Tangipahoa: The Railroad Village That Named a Parish

The village of Tangipahoa sits in the piney hills of southeast Louisiana, and it owes its existence entirely to a railroad that was ambitious far beyond its finances.

Workers began laying track for the New Orleans, Jackson and Great Northern Railroad through this area in eighteen fifty-three. The line was meant to run from New Orleans north to the Mississippi state line, connecting the Gulf Coast to the interior South. Tangipahoa village grew up around the depot that appeared along the new tracks, incorporated in eighteen sixty-six, and eventually gave its name to the entire surrounding parish when Tangipahoa Parish was carved out of four neighboring parishes in eighteen sixty-nine.

The name itself comes from a Native word often translated as people of the corn and reflects the Native peoples who lived across this region long before the railroad or the French. The village remains small today , a few hundred residents on the old right-of-way , but it carries the distinction of being the place that shares its name with an entire Louisiana parish and the river that drains it.