Bishop Leonidas Polk

The plaque is about a parish; Polk is why the name is on it. Leonidas Polk became Episcopal Missionary Bishop of the Southwest in 1838 and the first Bishop of Louisiana in 1841. He was also a slaveholder: Wikipedia records 111 enslaved people in Maury County, Tennessee, in 1840 and 400 in the 1850 census, with some estimates far higher. Commissioned a Confederate major general in 1861, he was killed by an artillery shell at Pine Mountain, Georgia, on June 14, 1864. His remains were reburied at Christ Church Cathedral in New Orleans in 1945.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Shreveport Municipal Auditorium — steps away
  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 — 0.5 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 — 0.8 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 — 2.7 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

• James Burton — steps away
• Old B'nai Zion Temple — steps away
• Scottish Rite Cathedral — steps away
• Oakland Cemetery — steps away