Ceremonial Indian Mound

This mound stands in a public park by Capitol Lake. It dates to about the year 1000 and is the earliest known human structure in the capital area. No source names its builders; archaeologist Thurston Hahn says they were probably the same peoples who used the red-stick hunting marker that named the city. The hill under the Capitol, by contrast, is not a mound: workers on Huey Long's building covered the site with sloping earth. Digs nearby have turned up buttons, cannonballs and a bugle.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Louisiana State Capitol — steps away
  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.
• Capitol Park Museum — 0.3 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.
• Old State Capitol — 0.8 mi
  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.
• LSU Rural Life Museum — 5.2 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

• Spanish Town — 0.3 mi
• Battle of Baton Rouge, 1862 — 0.3 mi
• Zachary Taylor — 0.3 mi
• Bogalusa to Baton Rouge March — 0.3 mi