Ruston
"Ruston is the one corner of Louisiana where the land rolls instead of floods, and it grows peaches instead of rice."
A hilly college town in the north Louisiana piney woods where peach orchards outnumber crawfish ponds. Lia and I came for a weekend and stayed an extra day just to keep eating peach cobbler on the porch of a farm stand outside town.
We came into Ruston from the west on I-20, and the change from the flat sugarcane country we’d left behind was almost immediate — red clay hills, loblolly pines, a college-town energy centered on Louisiana Tech’s bulldog-red banners hanging from every lamppost. It doesn’t feel like the Louisiana of postcards, and that’s exactly what made it interesting to us. Lia, who grew up near orchard country in France, kept saying the light here reminded her of late-summer Provence, minus the lavender and plus a lot more humidity.
Railroad Park and the old depot
Downtown Ruston curls around the restored 1912 railroad depot, which now anchors Railroad Park — a strip of green space with a working replica train, splash pad, and a farmers market that sets up on Saturdays under the old freight canopy. We bought boiled peanuts from a folding table there and watched a freight train actually rumble through on the still-active line a block over, which apparently happens several times a day and nobody so much as looks up. The Dixie Theatre a few blocks away still shows movies under its original marquee, restored by locals who refused to let it become another empty storefront.
Peach country
Ruston calls itself the peach capital of Louisiana, and Lincoln Parish’s sandy hill soil apparently suits the trees better than anywhere else in the state. We drove out to Mitcham Farms, where a family has been growing peaches since the 1940s, and left with a flat of them warm from the sun plus a slice of peach cobbler eaten standing up at a picnic table because we couldn’t wait. The Louisiana Peach Festival takes over downtown every June with a parade and enough cobbler-eating contests to make the whole town smell like caramelized sugar for a weekend.
Getting There
Ruston sits along I-20 in north Louisiana, about thirty-five minutes east of Monroe, which has the nearest regional airport (Monroe Regional, MLU). From Shreveport it’s roughly an hour and a half east on I-20; from New Orleans, plan on a good five-hour drive north. A car is essential — the orchards and Railroad Park are close together downtown, but everything else is spread across rolling parish roads.
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