Battle of Jackson, Station Five

The 2nd Vermont Battery, called Chase's Battery, had a short, hard war in Louisiana. It fought at Plains Store on May 21, 1863 and through the siege of Port Hudson from May 25 to July 9, then at Jackson on August 3. In its whole service one man died of wounds, 47 died of disease and one in a Confederate prison; seven were wounded and twelve taken. Its first captain, Lensie Sayles, resigned within two months, Pythagorus Holcomb left in August 1863 for the 1st Texas Cavalry, and John W. Chase gave it its name.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Audubon State Historic Site — 6.4 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.
• Rosedown Plantation State Historic Site — 9.8 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.
• Port Hudson State Historic Site — 11 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.
• Louisiana State Penitentiary Museum — 25 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.

More markers nearby

• Pvt. Joe Fluker C.S.A. Died Here — steps away
• Battle of Jackson, Station Four — steps away
• Burial Site of Lt. Col. John C. McKowen — steps away
• Battle of Jackson, Station Three — steps away