Ponchatoula Commercial Historic District

The strawberry built this street. In the early twentieth century, when Tangipahoa Parish rode the cash wave of King Strawberry, Ponchatoula's merchants lined Pine Street with brick storefronts to serve the trade. Eleven of those buildings earned National Register listing in 1982 as one of the two finest turn-of-the-century commercial zones in the Florida Parishes—the other being Hammond. The corridor runs between Railroad Avenue and Sixth Street, where freight once moved the berries that justified the expense. The district reflects what strawberry prosperity could buy: permanent commercial architecture in a region where most towns never got past timber. Ponchatoula formalized its claim in 1968 with a city ordinance declaring itself the Strawberry Capital of the World. The annual Strawberry Festival each April still draws roughly 300,000 visitors, though the town now carries a second nickname—America's Antique City—for the concentration of shops that occupy those brick shells. Park near the railroad tracks and walk Pine Street. The buildings that housed strawberry commerce now hold the furniture and glassware of a hundred dismantled households, but the bones of the district remain what the berry money built.