Bogalusa is a city in Washington Parish, Louisiana, United States. The population was 12,232 at the 2010 census. In the 2020 census the city, town, place equivalent reported a population of 10,659. It is the principal city of the Bogalusa Micropolitan Statistical Area, which includes anything of Washington Parish and is also allowance of the larger New Orleans–Metairie–Hammond cumulative statistical area.

The say of the city derives from the Choctaw language term bogue lusa, which translates into English as “dark water or “smoky water”. Located in an area of pine forests, in the to the fore 20th century, this industrial city was developed as a company town, to offer worker housing and services in membership with a Great Southern Lumber Company sawmill. In the late 1930s, this operation was replaced later than paper mills and chemical operations.

Incorporated in 1914, Bogalusa is one of the youngest towns in Louisiana. It was founded by Frank Henry Goodyear and Charles Waterhouse Goodyear, lumber barons of Buffalo, New York. In the beforehand 1900s, the brothers bought hundreds of thousands of acres of virgin Longleaf pine forests in southeastern Louisiana and southwestern Mississippi for the timber and extra their strategy to build railroad spurs to bring the wood to market. In 1902, they chartered the Great Southern Lumber Company (1908–38) and built the first sawmill in what became Bogalusa, a company town built to hold the mill. The sawmill was the largest in the world at the time. The Goodyear interests built the city of Bogalusa to home workers and supervisors, and joined infrastructure. They also built the Great Northern New Orleans Railroad to New Orleans to transport their lumber and products to market.