Livingston hosts one of the two LIGO gravitational wave detector sites, the other one being located in Hanford, Washington.

[4] On February 11, 2016, it was officially announced that the LIGO collaboration successfully made the first direct observation of gravitational waves in September 2015.

Barry Barish, Kip Thorne and Rainer Weiss were awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics for leading this work.

[11] According to the United States Census Bureau, the town has a total area of 3.1 square miles (8.0 km2), all land.

Doyle was established northeast of present-day Livingston, located on Hog Branch, off present-day North Doyle Road but moved when the railroad was built from Baton Rouge to Hammond, and the community was re-located in 1901 by the McDonald family.

Livingston was started by the Lyons Lumber Company in 1916 as a logging community on 63 acres just west of Doyle, to support their logging industry and timber mill in Garyville, located south of Livingston on the Mississippi River.