Garyville Timbermill Museum

Garyville is technically the largest city on the Mississippi River between New Orleans and Baton Rouge — a fact almost nobody knows, because it exists almost entirely because of the Lyon Cypress Lumber Company, which built a complete company town here in 1903. The museum preserves what remains of that industrial history: sawmill equipment, photographs, and records from when Garyville was cutting old-growth cypress out of the basin at an industrial pace that would strip the swamps bare within a generation. The company town is gone; the museum is in one of the few surviving original buildings. It is the only public record of a town that came into existence for one reason and nearly ceased to exist when that reason ended.