The abandoned Caddo Parish Penal Farm, commonly known as the Pea Farm, was established in the early 1900s as a self-sustaining prison farm designed to ease overcrowding and reduce costs for the parish. Inmates worked long hours tending large fields, growing crops that fed the prison population and were sold to generate revenue. A strict system enforced labor, with reports that those who refused to work received no meals. The facility housed both male and female inmates, the latter in a separate section, under conditions marked by hardship and documented accounts of guard brutality that sometimes resulted in deaths in custody.

Today its decaying structures, including remnants of cells and dormitories, stand as quiet evidence of an era when penal farms relied on forced agricultural work. Nearby lies a potter’s field containing the graves of prisoners who died while incarcerated, many of them unmarked. The site’s layered history of institutional labor, loss, and isolation continues to draw those interested in the raw, unvarnished story of early twentieth-century Southern corrections and the lives it shaped—or ended.