Ruddock: A Cypress Town Erased by the Storm of 1915

The highway sign for Ruddock still appears on Louisiana maps and on the interstate exit north of LaPlace, but no town is there to find. Ruddock is a ghost town that the Gulf never gave back.

In eighteen ninety-two, William Burton and C. H. Ruddock built a cypress sawmill on the isthmus between Lake Maurepas and Lake Pontchartrain and constructed a company town around it. By nineteen ten the community had seven hundred residents, a schoolhouse, a rail station, and all the infrastructure of a working industrial village deep in the Louisiana swamp.

The hurricane of September nineteen fifteen struck as a Category Four storm. Residents fled to the schoolhouse and the station, but the surge ripped the station apart. Fifty-eight people in Ruddock and the nearby town of Frenier drowned. Survivors clung to cypress trees, chicken-house roofs, and whatever floated. The community never rebuilt. The cypress company had nothing left to return to, and neither did its workers. Today the exit sign on Interstate Fifty-Five marks a name with no town beneath it , one of the stranger pieces of Louisiana roadside geography.