This Marks the Site of Battery 7

Shreveport's earthworks were laid out by engineers under Brig. Gen. William R. Boggs, Kirby Smith's chief of staff, who had studied under Dennis Hart Mahan, whose fortification textbook was used by both armies. His team included Henry T. Douglas, Richard M. Venable, David French Boyd and Joseph P. Hotchkiss. They tied the lines to ridgelines, creeks, bayous, lakes and the Red River so that about 30,000 men could hold the city. The works rose after Shreveport became headquarters of the Trans-Mississippi Department in 1863, and the Union attack they were built to stop never came.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Shreveport Municipal Auditorium — 0.6 mi
  The Art Deco hall of 1929 where the Louisiana Hayride went out over KWKH from 1948 to 1960 and where Elvis Presley first played Shreveport on October 16, 1954.
• Spring Street Museum — 1.0 mi
  An 1866 bank building downtown that also held a Freedman's Savings and Trust branch in 1870, now a free LSUS-run museum with a Victorian parlor and the original vault.
• Shreveport Water Works Museum — 1.2 mi
  An 1887 brick pumping station on McNeill Street where Worthington steam pumps ran until 1980, now a free museum and a National Historic Landmark.
• Louisiana State Exhibit Museum — 2.2 mi
  A circular Art Deco museum of 1939 on the Shreveport fairgrounds, with a 1,000-year-old Caddo log boat, rotunda murals and dioramas of early Caddo Parish.

More markers nearby

• Calanthean Temple — 0.4 mi
• St. Paul's Methodist Church — 0.5 mi
• Bishop Leonidas Polk — 0.5 mi
• James Burton — 0.5 mi