Abe Hawkins

The 1854 race made Hawkins famous, but the years afterward tell more. Enslaved at Ashland, he left the plantation after the Civil War and in 1866 won the Travers Stakes riding Merrill for owner Robert A. Alexander. He returned to Ashland that year and died there of tuberculosis in 1867. One history notes he was never inducted into the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame, the place where a jockey who beat Lexington might be expected to stand, though a Louisiana racing museum honored him in 1997.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• LSU Rural Life Museum — 18 mi
  Four slave cabins moved from Welham Plantation and a working-plantation row of more than twenty saved buildings, on land the Burden family held as Windrush plantation since the 1830s.
• Old State Capitol — 22 mi
  James Dakin's 1850 Gothic castle on the river bluff, gutted in the Civil War, nearly demolished in 1991 and reopened in 1994 as a free museum of political history.
• Capitol Park Museum — 22 mi
  The Louisiana State Museum in Baton Rouge: a shrimp trawler and a Civil War submarine, galleries on the slave market, resistance and Jim Crow, and the music from Armstrong to Chenier.
• Louisiana State Capitol — 22 mi
  A 450-foot Art Deco tower Huey Long pushed through in 1930, finished in 14 months, and the hallway where he was shot in 1935; free to enter and ringed by 27 acres of grounds.

More markers nearby

• Ashland — steps away
• Bocage Plantation — 4.4 mi
• Houmas House — 4.5 mi
• Fort Butler African American Soldiers Memorial — 4.7 mi