A City Built of Wood
New Orleans is one of the most architecturally distinctive cities in the United States, and wood is the material that made that distinction possible. From the earliest French colonial structures to the grand Antebellum mansions of the Garden District, from the iconic shotgun houses of the Bywater to the Creole cottages of the French Quarter, wood has been the defining building material of this city for over three centuries. Understanding the relationship between New Orleans and its lumber is essential to understanding the city itself.
The story begins with geography. New Orleans sits at the mouth of the Mississippi River, surrounded by vast forests of bald cypress, longleaf pine, and hardwoods that once covered millions of acres across Louisiana and the Gulf South. These forests provided an abundant and accessible supply of extraordinary building timber. The river itself served as the highway for transporting logs and lumber from upriver forests to the growing city. This confluence of abundant raw material and efficient transportation made wood the natural and dominant building material for the region.
The French Colonial Period
When the French established New Orleans in 1718, they built with the materials at hand. Early structures used a construction technique called colombage, a form of timber framing where heavy cypress posts were set into the ground or onto sills, with the spaces between filled with a mixture of mud, moss, and animal hair called bousillage. This building method was adapted from French provincial traditions but modified to suit the local climate and available materials.
Bald cypress was the timber of choice from the beginning. The early colonists quickly recognized that this native species was extraordinarily resistant to rot, insects, and moisture, qualities essential for building in a subtropical swamp. Cypress heartwood contains natural preservative compounds called cypressene that make it one of the most durable softwoods in the world. Structures built with old-growth cypress in the 18th century have survived hurricanes, floods, and centuries of New Orleans humidity, a testament to the remarkable properties of this Louisiana native species.
Creole Architecture and the Shotgun House
The Creole architectural tradition that developed in New Orleans during the 18th and 19th centuries produced some of the most distinctive building forms in American architecture. The Creole cottage, with its steeply pitched roof, lack of interior hallways, and rooms opening directly onto one another, was a practical response to the hot, humid climate that also reflected French, Spanish, Caribbean, and African building traditions. These cottages were built almost entirely of wood, with cypress framing, cypress or pine siding, and cypress shingle roofs.
The shotgun house, perhaps the most iconic New Orleans building type, is a narrow, rectangular dwelling one room wide and several rooms deep, with doors at each end aligned so that, as the folk etymology suggests, a shotgun blast could pass through the entire house without hitting a wall. Shotgun houses were built by the thousands from the mid-19th century through the early 20th century, providing affordable housing for the city's working-class population. They were built on raised foundations using local lumber, primarily cypress and longleaf pine, and their simple, efficient design made excellent use of limited urban lots while providing good ventilation in the subtropical climate.
The Lumber Industry and the Garden District
As New Orleans grew into one of America's wealthiest cities in the decades before the Civil War, its lumber industry grew with it. The city became a major center for lumber processing and distribution, with sawmills lining the riverfront and lumber schooners crowding the port. The wealth generated by cotton, sugar, and trade funded the construction of increasingly grand homes, and the lumber industry supplied the materials.
The Garden District, developed from the 1830s through the 1860s, showcases the grandest residential architecture of this period. Its mansions feature elaborate woodwork including columns, cornices, brackets, window hoods, and interior millwork that demonstrate the highest level of craft achievable in wood. Much of this ornamental work was executed in cypress, which could be carved into fine detail while providing exceptional durability. The interior floors, often heart pine or cypress, have survived over 150 years of use and remain beautiful and functional today.
The Cypress Logging Era
The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw the most intensive logging of Louisiana's cypress forests. Industrial-scale logging operations pushed deep into the swamps, felling trees that had grown for 500 to 1,000 years and floating the logs to mills along waterways. This era produced an enormous volume of cypress lumber that was used in construction throughout the South and shipped nationally. The quality of this old-growth cypress, with its tight grain, high oil content, and remarkable decay resistance, was legendary.
By the 1930s, the old-growth cypress forests were essentially exhausted. What had seemed like an inexhaustible resource had been harvested to the point where commercial logging was no longer viable. Second-growth cypress exists today, but it lacks the density, oil content, and decay resistance of old-growth timber. This makes the old-growth cypress found in historic New Orleans buildings an irreplaceable resource, one that can only be obtained through careful salvage and reclamation.
Preservation and the Future
Today, New Orleans faces the ongoing challenge of preserving its wooden architectural heritage. The same qualities that make the city's buildings remarkable, their age, their handcrafted wooden details, their use of irreplaceable old-growth timber, also make them vulnerable. Moisture, termites, storms, neglect, and development pressure all threaten the historic building stock. Preservation organizations, building codes, and an engaged community work to protect these structures, but losses continue.
At Lumber New Orleans, we see our role as part of this preservation ecosystem. When a historic structure cannot be saved, we work to ensure that its materials live on in new contexts. The reclaimed cypress and heart pine in our yard carry forward the material legacy of buildings that may no longer stand but whose lumber continues to serve. Every reclaimed beam and board we sell is a piece of New Orleans history finding a new chapter, connecting the architectural past to the buildings of the future.
We believe that building with reclaimed materials from our city's architectural heritage is one of the most meaningful ways to honor and continue the tradition of wood construction that has defined New Orleans for over 300 years. Whether you are restoring a shotgun house, renovating a Garden District mansion, or building something entirely new with salvaged materials, you are participating in a story that stretches back to the founding of this extraordinary city.