Hosston: The Oil Boom Town That Kept Its Refinery

Hosston is a small village in northern Caddo Parish, and it grew with the oil boom, though the community dates to the eighteen hundreds. When the Caddo-Pine Island oil field came in during nineteen oh five, small towns boomed overnight across the piney hills north of Shreveport. Hosston was among them, sitting on producing ground and served by a railroad, which made it a practical site for oil processing.

A lubricating oil plant there is said to have shipped product by rail across the region. The boom lasted perhaps a decade as the richest wells played out, and Hosston settled into the quieter existence of a village in the Shreveport suburbs. But for a few years in the early twentieth century, it was exactly the kind of wild, improvised oil camp town that defined the opening of the Louisiana petroleum era.