Longville, LA

Longville is a Beauregard Parish census-designated place with a past much larger than its current population suggests. In 1906, the Long-Bell Lumber Company chose the site for a steam sawmill and built a full company town around it: employee housing, a commissary, hotels, schools, a theater, a depot, a doctor, a fire department, and a telegraph office. The town was called Longville for company leader Robert A. Long. The mill could cut 350,000 board feet of longleaf pine in a ten-hour shift, and rail lines moved both workers and lumber.

That arrangement ended abruptly on June 3, 1921, when a fire destroyed the main sawmill. With the longleaf timber nearly cut over, Long-Bell did not rebuild the big mill; a hardwood flooring plant ran until 1929, and much of the company town was sold. The original bank, First Baptist church, a few company houses, and the mill pond remain as the clearest reminders. Today Longville is a rural place on U.S. 171, about 40 miles north of Lake Charles, where Longville Lake gives the old industrial footprint a life after the sawmill.