During Louisiana's timber boom, the Industrial Lumber Company bought tens of thousands of acres of virgin pine forest, founded Elizabeth in 1907, and began building a huge mill there, with operations starting in 1909. Running a single shift, and often a double shift day and night, the mill produced 160,000 board feet daily. Elizabeth quickly became the company's headquarters because of the mill's output and its rail connection to the company's other mills in Oakdale. Built as a company town, Elizabeth included office buildings, houses, stores, a modern hospital, a school, a church, a theater, a civic auditorium, a park with an open-air pavilion, and a golf course, while strict building standards and open front porches were meant to distinguish it from rougher lumber towns and encourage community life. Industrial Lumber called itself "builders, not spoilers" and, rather than quickly clear-cutting valuable heart pine, spread the cutting of 70,000 acres over several years, added mill operations to use less valuable pine, and established experimental farms, a sweet potato curing plant, and a canning plant to help preserve the land's value after logging. In 1942 Industrial Lumber ceased operations and leased the industrial field to the Calcasieu Paper Company, which had opened a nearby paper mill in 1926. In 1946 C. G. McGhee's Jacksonville Paper bought Calcasieu Paper Company and assumed Industrial Lumber's lease of the town, and in 1955 McGhee bought the town outright. In 1964 Governor Jimmie Davis signed Elizabeth's incorporation proclamation, ending ownership of the town by a single man. The town's commissary, managed from around 1910 by A.B. Finke, became Elizabeth's social and commercial center, with a soda fountain, druggist, theater ticket sales, hardware, clothing, grocery and meat departments, and an upstairs area where people handled accounts, while residents and people from surrounding areas gathered there weekly to shop, visit, and exchange news. Elizabeth's 1924 Colonial Revival hospital, built for workers and townspeople, had four wards separated by race and sex, private recovery and dressing rooms, three doctors and two nurses, X-ray machines, and advanced operating and sterilization rooms that gave it an excellent reputation. With only minor alterations since its construction, the building now serves as the town's municipal center and museum, and it has also become associated with local stories of unexplained voices, footsteps, apparitions, moving curtains, and a shattered coffee pot.