Bogalusa is a city in Washington Parish, Louisiana. In the early 1900s, brothers Frank Henry Goodyear and Charles W. Goodyear of Buffalo, New York, bought hundreds of thousands of acres of virgin pine forests in southeastern Louisiana and southwestern Mississippi. In 1902, they chartered the Great Southern Lumber Company (1908–38) and erected a sawmill in 1906 on the Bogue Lusa Creek where it flows into the Pearl River. Bogalusa was built as a company town to house workers, supervisors, and associated infrastructure to support this rural operation. The sawmill was the largest in the world at the time. With the virgin pine forest cleared, the sawmill closed in 1938 during the Great Depression. It was replaced as the city’s main industry by the Bogalusa Paper Company (Wikipedia, 2019).
Citations
McClendon, Pat. (2008, Jul. 15). Bogalusa, Washington Parish, Louisiana. Retrieved from freepages.rootsweb.com.
Wikipedia. (2019, Jul. 26). Bogalusa, Louisiana. Retrieved from en.wikipedia.org.
How it all Began 