The story
Longleaf — often written Long Leaf — was the company town of the Crowell & Spencer Lumber Company, founded in 1892 to cut the vast longleaf pine forests of central Louisiana. The mill town had the usual company parts: worker housing, a commissary, a school, churches, and medical care, all built around the sawmill complex south of Forest Hill in Rapides Parish.
The mill's timber went to serious use — the tough, splinter-resistant heart pine was used in World War II to build thousands of Higgins landing craft. The sawmill itself, built in 1910, is one of the oldest complete mills left in the country. Then on Valentine's Day 1969 the gears simply stopped, and the mill closed for good.
Rather than being scrapped, the complex survived nearly intact and became the Southern Forest Heritage Museum, opened in 1996. It preserves the whole works — the 1910 sawmill, planer mill, roundhouse, machine shop, dry kilns, and a collection of logging locomotives — the most complete historic sawmill complex in the South.
What remains today
The complete 1910 sawmill, planer mill, roundhouse, machine shop, dry kilns, commissary, and logging locomotives — preserved as the Southern Forest Heritage Museum.
Questions from the field
- What is at Longleaf, Louisiana today?
- The Southern Forest Heritage Museum, built around the intact Crowell & Spencer sawmill complex that closed in 1969 — considered the most complete historic sawmill in the South.
From the field
The most valuable part of this record is the part only visitors can write.
Stamp your passport
Check in at Longleaf — GPS-verified visits earn an inked stamp.
File a field report
Road conditions, what's still standing, what's gone — your report joins the record.
Add photographs
Credited, dated, and preserved as part of Longleaf's permanent record.
No field reports yet — sign in to file the first.
Primary sources for this record
- — USGS GNIS feature 547628
- — Southern Forest Heritage Museum records
- — National Register of Historic Places — Crowell Sawmill Historic District