1900's

How Richland Parish’s HOLLY RIDGE Got It’s Name

How Richland Parish’s HOLLY RIDGE Got It’s Name

Holly Ridge (Richland) – Holly Ridge is an accurately descriptive name. When the Holly Ridge post office was established in November 1911, the community was a lumbering center. In 1908, the Chess and Wymond Company erected a mill at Holly Ridge to manufacture barrel staves and headings for their barrel plant in Louisville, Kentucky. The barrels, made from white oak, were for aging and storing bourbon whiskey. A short time later, the Norman Lumber Company built a mill at Holly Ridge to cut all other species of timber. In 1910, the Mengel Company sawmill opened; it operated for many years. The Holly Ridge post office opened in November 1911 with Walter Cochran as postmaster. In 1925, the Chess and Wymond Company finished cutting the virgin timber off their forty-six thousand acres in the Holly Ridge and Crew Lake vicinity and sold the cutover timber to Jesse Cochran and George Franklin Sr., who made it into processed lumber products.

Leeper, Clare D’Artois. Louisiana Place Names: Popular, Unusual, and Forgotten Stories of Towns, Cities, Plantations, Bayous, and Even Some Cemeteries. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2012. Print.

 

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