Eighty-year-old Mack Thompson lives in the same town, and house, he grew up in. The town is very different today, the house, not so much. “I had a friend and mentor, Dr. Charles Saint. He’s gone now. When people would call him and tell him they were lonesome to see Elizabeth and planning to come for a visit, he would tell them that Elizabeth doesn’t live here anymore,” Mack said.

Saint was referring to a way of living that will never be resurrected. At its peak, Elizabeth had a population of 5,000. Today it’s home to 536. The town was named for the daughter of one of the 1908 founders. “A group of men bought 150,000 acres of virgin timber and put a real big sawmill here,” Mack said. “At the time you could only get here by rail.” Houses were built for workers. The section of town men lived in depended on the work they did at the mill. There was a section for managers, millers, turpentine workers and woodsman. “When you got a better job, it was fruit basket turnover,” Mack said. “You got a better house.” Many of these well-built houses are still standing.

Elizabeth’s story is one common to many Louisiana towns. “My mother grew up in Fullerton near Pitkin and there’s not much of anything there now. When she was growing up, there was big sawmill…swimming pools…opera houses,” Mack said.

Mack was there, looking on, when the last tree was sawed for the Elizabeth mill. He took the final ceremonial train ride, along with his father and other sawmill executives, before the railroad spur was taken up. He was six years old. (A paper mill and a paper bag plant were established later.)

Ralph Thompson, Mack’s father was an accountant for the mill. “He ended up as a woods manager in charge of logging,” Mack said. But the Thompson family wasn’t the first to live in the house, which was built around the same time as the town, 1908. “No matter how long a Thompson lives here, this will always be referred to as the Hallowell house,” Mack said.

The house has a different layout than the other structures that were homes for the mill’s managers. “It’s rumored that the woman who first lived here didn’t want to live so close to the woods,” Mack said. Bedrooms were typically built on the south side, but in this house, the bedrooms are on the north, facing away from the woods that are still there. “This is called the fourth forest,” Mack said, with a slight motion of his head to the endless stand of trees outside. It is the third growth of trees since the virgin forest was cut. Subsequent plantings were of slash pines, a fast-growing long-needed pine that Mack explains is not used so much for lumber as for its pulp for paper and particle board.

Mack’s father was talked into running for sheriff and won, though Mack claims he wasn’t much of a politician. That meant a move to Oberlin for the Thompson family where Mack met and married his high school sweetheart, Connie Guillory Thompson, his wife of 58 years. “Her father had a dry goods store in Oberlin. Connie worked at home and in that business. “I guess that’s why she has always had to have some sort of little shop,” Mack said. Today it’s a flea market in Oakdale she opens four days a week. On Saturday, she looks for goods to put in her flea market. She is 79. She does her own landscaping and gardening. Mack isn’t able to help as much as he did in the past but is happy that despite his spinal stenosis, he can hop on the riding lawn mower and mow. “I like that feeling of looking behind me and seeing that I’m accomplishing something,” he said, laughing. He is an engineer and still has a consulting business for which he shows up for work at 6 a.m.

Mack and Connie moved back to Elizabeth “after a brief stop in Baton Rouge where we were miserable,” Mack said. They were able to get the house Mack grew up in, in 1962.

This house isn’t exception just for the fact that it was so well built and well maintained that it’s still standing after over 100 years. The furnishings and décor are perfectly suited to such a house of quality. Connie calls her style, “flea market.” The term doesn’t do justice to the depth of creativity and assortment of antiques and collectibles used in furnishing and decorating.

“Connie is able to use things in a creative way that others wouldn’t dream of using,” he said, motioning to a ceramic ginger jar with a chip turned to the wall. The Thompson’s have had various collections through the years, occasionally getting rid of everything and beginning anew. “We’ve always enjoyed antiques and flea markets,” Connie said. She was a weakness for wooden boxes of all kinds. “Everything was shipped in boxes at one time,” she said, pointing out the lettering on one in her collection that was once a shipping container for books. In a cabinet on the glassed-in porch was a collection of floral frogs. (See sidebar.)

This house is spiked with the highly collectible, as well as the affordable and the chipped and discarded collectible. The house’s furnishings, except for a leather recliner that doesn’t look like a recliner at all, are antique. An English tavern table is used for a desk. Rough made shelves share space with high-end antiques like the Mallard looking half tester and heavily carved and marble topped matching dresser from South Mississippi.

The second bedroom has a bed that was purchased from the Elizabeth general store where people in the sawmill town did all their business. “They would bury you, sell you groceries and furniture,” Mack said. According to Mack, Mr. Finke ran the store and ordered a few bedroom sets of the Lillian Russell collection for the mill’s managers in the 1930s. This pattern has been continuously produced by Davis Cabinet Company since 1931.

Mack expresses regret that he and Connie painted over the wood in the hall, but there has been very little change to the house that is aging as gracefully as its owners. The original French windows and doors and large original windows let in loads of light. The main room has its original fireplace that Connie insists Mack build a fire in at least a couple of times during winter. Though the main room, the adjoining dining room and the back porch, which is now glassed in rather than screened, are three distinct rooms, each flows into the next. Floors are quarter-sawn heartwood pine. Ceilings are 11-feet.

Mack said that drivers often creep by the house so slowly it gives him plenty of time to walk out and chat with some of them about this carefully preserved bit of architectural history where he and his wife have lived for 53 years. They’ve been in the house longer than anyone.

In answer to the question, what makes this house a home, Mack and Connie Thompson came up with the following answer. “We have lived in this house for most of our married life. (Additionally, Mack lived in the house during his growing up years.) “It is full of wonderful memories of our children growing up and making a life for ourselves. It is a haven to retreat to. We are exactly where we want to be.”

Perhaps it’s time for the Hallowell House to become known as, and referred to, as “The Thompson House.”Mack Thompson