Battle of Bayou Fordoche

On September 29, 1863, about 650 Union troops, part of the XIII Corps, met roughly 3,000 Confederates under Thomas Green; Union losses were 16 killed, 45 wounded and 454 captured, against 26 Confederate dead and 85 wounded. For the prisoners the defeat was the start of a long walk through Alexandria, Natchitoches, Mansfield and Shreveport to Camp Ford, near Tyler, Texas, where they arrived on October 23. The fight is also known as the Battle of Stirling's Plantation and the Battle of Fordoche Bridge.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Rosedown Plantation State Historic Site — 18 mi
  A cotton plantation worked by hundreds of enslaved people, whose names survive in an 1862 succession list; the Turnbull house and gardens, and the quarters nobody has yet found.
• Louisiana State Penitentiary Museum — 19 mi
  The Angola museum outside the penitentiary gate, opened in 1997 on the history of crime and punishment in Louisiana, on ground where convicts were leased out as what 64 Parishes calls legal slave labor.
• Audubon State Historic Site — 22 mi
  Oakley House, where Audubon taught drawing and painted 32 birds in 1821, and the two cabins behind it where four Black families lived through slavery, Reconstruction and Jim Crow.
• Port Hudson State Historic Site — 22 mi
  The 48-day siege of 1863 on the Mississippi bluffs, where the Louisiana Native Guards and Captain Andre Cailloux led the first assault; earthworks, a six-mile trail and a museum.

More markers nearby

• Former Site of Melancon's Cafe — 4.7 mi
• Mississippi River — 7.6 mi
• John Archer Lejeune — 9.5 mi
• Old Hickory — 9.5 mi