Ponchatoula Historic Depot & Locomotive

The locomotive outside Ponchatoula's old Illinois Central depot is from the Louisiana Cypress Lumber Company — the industry that built Tangipahoa Parish. Inside the depot, now a Railway Post Office museum, stands an authentic 1940s mail car with working displays. Before highways came, the postal rail system connected rural Louisiana to the rest of the country. The depot sits in a parish that touches Lake Pontchartrain, an estuary fed by the Tangipahoa River and four others, part of a 10,000-square-mile watershed stretching across sixteen Louisiana parishes. The lake was named for a French finance minister under Louis XIV; the colony itself was named for the king. In 1852, a railroad linked New Orleans to the north shore. This depot is what remained when the trains stopped running and the mail moved to trucks. Pair it with Ponchatoula's antique district for a half-day stop.