Livingston became the parish seat in 1941 when the courthouse was moved there from Centerville (Springville).  The town is situated approximately in the north central part of the parish, about 25 miles east of Baton Rouge on U.S. Highway 190.  Livingston is located in the heart of the heavily forested area of the parish.  Although numerous other trees are common in and around Livingston, particularly hardwoods in the low area, it was the pine, then as now, that attracted the lumber companies to Livingston.  In fact, a lumber company, the Lyon Lumber Company of Chicago, Illinois, brought the town into existence.  The Lyon Lumber Co. was incorporated in Louisiana on January 3, 1903, as the Lyon Cypress Lumber Company, with John William Gary as president and John Kellogg Lyon as secretary.  Lyon Lumber established a sawmill at Garyville in St. John the Baptist Parish, directly south of Livingston, to cut cypress logs into lumber. The company extended a logging railroad into the cypress swamp north of Garyville to carry logs to the mill.  As the cypress was cut, the railroad was extended northward.
 

By 1915, the company had reached the Amite River and the end of the cypress.  The mill was remodeled to cut pine and hardwood.  The name of the company was also changed at this time to Lyon Lumber Co.  It was also in 1915, on June 4, that the Garyville Northern Railroad Company was incorporated under the general law of Louisiana.  Their first objective in Livingston Parish was to acquire an appropriate crossing location with the Baton Rouge to Hammond railroad, which was then known as the Yazoo & Mississippi Valley Railroad, now the Illinois Central Gulf.  Since most of the Lyon Lumber Co.'s land holdings in Livingston Parish was generally centered on the old town of Doyle (now a part of Livingston); the company wanted to purchase land in Doyle.  However, the company was unable to acquire enough land for their facilities in the existing town of Doyle, which was laid out in lots soon after the Baton Rouge; Hammond & Eastern Railroad was completed in 1908.  They therefore selected the vacant land just west of Doyle as the site for their new facilities, which included, among other things, a railroad station, a coal chute, and repair sheds.