Southern Forest Heritage Museum

The Southern Forest Heritage Museum is a complex of historic buildings, all on the National Register of Historic Places, preserved from an old sawmill in the beautiful piney woods of Longleaf, Louisiana, 3 miles south of Forest Hill, south of the city of Alexandria on the edge of the Alexander Forest Wildlife Management Area. Check out all the links on the pages.

Preserving Louisiana’s Southern Forest Heritage, click here.

Exhibit – Sustainable Forestry click link.
The first three decades of the 20th century came to be known as the “golden age of lumbering” in the South. Between 1894 and 1929, over 327 billion board of southern pine lumber was shipped to markets around the world, with nearly 62 billion board feet from the forests of Louisiana alone. Most of the timber was harvested with a cut-out and get-out policy with total disregard for its regeneration. The millions of acres of desolate cutover land that resulted were envisioned to have a disastrous effect on the Nation’s economy and perhaps even its climate. A few individuals took the initiatives that brought the hope of reforestation. The effort was led by a visionary who convinced others that reforestation was possible, followed by a pragmatic industrialist who committed his company to develop the necessary technology, and supported by a scientist who refined and documented the technology for its application across the South. The development and application of this natural and artificial regeneration technology restored the South’s denuded forest and made them the “wood basket” of the Nation and a global leader in the practice of sustainable forestry.