove by the former Southern Pacific depot numerous times without ever noticing it, until a colleague pointed it out to me.

 Photos and Story By Ken Hulsey This weekend, our granddaughter wanted to visit the newly built playground at the corner of Masonic Drive and Babe Ruth Drive. While my wife and the little one went to play, I decided to take a stroll around the old Bringhurst Field - once the home of the minor league Alexandria Aces baseball team. The once-beautiful ballpark is now just a shell, with most of the brick gone and only the metal skeleton of the old bleachers remaining.

 An old abandoned truck sits rusting away in the weeds in Ferriday. Over the past few months I have been taking a ton of photographs as I travel all over Louisiana. I have been wanting to share these images for some time, but I just couldn't make up my mind on just which ones I wanted to do individual posts about. As I perused all the images that I amassed it became clear that it would be way to time consuming to share them this way. Instead I took the time to weed through them and pick out the ones that really spoke to me and conveyed what I believe to be the essence of what summertime here in Louisiana really looks like.

 Earlier this week I to drive all the way up to Springhill for work and when returning home my keen eye spotted a old Schlitz Beer sign sticking out of the tree line. Being the curious type, I had to double back and find out what that sign was attached to. 

Over the past couple of years I taken literally hundreds of photographs from one end of Louisiana to the other. During that time I have shared the vast majority of those images here at The Traveler's Guide, yet there was a vast collection of images that I simply didn't have the time to sort through and write posts about. Last weekend I decided to devote an entire morning to sorting through those images so that I could put together this visual retrospective on what life is like here in the Pelican State. The image above sets a rather somber tone for this piece, maybe it is a fitting beginning for a visual tour of the parts of Louisiana that most visitors to our state never see. Far away from the big cities of New Orleans and Baton Rouge lies a vast area of heavily wooded forests and acres of rich farm land where cane and cotton are a way of life. 

 Last July I stumbled upon Ford Park and its many relics from Shreveport's transportation history while driving around Cross Lake looking for place to take some photographs. Out of the corner of my eye I spotted an old steam locomotive at the entrance of the park and my attention quickly shifted from wanting to capture some images of the water to getting images of the locomotive. What I didn't know at the time was that Ford Park was full of mysteries as well as historical relics both neglected and sadly forgotten. This past week I revisited Ford Park to capture more, and hopefully better images, of the steam locomotive, fire truck and trolly bus that most people in Louisiana don't even know exist.

Alexandria Iron & Supply Though this facility has only been closed for five years now the location looks as if no one has stepped foot on the property for decades. It just goes to show just how quickly the vegetation will overtake things that are not cared for. READ MORE Abandoned Louisiana: Under a Bayou Moon (America Through Time) Paperback - $24.99 @ Amazon.com - Order Here Brookhill Ferry Shipwreck Site in Baton Rouge What can be seen today is one of the two pontoon-like boats that formed the bottom of the ferry. There was a flat deck on top for transporting goods and passengers. The boiler for the ferry can be seen in the mud just a few yards north of the main wreckage. READ MORE Cannon embedded in a Baton Rouge Sidewalk In the 1850s, the cannons from the fort were sent to the John Hill Foundry on Third Street to be melted into sugar house machinery," Sykes said. "But the foundry sent the cannons back to the city to be imbedded into street corners to keep vehicles of...

A few days before Halloween I ventured out to the Sarto Old Iron Bridge in remote Avoyelles Parish to check out the local legend of a ghostly apparition known as The Marlboro Man who reportedly haunts the area. While talking to Mr. Boo (a local legend in his own right) of the Big Bend Post Office Museum, he informed me of another interesting bridge site less than a mile away on the other side of Bayou de Glaises. He said if I looked closely that I would see the remains of an old Louisiana & Arkansas Railway bridge in and along the bayou. History of Avoyelles Parish, Louisiana (Parish Histories) Paperback - $44.99 @ Amazon.com - Order Here Boo told me a little bit about the old bridge site, stating that in the old days the L&A line from Simmsport to Angola via a ferry on the Red River ran straight through the area. A massive flood in the 1920s destroyed the railroad's bridge over the bayou and they chose not to rebuild it. In fact the damage to the railroad was extensive t...

Horror fans worldwide know of the famous tale of the Headless Horseman (or Galloping Hessian) who author Washington Irving immortalized in the pages of his novel The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, yet most Louisiana residents are unaware that there is a legendary ghostly rider right here in the Pelican State. Down a lonely and winding stretch of Louisiana State Road 451 sits the Sarto Old Iron Bridge constructed in 1916 over Bayou de Glaises. As the legend goes a worker, known to locals as a cowboy, fell into the concrete while one of the pillars was being poured and was engulfed by the mixture while his coworkers helplessly looked on in terror.  Weird Louisiana: Your Travel Guide to Louisiana's Local Legends and Best Kept Secrets Hardcover Book - $19.99 @ Amazon.com - Order Here Over the following decades people on or around the bridge have seen and felt the presence of 'The Marlboro Man' (so named by locals because he is said to resemble the famed cowboy in Marlboro cigarette ...

There are literally hundreds of amazing old abandoned schools that are amazing examples of various types of architectural styles all over the state of Louisiana. Today I drove past the Nicholson Elementary School in Baton Rouge and I was struck by just how amazing a structure it truly is. Baton Rouge (Images of America) Paperback by Sylvia Frank Rodrigue - $24.99 @ Amazon.com They don't build them like this anymore, in fact this incredible structure dates back to the early 20s and it is one of the only surviving  Beaux Arts/Neo-Classical style structures left in the city. Here is some history from the State of Louisiana archives: The Nicholson School is locally significant in the area of architecture as one of a limited number of major examples illustrating the Beaux Arts/Neo-Classical taste in Baton Rouge. Although the official founding date of the community is recognized as 1719, Baton Rouge has retained only a relatively small number of historic commercial and institutional buil...