Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Spring 2006 - (Page 74) LOUISIANA ARCHITECTURE architectural history by Karen Kingsley When Lumber was King Abudant acres of pine forest provided prosperity to North Louisiana The showy and richly ornamented wooden houses that became popular in the late-19th and early-20th centuries are a hallmark of small towns and residential districts in Central and Northern Louisiana. Irregular in plan and shape, and ranging in style from Queen Anne to Colonial, these houses flowered in Louisiana when the lumber industry was at its height. They celebrate what can be built from wood with their picturesque silhouettes, their turrets, dormers, angled bay windows, elaborate window frames, deep shady galleries with extended eaves supported on fancy brackets, turned columns, spindle gallery railings, and multiple gables faced with differently-shaped wooden shingles. Houses like these fill the residential districts of Leesville, Alexandria, Minden and Ruston, and numerous other towns and villages. Louisiana’s abundance of timber provided the material for these houses and, more importantly, generated an economy that allowed towns and villages to flourish. At the end of the Civil War, three-quarters of Louisiana’s land was forested, most of it with longleaf pine, 150 to 200 years old and reaching more than 100 feet in height. By the 1880s, out-of-state lumber companies, having exhausted the supplies of timber in their home states, came south to harvest these pines. As they surveyed the tall stands of virgin pine, their response surely echoed that of Timothy Flint, who traveling through the region in 1835, reported, “I have seen the pine woods of New England, and many others, but this grand and impressive forest is unique and alone in my remembrance … Millions of straight and magnificent stems, from seventy to a hundred clear shaft, terminate in umbrella tops, whose deep and somber verdure contrasts strikingly with the azure of the sky.” The railroads opened up the state’s vast timber reserves for exploitation and enabled the lumber companies to flourish. Logs could be transported more efficiently than by the bayous and rivers as before. Logging companies moved deep into the extensive pine forests that blanketed the Central and Northern parts of the state that formerly were inaccessible. Lumber towns sprang up almost overnight. From 1900 to 1920, Louisiana was one of the nation’s top three lumberproducing states, along with Washington and Michigan. The lumber companies built communities to house their labor force, accommodating them in “skidder towns,” next to the forests they were cutting down. These temporary settlements were relocated when the nearby lumber was exhausted. More permanent company towns were established around a sawmill. Almost everything in these towns — housing, commissary, school, church, theater or movie house, sometimes a library, and recreational facilities — was built and owned by the company. The town of Fisher in Sabine Parish is one such example and still conveys the ambience of its early 20th-century character when it was owned by the Louisiana Long Leaf Lumber Company, known as 4L. Founded by John B. White and Oliver W. 74 LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES\Spring 2006
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