Welcome to
Winn ParishLouisiana
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(C) 1999-2007 Annette Carpenter Womack
Many towns were listed in the first census of 1860 and included: Pine Ridge, St. Maurice, Montgomery, Wheeling, Winnfield, Kyiche, Goodwater, and Winnfield, which was the smallest settlement of any of them! According to an article that Gregg Davis wrote (can be found in the Winn Paish online archives) it has been said that "Winn Parish was poor from birth." and others have added "It hasn't gotten any better!" Descriptions of Winnfield found in the diary of a passing Confederate soldier state that "it had only about five buildings, ugly ones at that"... and the soldier was even critical of the parish jail! It was only after the timber industry came at the turn of the century at Winn Parish began to prosper.
But the condition of the parish or the towns relinquished by Natchitoches and Catahoula did nothing to stop the colorful characters that made this "poor" area their homes, maybe because of the isolated conditions. As early as 1528, Cabeza de Vaca, the Spanish explorer stopped at Lewisville (now Gansville), to 1690 when De Tonit was trading in the same place with Indians who had established a village and trading post there, throughout the late 1800's when all the outlaws such as Laws Kimbrell and the West gang made the area their homes, to the boom towns of the early timber industy to the CCC camps and the maneuvers of WWII, and even today with the fact we have had no less than three Louisiana governors from the area, people just kept coming.
Colorful characters, colorful towns, and even rumors of gold and silver mines! We even have our own Revoluntionary Soldier buried here. Whatever the reason, Winn Parish's history is as colorful as any place in Louisiana!
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Annette Womack, list administrator!
Includes queries, general discussion of genealogy, etc.
Louisiana
Links
This Winn Parish Web Page
is coordinated by Annette Womack
Additions & Corrections are welcomed.
At the same time, volunteers were found who were willing to coordinate the collection of databases and generally oversee the contents of the web page. The Louisiana GenWeb Project is an extension of the KY GenWeb Project.
If you have compiled data on Winn Parish that you'd like to share, please contact Jo Branch the archive file manager or Gregg Davies, the co-file manager, or Annette Womack, the web page coordinator.
Our first webpage was put in on November 14, 1997!
You are the since the new counter was put in on May 17, 2004, 7 a.m. CDT
This site is continuously under construction
with remodeling, upgrading and just plain rearranging!
Check back often!
Please Report Broken Links to Annette Womack
(C) 1998 - 2007
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