Pickering Sawmill Ghost Town

Pickering was the second-largest town in Vernon Parish in 1910 — 3,000 people, a company commissary, a hotel, the Pickering Lumber Company mill running three shifts. By 1935 the longleaf was cut out, the mill shut, and the town was physically dismantled and hauled off on flatcars to the next stand of pine in Arkansas. What's left on LA-171 south of Leesville is a roadside sign, a cemetery, and a few foundation pads in the pine second-growth. Pickering is the classic cut-and-run pattern that produced dozens of ghost towns across the No Man's Land pine belt — and one of the few where you can still walk the streets, because the streets are still there under the pine needles.