Burial Site of Lt. Col. John C. McKowen

Neal Dow was a temperance crusader and a Union brigadier general, wounded in the right arm and left thigh in the assault on Port Hudson. He was recovering at a nearby plantation when, after dark on June 30, 1863, Confederate cavalry operating behind Union lines took him. Local tradition credits Lt. Col. John C. McKowen of the 1st Louisiana Cavalry. Dow went to Libby Prison in Richmond, then to Mobile, where officials looked into whether he had armed enslaved people and dropped the matter. He was exchanged in February 1864.

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 Five — steps away
• Battle of Jackson, Station Four — steps away
• Battle of Jackson, Station Three — steps away