Pearl River: From Halloo to Four Names in Thirty Years

The community that is now Pearl River, Louisiana began with loggers calling out to one another across the water. The shouts echoing between crews gave the place its first name: Halloo. Founded in eighteen fifty-nine at the junction of two small railroad lines in St. Tammany Parish, it was a timber and rail town from the start.

The name changed four times in thirty years. Halloo became Pearl in eighteen seventy-eight, then Pearlville in eighteen eighty-one, and finally Pearl River in eighteen eighty-eight, when the local train station took that name and the community followed. It sits just north of Lake Pontchartrain, tucked between the Louisiana marshland and the Mississippi state line, still a small town in the corridor that connects New Orleans to the wider South.