View Obscura

 From Tucker Baker of the Southern Forest Heritage Museum: We have some big upcoming sessions this spring. Thank you to everyone who has already let me know if they are coming or cannot make the session this week/weekend. This really helps with planning.

 Back in February I received a USB drive from my compadre Everett Lueck of the Southern Forest Heritage Museum that contains an enormous amount of information about life in Central Louisiana in the early to mid 20th century. The files that he sent me include documents, newspaper articles, letters, a couple of videos and huge amount of vintage photographs. The bulk of the material focuses on the lumber industry and the railroads that operated in this part of the state. Included with all of these files were a handful of images taken in Lecompte. The exact date of these images is unknown but I believe that they were taken sometime between the 1920s and 1940s. It is noted that the aerial shot of the town below was taken in 1940. Last week I shared my earlier article about an abandoned family owned gas station in Lecompte with the Abandoned Louisiana group on Facebook that received numerous responses from present and former residents sharing their memories about life in the small c...

  Why would a group of men and women brave pouring rain and winter cold to spend their Saturday working on a railroad that hasn't run since 1954? The Read River & Gulf Railroad ran it's last train from Lecompte to the saw mill complex at Long Leaf. Louisiana on March 30, 1954. The railroad that had once operated over some seventy miles of track had become too expensive to operate and maintain. The money it generated suppling lumber to the Long Leaf Mill could no longer pay the bills.   All the railroad's equipment, including several steam locomotives, numerous pieces of rolling stock, various structures and several miles of track, were simply abandoned and allowed to deteriorate for decades.  Likewise the Long Leaf Mill closed it's doors in 1969 after seventy-six years of operation and it, plus the adjacent town, also were abandoned. Let's flash forward to 2023 and the remains of the railroad, the saw mill complex and the town of Long Leaf are all under the ste...

Just about a month ago I posted a set of photos taken at the old abandoned Red River & Gulf Railyard just outside the historic logging town of Long Leaf. It was an extremely popular post and it has peaked a lot of interest in both the old logging railroad and the logging facility/town. This past Friday I passed by the site again and decided to take another set of photos. When I took my original photos it was a dark and rainy day. I thought that the dank conditions helped convey a feeling of the area being lost and abandoned. On this day the sun was just rising and allowed for a better illustration of just how the site actually looks.  Thanks to the sunlight and the fact that the surrounding foliage is now less dense because of an earlier freeze I was able to get a better view on just how much railroad equipment is at this location. It turns out that the railyard complex is much larger than I had originally perceived. Now dozens of more remains of old railcars can be seen in th...

On March 30, 1954 the Red River & Gulf Railroad ran it's last train from Lecompte to Long Leaf, Louisiana. The once profitable lumber railroad was founded in 1905 to carry raw materials for a sprawling lumber mill in Long Leaf but by the early 1950s the cost of running the line outweighed the revenue it produced. The tracks, locomotives, rolling stock and facilities of the Red River & Gulf were simply abandoned where the stood for decades. The harsh weather combined with the aggressive fauna of central Louisiana has taken it's toll over the past 60 plus years. The locomotives are rusting away, the tracks are almost impossible to find and the wooden freight and passenger cars have rotted away leaving only their metal parts behind. Recently volunteers from the nearby Southern Forrest Heritage Museum, who have been working for years to preserve the Long Leaf sawmill complex and the railroad that served it, located the old Red River & Gulf yard in the woods nearby. A c...

I was originally going to post this later this week but there has been such a overwhelmingly positive response to my article about  Crowell & Spencer Lumber Company Steam Locomotive #400 that I decided just to move on to another old locomotive on the Southern Forest Heritage Museum, in this case Meridian Lumber Company 2-6-0 Locomotive #202. Like #400, #202 was abandoned by it's original owner after it's last job in 1954. Unlike the #400 however #202 has been moved around a bit. In 1954 the Crowell Long Leaf Lumber Company opted to store the locomotive near the crossing of the old Meridian main line and Highway 497. In 1980 the locomotive was moved to a location adjacent to where #400 sits today. Over the next fifteen years the locomotive became so overrun with native foliage that it was all but invisible to anyone walking by. When #202 was rediscovered in 1993 the brush was cleared off of it and then it was relocated into the nearby former Red River & Gulf ...