Battle of the Plains Store

On May 21, 1863 about 3,500 Union troops under Christopher Augur marched from Baton Rouge toward Port Hudson. Col. Benjamin Grierson led the advance. Col. Frank Powers held the crossroads with about 600 men until his ammunition ran low, and Col. William Miles arrived near noon with 400 more and turned the Union flank. Reports of losses differ: about 100 Union and 89 Confederate casualties in one count, 150 Union men lost in Augur's. The fight let Banks land the next day, and Port Hudson was nearly surrounded by nightfall.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Port Hudson State Historic Site — 4.8 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.
• Audubon State Historic Site — 10 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 — 12 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 Capitol — 16 mi
  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.

More markers nearby

• The First West Florida Convention, 1810 — 2.4 mi
• Town of Zachary — 4.4 mi
• Port Hudson National Cemetery — 4.6 mi
• Town of Baker — 7.2 mi