Industry & Invention

Oscoda Township, MI

The Lumberman's Monument overlooks the Au Sable River valley to honor the pioneer lumbermen who felled Michigan's vast white-pine forests. In the late nineteenth century, Michigan led the nation in lumber production, and its timber built the farms, towns, and rail networks of the treeless prairie states to the west. The inscription frames that labor as the foundation for a wider American expansion.

Hillsboro, TX

When the Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railroad reached Hill County in 1881, Hillsboro boomed, and in 1883 a local contractor built this handsome residence for R. S. Lumpkin, the town's first saddle and harness maker. A Confederate veteran, horse fancier, and volunteer fireman, Lumpkin embodied the enterprising spirit of the railroad-era town, and his home's style reflected his success. Later owners included a family of merchants who kept the house through the mid-twentieth century.

Meridian, TX

South Carolina native Dr. James J. Lumpkin settled in Meridian in 1878, building a medical practice, pharmacy, and considerable landholdings. With his wife Ida Etoile Fuller he became a civic leader and benefactor, and the couple's 1898 home—marked by an octagonal Eastlake corner tower—became a center of the town's social life. After their deaths the residence passed to Mrs. Lumpkin's cousin, Frank Woodruff.

Greensboro, NC

While tending his Greensboro drugstore in 1894, pharmacist Lunsford Richardson blended a menthol salve to ease his family's colds. He called it Vicks VapoRub, and the mentholated rub grew into a household staple sold around the world. His small-town pharmacy counter became the birthplace of an American consumer icon.

Waco, TX

In the years just after the Civil War, Waco was growing from a Brazos River crossing into a bustling Central Texas town. This home, raised in 1866 by a Confederate captain, later passed to his widow and her second husband, a pioneering Waco physician and businessman who lived here into the 1920s. The Franciscan Fathers then acquired the property for use as a monastery.

Orange, TX

In 1877 H. J. Lutcher and G. B. Moore moved their lumber operations from Pennsylvania to Orange and built one of the great timber empires of the Gulf South. Over the following decades their company spread across Texas and Louisiana with a web of sawmills, railroads, canals, warehouses, docks, and transport ships, erecting a mission-style headquarters here in 1913. The fortunes made by Lutcher and Moore and their successors, the Brown and Stark families, seeded many of Orange County's lasting cultural institutions before operations wound down in the early 1930s.

Orange, TX

Orange's First Presbyterian Church, founded in 1878, worshiped in a modest frame building until 1912, when it moved into this richly appointed sanctuary given by Frances Ann Lutcher, whose husband H. J. Lutcher had built a fortune in the Lutcher & Moore Lumber Company. She asked that the building's cost never be made public and endowed its upkeep, sparing no expense: art-glass windows from Lamb Studios of New York, three prize windows from the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, Italian marble, Llano granite, gold-leaf decoration, and mahogany woodwork. The result is one of Southeast Texas' most lavish houses of worship.

Douglas County, NV

West of this marker, Ira M. Luther ran a sawmill from 1858 to 1865 and served as a delegate to Nevada's second Territorial Legislature. After he left, the canyon earned the name Horse Thief Canyon for the Olds brothers, who ran a station on the Emigrant Trail while quietly rustling stock from passing emigrants and reselling it down the road. The neighborhood drew a rough cast of frontier characters, from the notorious gunman Sam Brown to "Lucky Bill" Thorington, hanged by California vigilantes in 1858.

Eden, NC

Luther Hodges served as North Carolina's governor in the 1950s and then as U.S. Secretary of Commerce under President Kennedy. His signature achievement was helping launch Research Triangle Park, the pioneering research hub that began steering the state's economy from textiles and tobacco toward science and technology. His home still stands just east of this marker.

Wilkes-Barre, PA · est. 1982

Formed in 1786 from Northumberland County and named for the French nobleman Chevalier de la Luzerne, an ally of the American Revolution, Luzerne County has long been a place shaped by conflict and coal. Its seat, Wilkes-Barre, was settled in 1769 amid the Yankee-Pennamite Wars — bitter contests between Connecticut and Pennsylvania claimants over the same Wyoming Valley land. More than a century later the region became a flashpoint again during the great Anthracite Strike of 1902, a landmark clash between miners and coal operators.

Williamsport, PA · est. 1981

Carved from Northumberland County in 1795 and named for a creek bearing a Delaware Indian word, Lycoming County rose on the wealth of the surrounding forests. By the mid-1800s Williamsport stood among the greatest lumbering centers in the nation, its sawmills feeding a booming young republic. A very different kind of fame arrived later when the county became the birthplace of Little League Baseball.

Wilkes-Barre, PA · est. 2000

From his base in Wilkes-Barre, Lyman H. Howe ran six touring companies that carried the new marvel of motion pictures to small towns and rural audiences across America. Billing his programs as "high class," he paired films with coordinated sound effects and captured world and local events alike—including President Theodore Roosevelt's 1905 visit to the city. For many Americans, a Howe show was their very first movie.

Coudersport, PA · est. 1947

The first settlement in this rugged region took root in 1808, planted by Major Isaac Lyman, a land agent and veteran of the Revolutionary War. Around his pioneer holding grew the essential institutions of frontier life: the area's first saw and grist mills, its first post office, and its first court. Lymansville became the seedbed from which the wider settlement of the county followed.

Lyme, CT

The United States entered the Great War in April 1917, and by the armistice of November 1918 more than four million Americans had been called into service. Across New England, towns like Lyme raised "rolls of honor" to record the names of the local men and women who answered that call — a civic ledger of one small community's part in a global conflict. The spare dates carved here, 1917 to 1918, mark the span of America's fight.

Lynchburg, VA

The city of Lynchburg grew from a humble river crossing: in 1757 John Lynch launched a ferry across the James River, and from that landing a tobacco town took root. A church followed in 1765, the Virginia assembly chartered the settlement in 1786, and the first tobacco warehouse rose in 1791, fueling a trade that made Lynchburg one of the South's busiest tobacco markets. Incorporated as a town in 1805, the city later connected to the wider world through the James River and Kanawha Canal in 1840.

Johnson City, TX

By the 1930s cities across America enjoyed electricity while most of the rural Texas Hill Country remained in the dark, its sparse population failing to qualify for New Deal aid. In 1937 newly elected congressman Lyndon B. Johnson pressed President Roosevelt and federal agencies to bend the Rural Electrification Administration's rules, focusing on power from the Buchanan and Marshall Ford dams. With rancher E. Babe Smith helping sign up families, the Pedernales Electric Cooperative won the largest REA loan ever made, and in the fall of 1939 the lights came on.

Lyons, TX

Lyons began in 1878 as a railway work camp and by 1880 became Lyon's Station, named for landowner W. A. Lyon, who donated the townsite. It quickly grew three cotton gins, an oil mill, and a cluster of businesses, and in 1894 thrilled the county by hosting its first automobile, offering rides to the daring. Today it serves as a gateway to the Lake Somerville Recreation Area.

Agawam, MA

Displayed as a monument in Agawam, this decommissioned M-60 Patton main battle tank stands as a tribute to military veterans of every generation. Introduced in 1960, the M-60 was a mainstay of American armored forces through the Cold War, serving in various forms for decades before being retired and repurposed as memorials like this one in communities across the country. Static tank displays became a familiar feature of town greens, VFW posts, and veterans parks in the postwar era, turning surplus military hardware into a place for public remembrance.

McAllen, TX

Built in 1949 by developer M.R. Nelson for the J.C. Penney Company, this three-story reinforced-concrete building brought sleek Art Moderne styling to postwar McAllen—two-tone buff brick in horizontal bands, aluminum entry doors, and cast-stone trim. Inside were the city's first 13-passenger elevator and one of its earliest air-conditioning systems. As the Rio Grande Valley boomed after the war, the Nelson Building stood as a commercial and architectural anchor downtown.

Houston, TX

Monroe Dunaway Anderson, a Tennessee native, joined his brother and the Clayton family in an Oklahoma cotton business in 1904 and served as its financial officer as Anderson, Clayton & Company grew into the leading merchant in the global cotton trade. He moved the firm's operations to Houston, lived frugally as a lifelong bachelor in downtown hotels, and in 1936 established a charitable foundation. When he died in 1939 he left it $20 million, and the foundation's trustees used that fortune to help win and finance a state cancer hospital — the origin of the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center and the Texas Medical Center.

Brownsville, TX

Built in 1960-61 for the merchant and ranching family of M. E. and Estela Garcia, this Southern Colonial home was designed with a deliberate "fiction of age." Its architects wove in doors, floorboards, and windows salvaged from the c. 1854 house of M. E. Garcia's grandfather, the prominent South Texas figure Don Francisco Yturria, joining a grand Tuscan portico to fragments of a far older world.

Bowie, TX

A baby chick given to three-year-old Mose Johnson to teach responsibility grew into a lifelong passion. In 1905 he and his wife Mabel started the M. Johnson Poultry Ranch with five white leghorn hens and a rooster; by 1915 a large incubator shipped day-old chicks internationally and the ranch spanned 350 acres, among the largest of its kind. Their 1924 home was billed as "the house that white leghorns built," and the business ran until 1974.

Henderson, TX

Michael Kangerga left Croatia, then part of Austria-Hungary, and settled in Henderson in 1887, founding a mercantile and financial house with his brother in 1895. In 1901 he built this virtually unaltered turn-of-the-century home, designed by the noted architectural firm George F. Barber & Co. of Knoxville. Kangerga was also a volunteer U.S. weather observer for fifty years, earning a national award before his death in 1962.

Georgetown, TX

Standing on the footprint of an 1840s store, this building rose after the Civil War and by the 1880s housed the mercantile firm of Rucker & Montgomery. In 1889 Ohio-born merchant Melville Beveridge Lockett opened his own store here, and in 1896 he reshaped it into the exuberant Victorian design still visible today. Cast iron columns, a pressed-metal parapet, and a turreted corner bay mark it as a showpiece of a booming county-seat business district.

Hutto, TX

Mart B. Norman came to this Williamson County area in 1873, farming, running a general store, and co-owning a cotton gin in the settlement that came to bear his name, Norman's Crossing. In 1906 he bought this property and built an ornate two-story Queen Anne house with octagonal projections, a wrap-around porch, decorative balcony, and fishscale shingles. After his death in 1921 his widow Nettie kept the home, which has stayed in the family for more than a hundred years.

Bay City, TX

Built in 1917-18 for merchant M. S. Perry and his wife Cora Alice, this Bay City home blended Colonial Revival dignity with Queen Anne flourishes. Perry, principal owner of the Le Tulle Mercantile Co., helped design the house with builder George Schultz, using layered board-and-stucco construction meant to stand up to Gulf Coast storms. After years divided into apartments, it was restored in the 1970s.

Towson, MD · est. 1999

These stone abutments once carried a plate-girder bridge over York Road for the Maryland & Pennsylvania Railroad—the beloved 'Ma and Pa.' Rebuilt in 1900 from an earlier narrow-gauge line, the railroad wound a circuitous 77-mile course between Baltimore and York, Pennsylvania, before being abandoned in 1958 as traffic dwindled and its bridges decayed. The overpass came down in 1959, leaving only these abutments.

El Paso, TX

Mabel C. Welch became El Paso's first certified female architect and is credited with reviving Spanish-style architecture in a city that had traded its adobe roots for brick after the railroad arrived in 1881. She stepped into design and construction when her husband Malcolm fell ill with tuberculosis, finished his projects, and built a career of her own, embracing the Spanish Colonial Revival style she felt suited the city's heritage. Certified by the state in 1939, she designed as many as 1,500 homes across the Southwest before the early 1950s.

Lufkin, TX

These machines powered the vast lumber operations that reshaped the East Texas Piney Woods in the early twentieth century. Steam locomotive No. 3 and a 1906 wood-burning steam loader were bought by the Carter-Kelley Lumber Company to build and supply its sawmill at Manning, hauling logs, freight, and passengers over shifting 'portable' logging railroads whose cables could drag timber hundreds of feet to the tracks. The equipment served until the 1950s, after the company had merged with W.T. Carter & Brother.

Athens, TX

In 1882 local planter H. M. Morrison started Athens's first factory to make building brick, equipped with nothing more than this hand-operated press and a mule-drawn plunger that mixed clay dug on site. C. H. Coleman bought into the firm in 1891 and became sole owner after Morrison's death, and the plant kept turning out "Coleman brick" for decades. Harbison-Walker Refractories acquired the business in 1940 and ran it until 1968.

Storey County, NV

This elegant 1860s mansion was both the home of John Mackay and the office of the Gould & Curry Mining Company on the Comstock Lode. Mackay, an Irish immigrant, rose to become the richest man the Comstock ever produced, and the house served as headquarters for the "Silver Kings"—Mackay, Fair, Flood, and O'Brien—whose fortunes came from the fabulous Big Bonanza. The building famously survived Virginia City's Great Fire of 1875.

Floresville, TX

Nelson Mackey was born into a Hudson Valley family where the name was practically a byword for brickmaking, and after ventures in Iowa and Illinois he brought that trade to the San Antonio area in the late 1870s. By 1887 he and partners held land near Calaveras with clay pits and vast woodlots to fire the kilns, a company town with worker housing, tokens, and a store, and a rail spur to carry the buff-colored bricks across south Texas. Mackey bricks built downtown San Antonio landmarks and, in 1891, the state lunatic asylum with seven million of them, before fierce competition sent the business into decline by the time of his death in 1898.

Frankfort, KY

This brick townhouse, built around 1850 in Frankfort's Corner of Celebrities district, became the home of George B. Macklin, a prominent landowner and coal dealer who arrived from the Forks of Elkhorn area in 1867. Macklin ran his coal yard near the Louisville & Nashville Railroad bridge, tapping the rail traffic that made coal a booming Gilded Age business. Behind the house stand a rare two-story brick carriage house and the site of a blacksmith shop, remnants of a self-contained 19th-century urban household.

New York, NY · est. 2002

Founded on 14th Street in 1858, Macy's led the northward march of New York's retail trade when it opened its monumental Herald Square store in 1902. Designed by DeLemos and Cordes and billed as 'The World's Largest Store,' the building became an anchor of a new shopping district. Critics have long counted it among the architectural jewels of turn-of-the-century New York.

Village of Irvington, NY

V. Everit Macy (1871–1930) belonged to the wealthy Macy family and became one of Westchester County's most influential public figures during the Gilded Age and early Progressive era. Rather than simply enjoying his inherited fortune, he poured his time into public service, serving in county government and championing social welfare, parks, and civic improvement across the region. This monument honors that blend of private generosity and personal commitment to the common good that the inscription so plainly celebrates.

Elizabethtown, IN · est. 1999

Authorized under Indiana's ambitious 1836 Internal Improvement Act, the Madison and Indianapolis Railroad began at the Ohio River in 1836 and reached the state capital by 1847. The line's arrival gave rise to Elizabethtown, platted in 1845 as a direct result of the tracks. It was among the first railroads to link the river trade to Indiana's interior.

Galveston, TX

After an 1869 fire swept The Strand, John F. Magale rebuilt on this site in 1870 to house his wholesale liquor business, giving the Victorian structure a cast-iron first-floor facade and ornate window hoods. For much of the next century it served as a well-known paint and hardware store. It stands as part of Galveston's storied commercial district in the island's boom years as a Gulf port.

Abilene, TX

One of Abilene's earliest fine houses, this Colonial Revival home was built in 1903 by Dr. Jefferson Davis Magee, a Mississippi-born physician trained in Louisville who came to Abilene in 1902 and ran both a drugstore and a busy medical practice. Set on an entire city block and framed by lofty Ionic columns of cypress, the oak-lumber house was known for its hospitality. It was restored between 1962 and 1970 and recorded as a Texas Historical Landmark in 1971.

Montgomery, TX

Built in 1854 for Peter J. Willis and his wife Caroline, this home was named "Magnolia" for their daughter — the first child born in the house and later the namesake of the Magnolia Petroleum Company. Bought furnished by Ilai and Melissa Davis in 1868, it stayed in their family for generations, who preserved much of the original furniture hauled here by boat and wagon from New York.

Houston, TX

Magnolia Brewery was part of the Houston Ice and Brewing Company, founded in the late 1800s by Hugh Hamilton and known for its Magnolia, Southern Select, and Richelieu beers. This 1912 building, designed by H.C. Cooke and Co., stood within a sprawling complex along Buffalo Bayou, distinguished by a bold cornice, corbelled corner parapet, and stained-glass transoms bearing a magnolia design. The company closed in 1950, but the building endures as a landmark of the city's industrial past.

Magnolia, TX

Built in 1902 by the International and Great Northern Railroad, the Magnolia depot became a busy shipping point for cotton, sweet potatoes, cattle, and lumber from the surrounding farms and sawmills. After closing in 1963 it was auctioned off and served for years as a barn, until it was recovered in 1993 and moved back to Magnolia and restored within yards of its original site. With its pedimented doors, roof brackets, and clipped gable ends, it remains a fine example of early 20th-century folk Victorian depot architecture.

Corsicana, TX

Corsicana is remembered as the birthplace of the Texas oil industry, and in 1898 it gained the state's first commercial oil refinery. Joseph S. Cullinan, a manager lured from Standard Oil in Pennsylvania, built the plant with four great firing stills and fired the first crude on Christmas Day 1898. His company grew into the Magnolia Petroleum Company — later Mobil Oil, famous for its flying red horse — and though the refinery closed in 1941, one original brick-lined still survives.

Houston, TX

When the young city of Magnolia Park outgrew its scattered temporary offices, its leaders combined city hall and the central fire station in a single brick building, dedicated in 1923 on the tenth anniversary of the town's incorporation. Designed by a Houston architectural firm and built by a local contractor, it housed the mayor, aldermen, and firefighters under one roof. After Houston annexed Magnolia Park in 1926 the building carried on as a fire station, police substation, and even a voting precinct.

Frackville, PA · est. 2007

To move mountains of anthracite out of the Mahanoy Valley, engineers built an inclined-plane railroad that hauled loaded coal cars up the steep face of Broad Mountain to Frackville. Opened in 1862 within the Reading Railroad system and enlarged in the early 20th century, it grew into an engineering marvel capable of meeting national demand for hard coal. After lifting hundreds of millions of tons, it fell silent in 1932, leaving only partial ruins behind.

Fredericksburg, TX

Built around 1860, this sturdy German vernacular stone building was acquired in 1866 by Anton Maier, a native German who became a Fredericksburg merchant and held several Gillespie County offices. He passed it to his son-in-law August Alberthal, and over the decades the building served as a grocery, a soda water factory, an auto repair shop, and even a mission congregation's place of worship. Its thick stone walls reflect the building traditions the town's German settlers brought with them.

San Antonio, TX

Completed in 1928 at a cost of $3 million, the Majestic Theatre was designed by John Eberson for theater magnate Karl Hoblitzelle's Interstate chain. Its lavish Spanish Colonial Revival design, with paired columns, an ornate marquee and a courtyard-like interior, made it one of Eberson's celebrated "atmospheric" theaters, built to feel like an open-air plaza under a starry sky. It survives as one of the finest remaining examples of that flamboyant 1920s movie-palace style.

Dallas, TX

Theatre impresario Karl St. John Hoblitzelle built this five-story Beaux Arts palace in 1921 to house Dallas' Majestic Theatre, hiring Chicago architect John Eberson to design its opulent Baroque interior and 1,570-seat auditorium. Conceived as family entertainment, the Majestic became a cornerstone of the city's Elm Street theatre district. Its ornate detailing survives as a rare monument to the golden age of American vaudeville and movie palaces.

Salado, TX

Archibald Johnson Rose made a fortune in the 1849 California Gold Rush before bringing his family to Texas, serving as a Confederate major, and settling in Salado in 1870. A progressive farmer, he helped found the first Texas Grange in 1873 and then the statewide Grange, building cooperatives, textile mills, and an insurance company while lobbying for farmer protections and better schools. He served on school boards and the boards of Salado College, Mary Hardin-Baylor, and Texas A&M.

Jones Creek, TX

A close friend of Stephen F. Austin, James Peckham Caldwell received a Mexican land grant in 1824 and became an early industrialist, running what was said to be the first sugar mill on the Brazos. As adjutant of the Texas army he was wounded at the 1832 Battle of Velasco, and he was guarding civilians when Texas won its independence at San Jacinto in 1836. He married Ann Munson, widow of his friend Henry W. Munson.

Malakoff, TX

Malakoff began in the 1830s as the settlement of Caney Creek, centered on the grist mill of an Alabama widow, Jane Irvine, and later took the name Mitcham Chapel after an 1852 Methodist church. When a post office opened in 1855, residents chose Malakoff—after a Russian town made famous in the Crimean War. The railroad's arrival in 1880 shifted the town to a new site, and the 1912 discovery of lignite coal made mining Henderson County's largest industry.

Austin, TX

Malcolm Reed built on his father's business to become a leading Central Texas cotton exporter, the trade that dominated the region's economy for generations. After marrying Margaret "Maggie" Badger in 1898 and moving to Austin a decade later, the couple commissioned architect Hal Thomson to design this Italian Renaissance–style home, which they occupied in 1929. It stayed in the family, passing to their daughter, until 1990.

Galveston, TX

This Galveston commercial building rose after 1877 and was rebuilt following an 1881 fire, when the booming port city was one of Texas's busiest centers of trade. Owned by Baltimore merchant D.D. Mallory, it housed wholesale grocers and later gained lasting fame as the "Produce Building" for its decades as a wholesale produce house. Its paneled first-story arcade and towering 14-foot doors typify the sturdy commercial architecture of the era.

Lampasas, TX

Frank Malone arrived in Lampasas in the early 1880s, when the spa town was booming as a commercial center and resort, and as a bank cashier he helped found the Texas Bankers Association, which first met there in 1885. Around that time he built this Queen Anne home, with its unusual octagonal tower and richly detailed woodwork. After the Malones moved on, civic leader John Manuel bought the house in 1891, and his family held it for more than eighty years.

Clute, TX

Once a deep sand pit, Mammoth Lake sits on land with a long human and natural history: Native peoples hunted here in prehistoric times, and Anglo settlers arrived in the early 1800s, including Alabama planter Jared E. Groce, who bought the property from Mexico in 1822 and gave it to his daughter Sarah on her marriage to Republic of Texas leader William H. Wharton. Prized for its sand deposits after the Civil War, the pit yielded roughly four million cubic yards of material to build the booming chemical-industry town of Clute. During a 2003 excavation, workers uncovered the partial skeleton of a mammoth some fourteen feet tall, along with pottery shards and a wooden bowl.

East Huntingdon Township, PA · est. 2000

On January 27, 1891, an explosion tore through the Mammoth No. 1 Mine of the H.C. Frick Coke Company, killing 109 coal miners in one of the deadliest disasters the bituminous fields had ever seen. Seventy-nine of the dead — many of them immigrant laborers — were laid together in a mass grave in nearby St. John's Cemetery. The catastrophe shocked Pennsylvania into strengthening its mine-inspection laws, part of the long, hard-won struggle for safety in the coal country that powered American industry.

Brownsville, TX

Enrique Manautou arrived from Mexico in 1902 and built a chain of dry goods stores across the Lower Rio Grande Valley as railroads and refugees from the Mexican Revolution swelled the region's trade. In 1928 he opened his namesake department store in Brownsville's Market Square, a two-story Chicago-style building of brick and cut stone with prism-glass clerestory and plate-glass display windows. Manautou went on to become the first Mexican-American president of the city's Chamber of Commerce.

Eastland, TX

The community of Mangum sprang up where two rail lines met, once reaching 500 residents and boasting a cotton gin, mineral-water bathhouse, stores, and sawmills. Local Baptists, worshiping since 1901 at the High Point school, formally organized Bethany Baptist Church in 1904; when they moved the sanctuary into town in 1909, spring rains stretched the 1.5-mile journey into a 17-day ordeal. Renamed Mangum Baptist Church, the congregation outlasted the town's decline after the rails were pulled up in the 1920s, replacing its sanctuary in the 1940s and continuing to serve a wide rural area.

Nye County, NV

The Manhattan district had been organized as early as 1867, but the name only came alive in 1905 when John Humphrey struck gold near April Fool Hill along the old stage route. A classic boom followed—post office, telegraph, telephones, and businesses—supplied overland from Tonopah and the railhead at Sodaville. The 1906 earthquake chilled outside investment, so much of the real work fell to lessees, and by 1909 the camp counted thirteen mines and sixteen placers; hydraulic and later dredging operations eventually pushed total output past ten million dollars.

Benton County, WA

Built in a matter of months during World War II, Hanford's B Reactor was the world's first full-scale reactor designed to produce plutonium. The plutonium made here fueled the Trinity test and the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, part of the secret, sprawling Manhattan Project. Today it is preserved as a National Historic Landmark within the Manhattan Project National Historical Park.

Jean Lafitte, LA

Around the turn of the twentieth century, Filipino fishermen in nearby Barataria Bay built a community of houses and drying platforms on stilts above the water, known as Manila Village. Led by Quintin de la Cruz, its residents pioneered the sun-drying of shrimp that helped launch Louisiana's shrimp industry. The platform community endured for decades until Hurricane Betsy swept it away in 1965.