Battle of Baton Rouge, 1862

The Confederate ironclad Arkansas never reached the fight. Her engines failed about four miles above the city as she steamed toward USS Essex, and her commander set her afire to keep her from being taken. Without naval support Breckinridge withdrew after a dawn attack that drove Union troops across town, with the heaviest fighting around Magnolia Cemetery. Union losses were 383 and Confederate 453. Union troops left about a week later and returned that autumn, and the Confederates went on to hold Port Hudson.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Louisiana State Capitol — steps away
  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.
• Capitol Park Museum — steps away
  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.
• Old State Capitol — 0.6 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.
• LSU Rural Life Museum — 5.3 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.

More markers nearby

• Pentagon Barracks — steps away
• Zachary Taylor — steps away
• Bogalusa to Baton Rouge March — steps away
• Zachary Taylor Home Site — steps away