Bossier Parish Police Jury – Now and Then

In Bossier Parish, the highest local authority is the Bossier Parish Police Jury (BPPJ), administrating the parish from the Parish Courthouse in Benton. For many people, local government has become something abstract and nebulous, lost in the sea of attention paid towards national affairs. However, local governments, like the BPPJ, will affect you more in your day-to-day life than anything on the national scale. In Louisiana, Police Juries hold similar authority to County Commissions in other states. Originally founded via a state legislative act in 1811, the powers of police juries were ex... Read Full Blog

Handmade in Bossier, 75 Years Ago: Flags of the United Nations

“United Nations Flags Made Here” said the caption in the Planters Press newspaper of Bossier City, La. above a photo of Mrs. W. P. Belcher holding the United Nations emblem and Mrs. W.E. Richie with a standard flag-sized cloth laying on the table before her. No, a new factory didn’t open up, though the two factories that did exist in the U.S. for making the flags were already cranking them out as fast they could in the Fall of 1950. Taking up the slack for the increased demand for U.N. flags caused by the onset of the Korean War and the United Nations Day of late October, were women and gir... Read Full Blog

Understanding Hoopla Changes

Thanks to the growing popularity of Hoopla, Bossier Parish Libraries has determined the need to make the following changes effective December 1, 2025.

Limit of 10 borrows per month per cardholderCollective daily borrow limit (or budget cap)

What does this mean?
When using Hoopla, you may see this message, "The collective daily borrow limit set by your library has been reached and will reset at midnight. Please browse and add titles to favorites so you can easily access them after midnight."
Don't worry! It just means we've hit our budget for the day for all patrons. Any titles yo... Read Full Blog

Fun with Words, North Louisiana-Style

It’s November, and Thanksgiving, and the holiday season, is just around the corner. If you’re lucky, you may be spending extra time with family and relatives, perhaps in multiple generations. Some inter-generational differences can cause friction, while others are cause for fascination, or at least gentle amusement. The different words and phrases used by folks of different generations, or even different geographic areas, can be an example of the latter.

Recently, I’d been feeling “under the weather.” A coworker asked if I’d been “feeling peaky” then asked if I knew what that mean... Read Full Blog

Haughton High Mascot Has Changed Through the Years

Buccaneers, Vikings, Panthers, Bearkats, Tigers, and Lions, these fearsome high school mascots can all be found in Bossier Parish. And each has remained the same through the years, except for one. For Haughton High School’s mascot, the image of a swashbuckling pirate hasn’t always been the case.

Haughton High was established in 1886 in a small, two-room building with a handful of students, and today has an enrollment of approximately 1,400. Much has changed on the campus through the years, including its mascot. While conducting some research recently on another subject, I came acr... Read Full Blog

The Lumberjack Ghost: A Spectral Story of Real Dangers

Local legends abound in nearly every American town. Investigating the origins of some of these scary stories often reveal actual historical happenings. Let’s explore the history that could be behind a ghost story from the Plain Dealing area in north Bossier Parish about a lumberjack ghost who appears with large boots and carries an axe.

Timber has been a thriving economic activity here since the last two decades of the nineteenth century, when Northern forests had largely been over-harvested, and the untouched forests here became more accessible after the clearings of the Great Ra... Read Full Blog

A Glimpse at the State Fairs of Old

 It’s October, which means that it’s Louisiana State Fair season. The fair, which began in 1906, will be coming to the Shreveport-Bossier area October 30th, and will last until the 16th of November. Throughout its lifespan, it has had numerous attractions, from rides, to events, and more. Take a ride through the past, with images and the following article. What follows is a showcase of the attractions in 1936, some eighty-nine years ago, as seen in the September 24, 1936 edition of The Bossier Banner.

 

1936 STATE FAIR ATTRACTIONS

The Bossier Banner described the... Read Full Blog

Bossier High Band Impressive at Sugar Bowl

The 1960 Sugar Bowl featured a New Year’s Day matchup of Southeastern Conference rivals LSU and Ole Miss. The second-ranked Rebels were eager to avenge a 7 – 3 loss to the third ranked Tigers that occurred on Halloween night following an 89-yard punt return for a touchdown by LSU star halfback Billy Cannon. For the Bossier High School marching band, the bowl provided not only a chance to see top college teams in action, but also offered the opportunity to step onto a national stage.

Three months earlier, Bossier High had welcomed a special visitor to see the band perform. According to... Read Full Blog

Tri-State Oil Tool Company - A Bossier Titan

There was once a company of international prominence headquartered right here in Bossier City, Louisiana. Tri-State Oil Tool Industries Inc., or Tri-State Oil Tool Company, was once the one of the largest employers here in Bossier Parish, and whose wide-reaching influence would see a dozen international locations and nearly three dozen local. What got them there, and where did they go?

Tri-State Oil Tool got its start right here in Bossier City just under sixty years ago, in December of 1945, and was founded by Gary H. Burnham Tri-State Oil Tool. Mister Burnham was then quickly jo... Read Full Blog

A Lake Bistineau Fishing Story for National Hunting and Fishing Day

September 27 is National Hunting and Fishing Day, an event celebrated by all 50 states every year on the fourth Saturday in September. It was established in 1972 when Congress passed two bills to have a day to celebrate the conservation contributions of U.S. hunters and anglers. It seems a perfect time to share a fun fishing story (with some hunting thrown in, too) brought to me by a reader of this column, JoAnne McDonald.

 

Mrs. McDonald and her late husband Jerry had a house in Bossier Parish with a private pond near Lake Bistineau. It was highlighted in The Shrevepor... Read Full Blog

Combat Skyspot in SE Asia: The B-52s On-the-Ground Advantage

Operational since December of 1954, the B-52 Stratofortress bomber aircraft and its distinctive hulking silhouette are familiar, over 70 years Advantage, to anyone living near North Louisiana’s Barksdale Air Force Base. When the B-52 entered service, the Air Force’s Strategic Air Command (SAC) intended it for use in the “Cold War” to deter the expanding and modernizing military of the Soviet Union and its increasing nuclear capabilities. In the 1960s, projects to replace the B-52 with a new bomber had been aborted or scrapped after disappointing results. With the escalating situation in Sou... Read Full Blog

Name Change a Contentious Issue in Bossier City History

“What’s in a name? This question from Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” might well have been asked concerning a name change for Bossier City. Beginning in the early 20th century, efforts surfaced to re-label Bossier City as East Shreveport. But how serious were those efforts, and could Bossier still retain its own identity if referred to as something else? Would Bossier, by any other name, still be Bossier?

 

When Bossier City, namesake of soldier and congressman General Pierre Bossier, was still officially a village, local maps from the early 1900s show a subdivision of the... Read Full Blog

Black Business Month: Blacksmithing in Koran

August is Black Business Month, founded as a time to acknowledge and uplift Black-owned businesses across the U.S., that have existed and persisted despite the obstacles historically put in front of them. Unfortunately, there are obstacles in researching black owned businesses, too. When searching the History Center’s own archives, and city directories and local newspapers readily available to us, such as the Shreveport Times and Journal, the Bossier Banner and the Plain Dealing Progress, there was little to find on early black businesses in Bossier Parish, when life and news sources were s... Read Full Blog

On the 80th Anniversary of the Atomic Bombing of Japan: A Story of Survivor Shoji Tabuchi

Shoji Tabuchi, who made Bossier City home for a decade in the 1970’s, was a young classically-trained violinist in Japan who set himself a goal to be a country music star in America when as a college student he heard Howdy Forrester, fiddler for Roy Acuff, on tour in Japan. Ultimately becoming the fiddler for Bossier’s homegrown country music star David Houston, who wowed audiences in his own right, and then in his own show and theatre in Branson, MO, Shoji attained that goal and then some. If you visited Branson, Missouri, the entertainment tourism-based city in the Ozarks, or know anyone ... Read Full Blog

“Invasion” Force Hits Bossier’s East Bank During World War II

The Bossier side of the Red River was the scene of a unique event 80 years ago. Soldiers dashed out of boats amid billowing smoke screens and hurried towards the east bank. Planes fired on enemy positions, as the clatter of machine guns echoed along the river, and medics tended the wounded. No, war hadn’t come to Bossier City. The fighting was simulated, meant to give spectators a glimpse of America’s fighting forces in action and encourage the support of those forces by the purchase of war bonds.

War bond drives, or war loan drives as they were also called, were a critical aspect... Read Full Blog