Tickfaw, LA

Tickfaw is a Tangipahoa Parish village founded in 1852, where Italian-American families built farms and a community around the piney-woods edge of Hammond. The name is often connected to a Choctaw phrase meaning a rest among the pines, and the landscape still gives that idea some weight: shade, flat farm roads, and the longer commercial pull of Hammond nearby. Joe Greco led the village's incorporation in 1957 and became its first mayor.

The Italian Festival gives Tickfaw its loudest annual signature, while Our Lady of Pompeii keeps the older religious and family traditions visible through the Saint Joseph's altar and July's Blessed Mother Parade. The Hammond area keeps the village connected to a larger market without erasing its own traditions. Strawberry farming brought many Italian families into the region, and those roots are still part of how the village introduces itself. Tickfaw is small, but the calendar carries a strong sense of place: church hall, parade route, family recipes, and the piney parish roads around it.