After Poverty Point

Nobody knows why the people left, and for about 1,800 years the ground saw little heavy use. Coles Creek builders raised Mound D around AD 700. Europeans and Americans began settling in the early 1800s through military land grants, and Philip Guier, from Kentucky, bought the property in the 1840s. By 1851 it was called Poverty Point Plantation, the name that stuck to the earthworks. Later accounts call it a slave plantation. Samuel Lockett, a Confederate Army officer, published the first account of the earthworks in 1873, and Clarence Webb began investigating in 1935.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Poverty Point World Heritage Site — steps away
  Louisiana's only World Heritage Site: six C-shaped ridges, a 43-acre plaza and Mound A, raised on Macon Ridge between about 1700 and 1100 BCE.
• Louisiana State Cotton Museum — 17 mi
  A state museum on US 65 north of Lake Providence with a sharecropper's cabin, a commissary and a gin house, in the parish where John H. Scott worked for Black voting rights.
• Grant's Canal, Lake Providence — 18 mi
  About 1,000 feet of the ditch Union troops dug in early 1863 to get Grant's army around Vicksburg, with a boardwalk, a pier and a visitor center in the Byerley House.
• Tensas River National Wildlife Refuge — 22 mi
  Nearly 80,000 acres of bottomland hardwood forest and oxbow lakes, with the state's largest population of Louisiana black bears and Theodore Roosevelt's 1907 hunt nearby.

More markers nearby

• Poverty Point Artifacts — steps away
• Mound C — steps away
• Southwest Ridges — steps away
• Mound A — 0.3 mi