Building a House in a Town That Was Once Nothing But Timber
If you have ever tried to track down the original property lines on a colonial-style home in Deridder, Louisiana, you will quickly learn that the town's layout is not a grid. It is a series of irregular parcels carved out of pine forest by the Myers Lumber Company around 1904, and the deed records reflect that messiness. You cannot just pull up a parcel map and expect clean lot lines. The Myers family founded this town specifically to exploit the vast longleaf pine stands in Beauregard Parish, and the streets were laid out to serve the mill, not to serve future homeowners or surveyors. Understanding what happened here requires understanding the mechanics of a company town. The Myers Lumber Company did not just build a sawmill. They built housing for their workers, a general store where wages could be spent, a railroad depot, and a post office. The town was called Deridder after a former railroad official, C.C. Deridder, and the entire infrastructure existed to support the lumber trade. When the pines ran out in the 1920s and 1930s, the mill closed, but the town did not disappear. The housing stock remained, the street names remained, and the community held on through cotton farming and later through the Navy's presence at nearby Camp Henderson during World War II. I spent three weeks last year trying to verify the original construction date of a craftsman-bungalow hybrid on Pine Street that had been renovated at least twice. The Assessor's office had the square footage listed correctly but the year was off by eight years because the first permit was filed under the name of a Myers Lumber foreman who later sold the property to his daughter. The workaround was to pull the deed chain from the Beauregard Parish clerk's records going back to the original Myers Lumber Company trust. Once you cross-reference the deed dates with the Sanborn fire insurance maps from 1918, the actual build date becomes obvious. The house was framed in 1912, not 1920 as the assessor claimed.
The colonial-style homes in Deridder are not true colonial revivals in the architectural sense. Most of them are vernacular structures built by mill workers using materials from the very mill that built the town. You will find original heart pine flooring, often still in place beneath later vinyl or carpet installations. The lumber was kiln-dried by the mill's own dry kilns, which means the wood is significantly denser than modern southern yellow pine. If you are working on a renovation and you encounter original trim or flooring, do not assume it is standard material. It will be harder to cut, it will hold nails better, and it is far more resistant to rot than anything available today. One thing most people researching Deridder's history miss is the role of the railroad. The Cotton Belt Railroad ran right through town and was the reason the Myers Lumber Company chose this location in the first place. Without that rail connection, the timber could not have been shipped to markets in New Orleans and beyond. The railroad also brought in labor from Mississippi, Texas, and other parts of Louisiana, which created a diverse working-class population that persisted even after the mill declined. The demographic makeup of Deridder today is a direct result of those migration patterns from over a hundred years ago. The downside of dealing with Deridder's housing history is that many original records from the Myers Lumber Company era were lost to flooding, poor storage conditions, or simply discarded when the company restructured during the Great Depression. You will hit dead ends. I hit one on a property off East Liberty Street where the original lot plat had never been recorded with the parish because the Myers Company treated the land as company property until it was sold. The only way to establish the boundary was to physically survey the existing structures and compare them to aerial photographs from 1938. That took two days and cost more than the research itself, but it resolved a dispute between two neighbors over a ten-foot strip of land that had been ignored for sixty years.
If you are interested in this history and want to dig into it yourself, the Beauregard Parish Library has a local history collection that includes copies of old Deridder newspapers, particularly the Beauregard Daily News, which goes back to the 1920s. The Louisiana State Archives in Baton Rouge holds the Myers Lumber Company records, though accessing them requires a research appointment. For property-specific information, the Beauregard Parish Assessor's office and the Clerk of Court are your starting points, but do not stop there. The real answers are usually in the gap between what those offices have recorded and what actually exists on the ground.
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