Alexandria is the ninth-largest city in the divulge of Louisiana and is the parish seat of Rapides Parish, Louisiana, United States. It lies on the south bank of the Red River in all but the perfect geographic center of the state. It is the principal city of the Alexandria metropolitan area (population 153,922) which encompasses all of Rapides and Grant parishes. Its against city is Pineville. In 2010, the population was 47,723, an increase of 3 percent from the 2000 census.

Located along the Red River, the city of Alexandria was originally house to a community which supported actions of the neighboring French trader outpost of Post du Rapides. The area developed as an assemblage of traders, Caddo people, and merchants in the agricultural lands next-door the mostly unsettled areas to the north and providing a belong to from the south to the El Camino Real and subsequently larger harmony of Natchitoches, the oldest permanent settlement in the Louisiana Purchase.

Alexander Fulton, a businessman from Washington County, near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, received a land agree from Spain in 1762, and the first organized agreement was made at some tapering off in the 1780s. In 1805, Fulton and business co-conspirator Thomas Harris Maddox laid out the town goal and named the town in Fulton’s honor. The earliest capability that survives for an Alexandria resident is from June 24, 1801, when a William Cochren, who identifies himself as “Slave master of the Southern Americas”, sold a tract of estate across the Red River to a William Murrey.

That similar year, Fulton was appointed coroner in Rapides Parish by territorial Governor William C.C. Claiborne. Alexandria was incorporated as a town in 1818 and customary a city charter in 1832.