Bogalusa — The Magic City

The Goodyear brothers of Pennsylvania bought piney woods in Washington Parish and built a sawmill company town in 1906. At its peak, the Great Southern Lumber Company here was the largest sawmill in the world. The city that grew around it earned the nickname "The Magic City" for how quickly it rose out of the piney woods. This is Louisiana's North Shore — the land that wraps the northern edge of Lake Pontchartrain, the massive estuary that defines southeastern Louisiana. The lake itself is no lake at all but a brackish passage to the Gulf, fed by the Tangipahoa, Tchefuncte, Tickfaw, Amite, and Bogue Falaya rivers, draining a watershed that spans sixteen Louisiana parishes and four Mississippi counties. Bogalusa sits inland in Washington Parish, where the timber was. In the 1960s, the city became a pivotal civil rights battleground. Bogalusa was home to the Deacons for Defense and Justice — an armed self-defense organization that protected civil rights workers and Black communities when local law enforcement would not. What began as a company town built for profit became a place where people fought over what the city could mean. The Bogalusa City Museum on Avenue F holds the lumber-era and civil rights exhibits — the two stories that made this place.