Carson sat five miles south of DeRidder on the Kansas City Southern line, on land bought up by Central Coal and Coke of Kansas City. Founded 1901, named for a company official. A sawmill town, like dozens of others through the southern pines.
It was a town long enough to have a baseball team. The Carson team played Bon Ami on April 5, 1908, in the Yellow Pine League — the sawmill towns of the region had organized their own circuit the year before, the kind of detail that says a place expected to be around. Then the trees ran out. By 1925 Beauregard Parish was, in the period phrase, 'a wasteland of cutover pine stumps,' and Carson was one of the roughly two hundred Louisiana mill towns that simply stopped. The mill closed; the company moved on; the town went with it.
Carson exists now in records and archives — Stephen F. Austin's East Texas Research Center has the paper trail. On the ground there is nothing to flag the spot. Two hundred Carsons stopped the same way; this is one of them.
