Boom or Bust

Driving Caddo Parish's scenic byways through oil towns and living history

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Getaways

A field is never just a field—not here in the South, anyway. The long, flat stretches of land that define the highways of Caddo Parish are anything but empty. Like the young, perfectly uniform pine forests—interspersed with the rare and knowing elder tree—the landscape has always been a testament to the human hand, and likewise the human story. 

To wind through the small Northwest Louisiana towns between Caddo Lake and the Red River is to follow a map of phantoms: hills that are actually tombs, tufts of cotton snagged in the branches of trees; abandoned pumpjacks, rusted and shrouded by a forest struggling to reclaim itself, nodding towards eternity. Echoes of more prosperous ages rise from Greek columns—some of it perfectly preserved, much of it not—surrounded on all sides by the disheveled and rusty ruins from when the wells ran dry. The stories, half-told, are layered one over another: America, the gateway to the West, Manifest Destiny, the lumber baron, the cotton baron, and all the men and women who labored beneath them; black gold, pouring from the ground, until they didn’t call it gold anymore.  

“Boom or Bust” they’ve named this scenic byway, a tourism-forward storytelling mechanism to connect the threads, to slow you down on the drive so you might actually see them. 

When exploring the Caddo corner of the National Scenic Boom or Bust Byway, you could certainly make Shreveport your homebase—an urban reprieve rich in the amenities of a major Southern city. But a better immersion is perhaps a quieter one. I found myself about fifteen minutes north of the city proper, at God’s Country RV Resort inside the Soda Lake Wildlife Management Area, where, as they say, “Louisiana touches a bit of Heaven.”

Off Highway 1, the site leans into the aesthetics of a rustic Western utopia. Besides the RV sites (some of them with their own patios, fire pits, and swings), the cabins look as though they were built from Lincoln Logs, and the glamping teepees are air conditioned. You can even stay in a retrofitted Conestoga wagon reminiscent of the nineteenth-century pioneers. There are fishing ponds and playgrounds, a nine-hole disc golf course, dog parks and swimming pools, a massive indoor arcade, a tennis court, an indoor pickleball court, and a gym. 

From my stone cabin, situated on top of a hill with the wagons and RVs and a statue of a buffalo looking yonder, I enjoyed an expansive view of the willow, cottonwood, ash, and hackberry forests surrounding the Egan Lake Reservoir. (I might have done so even more luxuriously from my private hot tub on the patio, if I weren’t six months pregnant at the time.) 

There are trade-offs to being in the middle of nowhere, certainly, and a scarcity of nearby take-out options is one of them. After a long day of travel, I wanted nothing more than to settle into my cozy cabin. A barbecue on the provided pit would have been ideal, but I was curious about the local cuisine options. A deep dive on North Louisiana Facebook foodie groups drew me to Kim’s Cook House on S. Lakeshore Drive about fifteen minutes away, known for their steaming and sauce-covered boil plates. A quick jaunt over Cross Lake and back, and I was free to indulge whole-heartedly (and privately) in the messy delights of boiled Gulf shrimp, potatoes, and corn, caked in just the right amount of seasoning, and drizzled in garlic sauce.   

Breakfast was less of an ordeal—Bernard’s Back Porch Café in Blanchard is exactly what it sounds like: a small town’s designated third place, owned by born and bred locals Lacey and Codi Bernard. It set the tone as my gateway to a day of exploring the backroads of Caddo Parish, and the fuel offered by the hearty loaded potato breakfast certainly didn’t hurt.

Still sipping on my just-floral-enough “Wild Flower Latte” (espresso, honey, lavender, vanilla, and milk), I set out for my first stop—a glimpse into the natural heritage of Caddo Parish past. 

In the heart of logging country, the 160-acre Walter B. Jacobs Memorial Nature Park is a rare haven of old growth pine-oak-hickory forest, home to more than five hundred species of Louisiana native plants (nearly twenty percent of the flora of the entire state). A glimpse of what this region was like unspoiled by modern industry, the property was donated by the Jacobs family to the Caddo Parish Parks and Recreation Commission in the early 1970s, opening to the public in 1975 with five miles of hiking trails and an interpretive nature center. 

Over fifty years later, the Park re-opened in January 2026 after a nearly two-year renovation with a brand new, $20 million nature center, funded by bonds approved by Caddo Parish voters. Rusty Scarborough, the park manager and senior park naturalist, guided me through the artistically rendered exhibitions in the gallery space—still aweing over it all himself. To have had enough community support to make this happen, he said, still gives him chills. He called it one of the most state-of-the-art facilities of its kind in the South. 

The exhibits invite visitors to reach out and feel the texture of an alligator egg, to sniff a native pawpaw tree. Replicas of vernal pools, trees fallen from storms, and various wildlife habitats encourage a closer look: spot tiny beetles crawling on trees and a red-tailed hawk peeking over branches. Real-life baby gators, cottonmouth snakes, and box turtles peer from their habitats as you wander through, hopefully sparking enough curiosity to get you outside and onto the trails. 

On the second floor, massive windows are designed to provide a view of the forest canopy: a birdwatcher’s delight, with thoughtfully slanted, UV-treated glass to prevent the birds from smashing into them. Some of the almost 150 species known to inhabit the Park include three species of nuthatches, eastern wood-peewees, Acadian flycatchers, Louisiana waterthrushes, and yellow-breasted chats. 

For decades, the Park has also played host to a remarkable collection of rehabilitated birds of prey. In the aviary, see up close (from behind careful fencing) various species of owls, a vulture, and a bald eagle. These trained birds are utilized in much of the Park’s comprehensive educational programming. 

Before departing, I took a few minutes to walk the quick (.3-mile) paved Audubon Trail near the nature center, just to get a true immersion of the forest, however brief. The fallen leaves of late February blanketed everything, tiny wildflowers only just beginning to peek through as a harbinger of spring. Even so close to the parking lot, the rustles and chirps of fauna unbothered sang through the silence. 

From here, the Byway takes you to Mooringsport, but it would be a sin not to make a brief pilgrimage west, to Shiloh Baptist Church—the final resting place of blues legend Huddie Ledbetter, better known as “Lead Belly.” You’ve heard Lead Belly’s music, even if you don’t know it; the blues artist born to just-freed sharecroppers at Jeter Plantation at the end of the twentieth century went on to inspire the likes of Bob Dylan, Led Zeppelin, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and Nirvana. His impact on America’s musical sensibilities is vast, and gathered largely from a youth absorbing field hollers and work songs in the very cotton fields I was driving by, gospel music and hymns in the area’s Black churches, fiddle tunes and folksongs distinct to the mélange of cultures that called the Ark-La-Tex region home. Scholars have detected rhythms of Afro-Caribbean influence characteristic of New Orleans, as well as the modern ragtime performed in Shreveport. He was of a particular place, this particular place; but his impact has reverberated across the globe, and through the decades. 

Ledbetter’s grave joins a hundred or so others in a remote rural cemetery, a collection of stones with inscriptions unreadable alongside others decorated within the last few weeks. Some are little more than a glance of rock poking through the soil. As I approached his slab, designated by a protective black fence and shiny granite, I noted dozens of other Ledbetters leading the way. 

Pulling out of the church lot, I did what so many must do upon departing this cemetery carved out from the loblolly forests, directing my Spotify to play the folksong Lead Belly made famous: 

In the pines

In the pines

Where the sun never shines

I will shiver the whole night through

The wooded road to Mooringsport opens up to the small village, population six hundred. Blink and you’ll miss it, finding yourself soaring right over Caddo Lake. But slow down, and look up to see the historic water tower, a structure iconic enough to be featured in various artworks capturing the uncannily beautiful character of this region. The circa-1916 Masonic Hall will encourage a tap on the breaks, practically glimmering, with its recently restored Beaux-Arts columns, against the sagging downtown. A sign out front advertises support for the ambitious preservation project, which is promised to be the first of a campaign of rehabilitation efforts across the small community. 

This infusion of energy and investment can also be seen just down the street at the town’s historic bank building, which appears freshly power washed with a bright mural on its wall, advertising local investor Wayne Boyter’s beer cave, Cooter Brown’s Vault, with an artistic rendering of a Bonnie and Clyde robbery. As recently as 2023, Mooringsport was one of Caddo Parish's last dry towns, until a local vote approved alcohol sales as part of its economic revitalization plan. The Vault now serves not only the local villagers, who used to have to drive out of town for a drink or a six pack, but also visitors enjoying the provisions of the area’s fishing camps—who can now stop by  Mooringsport to shop from the wide selection of beer, wine, and liquor or enjoy a handcrafted cocktail at the bar.

I’m intrigued by what appears to be an old train car sitting, without explanation, in a lot nearby. Some research reveals it to be a caboose from the old Kansas City Southern Railway’s “Southern Belle” passenger train, which originally ran from Kansas City to the Gulf of Mexico—stopping for a time in Mooringsport. Boyter purchased it in 2023, with plans to someday include it in plans for a resort on Caddo Lake. 

Just past the downtown is perhaps one of the best vantage points to view the Lake itself, standing on the pedestrian-only Mooringsport Drawbridge, built in 1914. The 26,000-acre lake is the largest natural freshwater body of water in the South, and has been called by some “the most beautiful lake in America,” a mysterious wonderland of bayous, swamps, and cypress forests crossing into Texas. Caddo legend traces its origins to the New Madrid earthquakes of 1811–1812, though geological surveys reveal the body to be even older, formed by an enormous 150-mile log jam known as the Great Raft, which clogged the Red River as early as the twelfth century.

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Mooringsport’s access to the lake, especially before Henry Miller Shreve removed the log jams and made the Red River navigable, made it a minor, but busy, steamboat port—where cotton and other goods were loaded for transport to Texas after being hauled over land from New Orleans. After a local fisherman discovered a pearl in a mussel in 1909, the area briefly became a hub for a freshwater pearl rush. One resident described the era as being characterized by campfires seen around Caddo Lake’s shores for miles each night. When the Corps of Engineers raised the dam in 1911, though, the mussel beds were completely submerged—destroying the fledgling industry overnight.   

Around the same time, though, just a couple of years after the initial oil boom, workers for Gulf Refining Company noticed bubbles rising to the surface of certain parts of Caddo Lake; the discovery led to the construction of the first over-the-water drilling platform built in the United States. Like other small towns in the area at that time, Mooringsport was experiencing a surge in population as workers flocked to the new opportunities presented by the mushrooming oil industry. 

The drawbridge I stood on was built to meet those growing transportation needs in 1914, designed to allow tall oil drilling equipment to pass beneath it. The original bridge was used until 1989, even playing host to training exercises facilitated by the U.S. Army in preparation for World War II. In the summer of 1941, President Eisenhower and General George S. Patton led thousands of soldiers in a maneuver to "capture” the bridge, even “bombing” it with sacks of flour. 

When it went out of commission and a new, more modern bridge was built, locals came out to campaign for the historic bridge’s preservation, proclaiming that the city “Save the Historic Caddo Lake Drawbridge.” Their efforts proved successful, and today it resides on the National Register of Historic Places: a landmark, tourist attraction, and popular fishing spot. 

From here, the road rises eagerly to meet its legend as “oil country.” Just a few miles out from Mooringsport stands a stop-in-your-tracks billboard advertising a local business called W.C. “Dub” Allen & Sons. “Welcome to Oil City, LA,” it says, with an arrow showing the way. The sign is compelling, not only for its size, but for its old school ad design, and the fact that it is fading before our eyes. Who knows how long it has been here, barely readable now. Beneath it are two signs clearly added years, probably decades later, directing drivers to the First Baptist Church on the road to the left, the Oil City United Methodist Church to the right. Just a couple minutes later, there’s another sign, also by W.C. “Dub” Allen & Sons, proclaiming Oil City as “A City on the Ball.” 

It was 1905 when the fishermen, trappers, and farmers of this area saw their city transformed into a “boom town” following the initial discovery of oil and establishment of the Caddo-Pine Island field. The name Oil City can be traced back to the local postmaster, Howard Hughes Sr. (whose son would go on to become the prominent business magnate, Howard Hughes Jr., made one of the richest men in America by the oil industry). As laborers flocked toward the land of opportunity, area properties rose from 50 cents an acre to $500, overnight. The population soared. The exploding industry brought forth an era of prosperity that extended far beyond Caddo Parish, impacting the entire economic structure of the state; and resulting in engineering innovations that, to this day, are utilized across the global energy sector.

But while there was certainly money to be made, this was no Mayfair. Oil City was a worksite, with men spending twelve hours a day, seven days a week in the fields, often sleeping in tents. In the early days, it gained a reputation as “Wild Cat Town,” characterized by an outlaw culture and its bustling red light district. It was a land of fires and fumes, a “sacrificial landscape,” for energy extraction, as Henry Alexander Wiencek wrote in his history of the area.

Driving through the sleepy town today, with its population of around 1,000, the almost operatic-level tragedy of the 1980s oil bust still reverberates—the boom days little more than a haunt. Following Saudi Arabia’s ramp up in oil production in 1986, crude oil prices plummeted from $35 per barrel ($134 today) to $10 per barrel ($29 today). Banks, which had been lending freely across the state, collapsed, and the economic fallout would come to define a generation. 

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Forty years later, the town is still marked by its history; you can see it everywhere. The industries of the area retain their ties to the world of oil, with most residents working in the fields of extraction, maintenance, and manufacturing. Some people have found work plugging the hundreds of “orphan” wells leftover from the boom, abandoned structures that continue to leak chemicals like methane, and pollute groundwater all these years later. 

When I visit downtown, advertised as “Beautiful Downtown Oil City,” “ghost” is the word that comes to mind: a short line of unmarked warehouses on one side of the street, crumbling monuments to oil rigs on the other. I count around five cars parked, including mine, on this Thursday afternoon. I spot a bench with the refraining label of “W.C. Dub Allen & Sons,” and later learn that Dub Allen was an influential business owner in the area, who spent his life promoting Oil City and preserving its history. He was involved in founding the Caddo Pine Island Oil Museum, today the Louisiana State Oil and Gas Museum—which documents the rise and fall, and all of the twists and turns in between, of Caddo Parish’s Boom or Bust era. As I’m backing out of my parking spot, I notice a faded mural poking out from the wall of one of the tallest buildings, proclaiming proudly, “World’s First Overwater Oil Well Drilled in Caddo Lake in 1911.” 

The history is weighty, so I was grateful for the reprieve of natural beauty offered by the nearby Earl G. Williamson Park—forty acres of carefully maintained lakeside bliss, complete with a fishing pier, boat ramp, camping spots, and a ball field, cornhole court, and playground. Here is where the people of Oil City (and beyond) come together each spring to honor their history at the Gusher Days Festival, held the first weekend of May. The fishing pier provides another view of the legendary Caddo Lake, and I enjoyed a revitalizing stroll along the disc golf trail, which takes you into the woods on the far end of the property. 

From here, the byway takes you through other boom towns of the region, interspersed as they are by an oscillating sense of prosperity: massive homes with extensive properties, charming little houses selling farm fresh eggs, trailer parks and abandoned gas stations, pumpjacks marking time, always. 

In the teeny village of Hosston, the view is broken up by a conglomerate of treasures, piled enticingly around two historic brick buildings that appear seemingly out of nowhere—one of them the old Post Office. This is Big Mama’s Antiques & Restoration, a crowned jewel on the area’s Antiques Trail. The place is open by appointment only and on Saturdays, though when I passed I could see the owner, Ray Stevenson, working on his laptop outside. I pulled in. 

Stevenson, who lives in the Post Office, has been collecting treasures for decades now, and feels he has mastered the business to his liking. “People ask me all the time how I sell anything out here in the middle of nowhere,” he said, noting that most of his sales are online these days. “But people who are antique dealers or collectors, who know the value of what I’ve got, they’ll come.” This is, of course, in addition to the natural curiosity his display of roadside accoutrements draws: it stops people in their tracks. Walking me through the wonderland of his store—a collection of historic lighting and chandeliers dripping from the ceiling, Victorian desks and chairs serving as a foundation for carefully displayed (though not exactly “curated,” by Stevenson’s own admission) artworks, books, and Americana. Stevenson shares that some of what’s on display is from his personal collection, and not even for sale. His specialty is African American history, and much of his stock is sourced from private estates around the country. 

“Our history is very rare,” he said, “and it is rarely told correctly. Now, today, it is being removed. But we will not be erased, in part, because of people like me, who know this is important, more important than ever.” 

He shared with me, for instance, a cabinet of books from the collection of a man called A.T. Stewart, who was born enslaved but later became educated and influential in academic and political circles. The books are valuable in and of themselves, but the real treasures were the “stories” within them: all of Stewart’s notes, stray papers, letters. “He wrote on everything,” said Stevenson, who next showed me a door with a painting of a Black child in utero in the glass window. The door, and its artwork, came from Shreveport’s very first Black gynecologist, Dr. Brierre. There are portraits and a bust of the musician Beauty Milton, and a cotton sack from the Jim Crow era. All over the room are “Mammy” dolls and other derogatory artworks, whose fraught histories Stevenson takes the time to explain to each customer. “What’s amazing,” he said, “is that people are learning. These are no longer a good investment for collectors the way they once were.” From drawers in what is probably a priceless cabinet, Stevenson pulls out piles of rare broadsides and handbills, all taken from private estates. “This,” he said, “seems like nothing to some people. But this is the history. This is what’s important.” 

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After an hour of rich conversation and museum-level access to remarkable historic artifacts, I headed towards Gilliam with Stevenson’s endorsement of the little cotton town’s restaurant, Main Street. Occupying a century-old warehouse, the place is clearly a community staple—when I arrived at almost two, the late lunch crowd was polishing off their plates, making jokes to the waitresses as they cleaned tables. A chicken club sandwich with fries fortified me for the last leg of my journey. 

I started just next door at the Red River Crossroads Historical & Cultural Museum, housed in the local library. The micro-museum is a great launchpad for exploring this side of the Byway, where the impacts of early oil ran against the deep-set farming culture of communities like Gilliam, Hosston, and Belcher. On exhibit are an extensive collection of projectile points and pottery found in the area, as well as examples of old farm machinery with handwritten captions like: “Blow torch Hardy Hale inherited from his Uncle Randall Clark after WWI.” 

On my way to Belcher, the road was flecked in white: strands of cotton sprinkled across the highway, caught in the trees. The fields were empty, harvested the previous fall. In a place where history rises up so visually from the ground, North Louisiana continues to grapple with its own past as a hotspot of the antebellum cotton industry—an economic system defined by chattel slavery. Many of the old properties are still there, but in most places, the only evidence is found in those fibers clinging to the trees. 

I pull over at Lynn Plantation, a cotton farm that has been in operation since the late nineteenth century. The home that sits there now was built in 1928, and is one of the best surviving examples of a twentieth century cotton plantation complex. Across the street, a country store moved from Myrtis, Louisiana stands as a tribute to the concept of the “commissary,” or general store serving the plantation’s workforce—which, at its peak, included over 300 families. Just down the road is Ida Bell’s House, a rare, well-preserved example of a Red River region tenant farmer’s home. Ida Bell Carroll worked for multiple generations of the Lynn family, and her home, situated as it is in the field, has inspired numerous artists attempting to capture the character of this place. 

Likely many of these fields were soon to be seeded with sunflowers in anticipation for Gilliam’s iconic Sunflower Trail and Festival come summer. Cotton is still grown here, with all its weight, but the stories are ever changing, the landscape painted over, at least for the summer, in gold. 

Carrying on, I didn’t expect a town called “Belcher” to be beautiful, but found myself quickly charmed by the farming community, knitted together by old growth elms, sycamores, magnolias, and oaks. By accident, trying to turn around after missing a turn, I found myself in front of the historic Horseshoe Bayou Bridge. Built in 1915, it is one of the earliest examples in Louisiana of an all-concrete structure. 

The little town is home to several historic plantation homesites, the kind of places with names—all graciously marked by the Red River Crossroads Historical Society. Both the Belcher Baptist Church and Belcher Methodist Church congregations are over a century old and their churches worth a moment of admiration, as is the beautifully tended-to Veteran’s Memorial in the middle of town. 

Just outside of the village proper, you can drive out to Belcher Mound—a Native American site that is hard to distinguish today in the fields of the still functioning Briarwood Plantation farm. Once, it was a mound that rose above the flat lands of the Red River region, a place to honor the dead as well as an active village, inhabited from 900–1700 CE. Early twentieth century excavations, combined with the farm’s operations, have left little visible to the eye—but those archaeological endeavors unearthed the remains of forty-six people and their funerary objects, including earthenware pottery and shell artifacts. From these discoveries, researchers gained valuable insight into the ways of life of the people who occupied this land long before our ancestors did. 

On the way back to God’s Country, driving through the community called Dixie, I keep my eyes peeled—pulling over to ogle at longhorn cattle grazing; at Killarney Farm, home to James Stuart Douglas, who was once speaker of the Louisiana House of Representatives; at historic churches every couple of miles. I pass so many signs advertising fresh eggs for sale and then Ryan Farms Produce, which sells fruit and vegetables straight from the Ryan family’s fields. (They weren’t open for my visit, but if you’re in the area after June, this is a must-stop!) 

The road opened up before me, and it appeared endless: old and new all at once. This region’s past still dwells, like dust, over everything—and it’s worth the squint to consider it, while the evidence is there. I think about how, as must happen over and over, it’s all going to change again—and soon, with the imminent arrival of the data centers once again redefining industry and land in this place. What will these fields look like ten years from now? A century? What new stories, new people, new ideas, new challenges will layer themselves over all of this? What will be lost? What will remain? 

Plan your own trip at boomorbustbyway.com.