Historic Louisiana

✧
Barksdale Field was dedicated in 1933. It
occupies twenty-two thousand acres near
Shreveport and Bossier City. Barksdale was
host in the 1930s to the Twentieth Pursuit
Group. In 1940, Barksdale hosted major
army maneuvers in preparation for World
War II. Subsequently, Barksdale has been a
bomber base, with the first B-52 arriving in
1958. Barksdale is the home of the Eighth
Air Force and its museum.
COURTESY OF THE LOUISIANA STATE MUSEUM.
HISTORIC LOUISIANA
34
same depth. His business partner was William
Miller, the first judge for the parish. Miller was
a Pennsylvania merchant who had moved to
Louisiana during the Spanish occupation. The
principal politician of Rapides quickly became
Josiah Stoddard Johnston, who went on to
become a Whig United States senator. One of
Johnston’s brothers remained a prominent
planter, and another of his brothers, Albert
Sidney Johnston, went on to become a
Confederate general. Alexandria became the
hub of the district that grew both cotton and
sugar in the antebellum period. The first
railroad west of the Mississippi went into
construction in 1837, extending from the
Alexandria courthouse to Bayou Hauffpaur
below Cheneyville. It did not survive the
Civil War.
By the Civil War, Alexandria was an
important center for Confederate supplies. The
Confederacy operated a major packing plant
that pickled meat to be shipped to their eastern
armies. A large foundry and machine shop
were the only ones left in Confederate hands in
Louisiana save Shreveport. A shipyard turned
steamboats into gunboats. With the return of
the Union Army in 1864, the town was entirely
burned, including the courthouse.
Shreve’s snag removal boats worked the
Mississippi River for decades. Snag removal
was an essential component in the spectacular
rise of steamboating, a mode of transportation
that for decades rivaled railroads. For
Louisiana, steamboating ensured that the
principal artery of transportation went north
to south, rather than west to east. Louisiana
was the beneficiary. Louisiana’s first railroads
were links between towns and water routes.
In 1830 the New Orleans-Pontchartrain
Railroad, one of the first in the nation, tied the
city proper to the steamboat routes on Lake
Pontchartrain which extended east to Mobile.
It took forty more years for the railroad to
cross the Rigolets and extend to Mobile. The
Opelousas and Great Western Railroad
commenced at Algiers across from New
Orleans, but extended no farther than Morgan
City. Prior to the Civil War it simply shortened
the water route to Texas on the west. The
Nashville and Great Northern Railroad was the
one railroad that never included a water link.
Intended to strengthen the north-south trade
axis, before the Civil War it could only reach
Jackson, Mississippi. As an aftermath of the
Civil War, Henry Simpson McComb scooped
up the pieces of the railroad and assembled the
southern portion into an acceptable line that
soon ended up as the southern link of the
Chicago-owned Illinois Central. He founded
the town that became McComb, Mississippi,
to be the railroad repair yards for the line.
Following the Civil War, the success of
Louisiana agriculture soon came to depend on
another federal policy—flood control. In the
eighteenth century and up to the Civil War,
the responsibility for the levees belonged to
the riparian owner. Nevertheless, some
parishes contributed to the cost of levees,