Elizabeth Hospital Building
a.k.a. Elizabeth Town Hall
Mimosa Dr., Elizabeth, LAThe Elizabeth Hospital Building is locally significant in the area of industry because it best represents the community's origins and early history as a lumber company town.
The sawmill town of Elizabeth was founded, owned, and operated by the Industrial Lumber Company. The company already owned two mills in nearby Oakdale and one in Vinton when in 1907 it located a new mill site at Elizabeth and platted the town. The mill site and adjacent town site were in the heart of a 70,000-acre parcel of long-leaf yellow pine acquired by Industrial in 1905.
The huge Elizabeth mill began operation in 1909 and had a daily capacity of 160,000 feet of lumber when operating a single shift. The company's two mills in Oakdale each had a daily capacity of 75,000. The three were linked by company-built railroads, with Elizabeth serving as the Industrial's headquarters, Elizabeth was also the home of three smaller allied industries: Producers' Turpentine Company; Southern Wood Products Corporation (turpentine, pine oil, pine tar, and charcoal); and Calcasieu Manufacturing Company (turpentine, resin, and paper from otherwise unusable stumps). These companies, which were part of the Industrial "family," enabled the parent company to boast that "the entire original crop produced by the land has been utilized without waste."
Industrial was also quite proud of its motto "Builders, not spoilers." According to a 1923 company publication, Industrial devoted considerable attention to developing suitable cutover land for agricultural use. Specific activities in Elizabeth included a colonization plan, a sweet potato curing plant, a canning plant, and experimental farms.
This 1923 company publication, although obviously biased, is an invaluable pictorial and written record of Elizabeth's "golden age." It even has an aerial view showing a town much larger than the present one. In addition to the large mill and allied operations, there was a company office, a large mercantile company, a hospital, a civic auditorium, several schools, hotels, six churches (three white and three black), and a movie theatre, not to mention housing for the workers, management, etc. Also, as was often the custom in company towns of the period, Industrial provided outdoor recreational facilities such as a golf course, two bathing clubs, and a park complete with an open-air pavilion, Elizabeth's permanent residents numbered about 3,000 in 1923.
According to an individual who has lived in the community since 1911, Industrial shut down operations in 1940, whereupon Elizabeth became a paper mill town, (Apparently Industrial's interests were purchased by a paper mill.) As indicated previously, today's Elizabeth (at least the historic portion) is a considerably reduced and depleted version of the 1923 boom town. The mill is gone, and the only non-residential buildings remaining are the hospital, the company-built Methodist church, and a small Catholic church which may or may not have been built by Industrial. There are also 50-75 workers' cottages as well as several larger fairly plain houses which were presumably for managers and other upper-echelon employees.
The State Historic Preservation Office feels that, of these extant resources, the hospital building best represents Elizabeth's history as a lumber company town. The staff at first thought there might be an eligible district in Elizabeth, but careful investigation revealed that the workers' cottages have been altered too much (original porch columns replaced with iron columns, modern windows and doors, and side carport extensions). The handful of "big houses" and the two churches have not been seriously altered on the exterior, but they were used only by certain groups and not by the entire town the way the hospital was. In Elizabeth's heyday there were numerous public buildings and facilities used by the community as a whole, but today the hospital is the only one remaining. Also, of the extant buildings, it best represents the paternalism evident in lumber towns such as Elizabeth. In short, it illustrates that the Industrial "took care of its own" in a manner no other extant resource can.
Listed in National Register of Historic Places in 1985.
The National Register of Historic Places is the official list of the Nation’s historic places worthy of preservation. Authorized by the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, the National Park Service’s National Register of Historic Places is part of a national program to coordinate and support public and private efforts to identify, evaluate, and protect America’s historic and archeological resources.