The Goodyear brothers came down from Pennsylvania in 1906, bought the piney woods of Washington Parish, and built a town around a sawmill. At its peak, the Great Southern Lumber Company was the largest sawmill in the world — and the city that rose around it earned the nickname "The Magic City" for the speed of its arrival. In Ponchatoula, to the west, the Louisiana Cypress Lumber Company ran logs through Tangipahoa Parish, and the storefronts on Pine Street went up to serve the workers. A locomotive from that company still sits outside the Collinswood School Museum — stationary, honest about what paid for the buildings around it. At the old Illinois Central depot, a preserved 1940s mail car documents the postal rail system that connected rural Louisiana to the rest of the country before highways arrived. The timber is long gone, but the towns it built are still standing.
