Lincoln Parish, Louisiana
parish in Louisiana, United States

Lincoln Parish (French: Paroisse de Lincoln) is a parish located in the U.S. state of Louisiana. As of the 2020 census, the population was 48,396. The parish was created on February 24, 1873, from parts of Bienville, Claiborne, Union, and Jackson parishes, and its boundaries have changed only once (in 1877). This makes Lincoln Parish one of the Reconstruction parishes.
The parish seat was Vienna from the parish's creation in 1873 until 1884, when a parish-wide vote moved it to the new railroad town of Ruston.
Lincoln Parish comprises the Ruston micropolitan statistical area.
History
Since the late 20th century, archeologists have dated 11 sites in northern Louisiana where thousands of years ago, indigenous cultures built complexes with multiple, monumental earthwork mounds during the Middle Archaic period, long before the development of sedentary, agricultural societies. At sites such as Watson Brake, Frenchman's Bend, and Caney, generations of hunter-gatherers worked for hundreds of years to build and add to mound complexes. Hedgepeth Site, located in Lincoln Parish, is dated about 5200–4500 BP (about 3300–2600 BCE), from the latter part of this period. Such finds are changing the understanding of early human cultures.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Lincoln Parish, Louisiana” is parish in Louisiana, United States. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Lincoln, Parish and Louisiana, not as a finished interpretation.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q120080. VIAF identifies the subject as 132542912. The Library of Congress control number is n82047444. Authority coordinates are 32.600, -92.660. 5 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2020, 1873, 1877 and 1884.
Overview language is designed for orientation and should not be treated as a substitute for the evidence cited beneath it. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Lincoln Parish, Louisiana” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.