DeRidder Historic District

The Kansas City Southern Railway platted DeRidder in 1898 and named it for Ella de Ridder—a woman who'd run away from home young and was presumed dead by her family until they learned she'd made it to the United States. She was one of thirteen children from a family that came from Geldermalsen in the Netherlands. Her brother-in-law, Dutch railroad financier Jan de Goeijen, was bringing rail through and chose her name for the new town. Before that it was Schovall.

By 1898 the town held nearly 300 people in shack houses and a sawmill. The longleaf pine was the asset—timber men claimed the largest pine in the world stood where DeRidder now stands. The town hit 5,400 people by 1920, almost all of them on sawmill and tie-mill payrolls. Then the longleaf was cut out by the mid-1930s and the mills closed within months of each other. The population contracted but the grid stayed.

The historic district went on the National Register in 1983—Washington, Second, Stewart, and Port streets, the commercial core from the sawmill peak. The courthouse and jail were built in 1914, when timber money was still coming. The jail is collegiate Gothic Revival with shallow arches, dormer windows, and a central tower—an architectural style popular with colleges, universities, and churches, here holding prisoners behind iron bars. Walls run thirteen to twenty-one inches thick, reinforced concrete. A corridor in the basement connects it to the courthouse next door.

The courthouse square and the Kansas City Southern depot are still there. The whole district is ten minutes on foot, which is the point: you can see exactly how much town a timber boom bought, and how much stayed when the boom left.