318 Area Code 🌍☎️

Shreveport, Louisiana's third-largest city with a 2020 population of 187,593, is located in Caddo Parish along the Red River in the Ark-La-Tex region where Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas meet. Founded in 1836 by the Shreve Town Company to develop a trading hub at the confluence of the newly navigable Red River and the Texas Trail, the city was named after Captain Henry Miller Shreve, who cleared the obstructing Great Raft log jam. Shreveport became a major center for steamboat commerce and cotton trade before emerging as a national oil industry hub in the 20th century, hosting headquarters of Standard Oil of Louisiana and United Gas Corporation until the 1960s-1980s. The city serves as the educational and cultural center of the region, home to five colleges and universities and major companies including Amazon, Regions Financial Corporation, JPMorgan Chase, and Walmart, while forming part of the I-20 Cyber Corridor linking Dallas and Atlanta. Following the decline of the oil industry and closure of General Motors operations, Shreveport has focused on infrastructure revitalization and economic diversification to address population loss, poverty, and crime. Monroe is the ninth-largest city in Louisiana and the parish seat of Ouachita Parish, with a 2020 census population of 47,702 serving as the principal city of the second-largest metropolitan area in North Louisiana. Located in northeastern Louisiana at 72 feet elevation, the city originated during the Spanish colonial period and was named in 1820 to commemorate the arrival of the steamboat James Monroe, which transformed the former Fort Miro settlement into a town. Monroe became historically significant as the home of Joseph A. Biedenharn, who in 1913 moved from Vicksburg as the first bottler of Coca-Cola and co-founded Delta Air Lines with his son Malcolm, originally established in nearby Tallulah to pioneer crop-dusting technology against the boll weevil. The city served as the epicenter of agricultural innovation under Collett E. Woolman, an Ouachita Parish agent from Indiana who originated the world's first crop-dusting service to combat cotton destruction across the Mississippi Delta. The Biedenharn Museum and Gardens, housed in the preserved home of the Coca-Cola bottler, remains open to the public as a testament to Monroe's role in American industrial and agricultural history. Alexandria is Louisiana's ninth-largest city and the parish seat of Rapides Parish, situated on the south bank of the Red River in the geographic center of the state, with a 2020 population of 45,275 and a metropolitan area population of 153,922 encompassing Rapides and Grant parishes. Originally supporting the French trading post of Post du Rapides and serving as a link to El Camino Real and Natchitoches, the city was founded when Pennsylvania businessman Alexander Fulton received a Spanish land grant in 1762 and established the first organized settlement in the 1780s, with Fulton and partner Thomas Harris Maddox formally laying out the town plan in 1805. Alexandria was incorporated as a town in 1818 and chartered as a city in 1832, but gained darker historical significance as the site of the 1942 Lee Street Riot, a racial violence incident involving civilians and military police. Situated in Louisiana's longleaf pine forests at 27 square miles with a humid subtropical climate, the city experiences an average of 69 thunderstorm days annually - nearly double the national average - and has been impacted by hurricanes including Rita in 2005 and Gustav in 2008. The surrounding agricultural region cultivates cotton, sugar, alfalfa, and vegetables along bayous including Bayou Rapides and Bayou Robert.