Dry Prong, LA

Dry Prong is a village in central Grant Parish, Louisiana, within the Alexandria metropolitan area. The 2020 census counted 455 people. U.S. Route 167 runs through the village, about 26 miles south of Winnfield and 22 miles north of Alexandria, and the community sits inside Kisatchie National Forest. The name comes from a nineteenth-century sawmill story: a family built a water wheel over a creek that dried each summer, moved the mill to a year-round stream, and left the original creek's name behind.

Dry Prong incorporated in 1945, and the timber boom that followed the railroad helped shape the wider Grant Parish towns around it. Today the village has a public library, park, tennis courts, community center, and other public services; nearby Iatt Lake and the Dry Prong bike trail extend the local map into the forest. Grant Parish School Board schools serve the village, with Grant Junior High in Dry Prong. The school story includes a difficult turning point: in 1971, Colfax Elementary, Pollock High, and the all-Black Mary E. Graham High School were consolidated into Dry Prong High, and graduates later recalled the resistance and disruptions around integration. The local scoop is a pine-woods village whose name began with a dry creek and whose current map still follows timber, school, and forest roads.