In 1903 the Hudson Lumber Company built 125 tenant houses in DeRidder, and the Long Bell Lumber Company’s subsidiary sawmill there grew into a hub for area sawmills. By 1904 the mill was producing 34,000,000 feet of lumber, averaging 150,000 feet each work day, and shipping 3,000 boxcars annually. In 1905 the plant employed 200 mill hands and loggers and operated 16 miles of tram railroad into the forest with three pine-knot-burning locomotives and 60 log cars. The complex included a plant office, dispensary, union school, and church building. Powered by boilers and a 400-hp Corliss steam engine, the sawmill and planing mill used an array of cutting and finishing machines, while the yard could hold 9,000,000 feet of lumber drying, stored, or being loaded. At the log front, workers used 50 horses and mules, 8-wheel log wagons, and a Ledgerwood skidder-loader that handled 140,000 scaled feet of logs daily. Timber men such as Willis Grantham established logging camps in the forest, often reaching sites before improved roads existed. The sawmill era also left a legacy in the curly pine trim preserved in a few homes on Fourth St., wood saved for Long Bell employees including Charles Sills, the general manager, and the company doctor; curly pine was cut to extinction by the 1920s. DeRidder also became known in local legend for Chinese pistachio trees planted in the early 1900s, especially along the Pine Street corridor, and the city later promoted their reintroduction. More broadly, Beauregard Parish once held one of the world’s premier pine forests, whose dense canopy and immense trees were harvested over the first quarter of the twentieth century, supplying lumber used in cities such as Chicago and New York City. A longer history of the region’s timber runs from undisturbed southern yellow pines after 1492, through settlers, turpentine camps, industrial logging, widespread cutting by 1925, Depression-era stump lands, stump-based turpentine production in the 1940s, papermaking from reforested trees in the 1960s, and modern regrowth that makes pine central to Beauregard Parish’s economy past and future.