Cohn High School

Cohn High School opened on August 31, 1949 with 123 students, in a prefabricated building hauled from Harding Field. Oliver Baham was the first principal, and the first graduating class had 18. Landowner Henry Cohn had given the site a year earlier, after parents raised money for a high school for Black children; the share of the parish's Black students in high school went from 67 to 99 percent. There were majorettes, cheerleaders, football and track, and biology teacher John Edward Searcy became a leader in local civil rights work. The last class graduated in 1969.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Louisiana State Capitol — 1.8 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.
• Capitol Park Museum — 1.9 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 — 1.9 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 — 6.9 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

• Port Allen Prisoner-Of-War Sub-Camp No. 7 — 0.6 mi
• Third Parish Courthouse — 0.7 mi
• Sunrise — 1.5 mi
• Zachary Taylor Home Site — 1.7 mi