Centenary College's Main Academic Building

Two colleges used this ground. The College of Louisiana opened in 1825 and held the site from 1830, but enrollment sank and it closed. Methodists had founded Centenary in 1839, the centenary year of Methodism, at Brandon Springs, Mississippi; in 1845 it moved to Jackson and took over the older school's property. A three-story academic building rose in 1857, and about 300 students lived on campus. The war closed the college: Confederates used the buildings as a convalescent hospital and Union troops housed men and stored supplies there. Centenary left for Shreveport in 1908.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Audubon State Historic Site — 6.7 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 — 10 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

• Battle of Jackson, Station One — steps away
• Battle of Jackson, Station Two — 0.3 mi
• Battle of Jackson, Station Three — 0.3 mi
• Battle of Jackson, Station Four — 0.3 mi