Burning of Richmond

Richmond was the Madison Parish seat, and the roads through it carried food from the country between the Mississippi and the Tensas to the Confederate garrison at Vicksburg. After the fight at Milliken's Bend, Grant sent Joseph Mower's brigade to cut that line. On June 15, 1863, the Federals pushed Texas troops under General Walker back behind Roundaway Bayou, traded artillery for about an hour, then crossed and burned the town. Casualties were light: one Union soldier killed and five Confederates. The Eighth Wisconsin marched with its mascot, a bald eagle named Old Abe. Richmond was never rebuilt.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Tensas River National Wildlife Refuge — 11 mi
  Nearly 80,000 acres of bottomland hardwood forest and oxbow lakes, with the state's largest population of Louisiana black bears and Theodore Roosevelt's 1907 hunt nearby.
• Poverty Point World Heritage Site — 21 mi
  Louisiana's only World Heritage Site: six C-shaped ridges, a 43-acre plaza and Mound A, raised on Macon Ridge between about 1700 and 1100 BCE.

More markers nearby

• Scottland Plantation House — 1.5 mi
• Crescent Plantation — 2.7 mi
• Insley Mounds — 16 mi
• Grant's Canal — 17 mi