Capture of Baton Rouge by Galvez, 1779

Fort New Richmond looked formidable on paper: an earthen redoubt with a moat and thirteen cannons, begun that July by Lt. Col. Alexander Dickson. Its garrison included regulars of the 16th and 60th Regiments, artillerymen and German troops of the 3rd Waldeck Regiment. Gálvez sent militia to make noise in the woods while his men dug gun pits within musket range, and his cannon opened on September 21. The fort fell that day. Dickson surrendered about 375 men, and Gálvez demanded the 80 grenadiers at Fort Panmure, now Natchez. Spain counted nine killed, Britain four.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Old State Capitol — steps away
  James Dakin's 1850 Gothic castle on the river bluff, gutted in the Civil War, nearly demolished in 1991 and reopened in 1994 as a free museum of political history.
• Capitol Park Museum — 0.5 mi
  The Louisiana State Museum in Baton Rouge: a shrimp trawler and a Civil War submarine, galleries on the slave market, resistance and Jim Crow, and the music from Armstrong to Chenier.
• Louisiana State Capitol — 0.7 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.
• LSU Rural Life Museum — 5.0 mi
  Four slave cabins moved from Welham Plantation and a working-plantation row of more than twenty saved buildings, on land the Burden family held as Windrush plantation since the 1830s.

More markers nearby

• Oliver Pollock — steps away
• The Founding of Baton Rouge — steps away
• Alvin Batiste — steps away
• Pioneers of the Bus Boycott — steps away