Historic Downtown Ponchatoula — America's Antique City

The railroad reached Ponchatoula in 1852, linking New Orleans to the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain. Cypress swamps stretched for miles. By the early 1900s, the Louisiana Cypress Lumber Company was running logs through town, and the storefronts on Pine Street went up to serve the workers. A locomotive from that company sits outside the Collinswood School Museum now—stationary, but honest about what paid for the buildings around it. The museum offers free admission. Inside: cypress industry history and Native American artifacts pulled from the wetlands that once dominated Tangipahoa Parish. The old train depot, a few blocks away, operates as the Ponchatoula Country Market. Pine Street itself has become a strip of antique shops—dozens of them, enough that the town calls itself America's Antique City without anyone arguing the point. Twice a year, in March and November, downtown hosts an arts and crafts fair. The real test comes each April, when the Strawberry Festival draws more than 300,000 visitors to the parish. The antique shops stay open late. Pine Street fills with people who drove up from New Orleans or across the Causeway—the longest continuous bridge over water in the world, crossing the estuary that shaped this region. The locomotive doesn't move, but everything else does.