Garyville, LA

Garyville is a St. John the Baptist Parish census-designated place on the east bank of the Mississippi River, in the New Orleans metropolitan area. The 2020 census counted 2,123 residents. Its present-day scale is tied to the Garyville Refinery, but the town began with a different kind of industry. In 1903, the Lyon Cypress Lumber Company laid out a planned company community beside the New Orleans and Texas Railroad, with housing, a mill pond, worker facilities, and a cypress mill capable of processing 100,000 board feet a day.

That old lumber-town layout still sits beneath the industrial Garyville people see from the river road. Museum Street follows the former mill side, and the Garyville Historic District preserves much of the original neighborhood pattern. Sugar-cane fields, river levees, rail lines, and refinery equipment all share the parish landscape, which is why Garyville feels more like a working corridor than a standalone main street. Garyville's local scoop is a Louisiana community where a company town built for cypress workers grew into a major Mississippi River industrial address.