Alexandria National Cemetery

The government bought 8.2 acres from a local resident, Francois Poussin, in 1867 and brought in Union dead from the Red River Campaign: Cotile Landing, Fort De Russy, Yellow Bayou, Pleasant Hill, and Jefferson and Tyler, Texas. In 1909 a private firm moved about 3,800 soldiers here from the abandoned Brownsville National Cemetery, and one grave holds 1,537 unknown men from there. Buffalo Soldiers of the 9th and 10th Cavalry and the 24th and 25th Infantry are buried here. A marble marker laid in 1901 is a surveyors' magnetic station, not the geographic center of the state.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Forts Randolph and Buhlow State Historic Site — 1.0 mi
  Two Confederate earthen forts on the Red River at Pineville, built with enslaved labor and never attacked, beside the remains of Bailey's Dam.
• Arna Bontemps African American Museum — 1.1 mi
  The restored Alexandria house where the Harlem Renaissance writer Arna Bontemps was born in 1902, on the Louisiana African American Heritage Trail.
• Kent Plantation House — 3.2 mi
  Rapides Parish's oldest known standing building, a Creole house with a February tour and a 2023 memorial that put the enslaved first.
• Louisiana Maneuvers and Military Museum — 3.8 mi
  A National Guard museum in a replica WWII barracks at Camp Beauregard, built around the huge 1940-41 war games in Central Louisiana. Free.

More markers nearby

• Louisiana College — 0.5 mi
• The Jewish Cemetery — 0.5 mi
• Rapides Cemetery — 0.6 mi
• Central Louisiana State Hospital Cemetery — 0.7 mi