The "Cotton Bale" Battery

General Joseph Johnston, back in Jackson on May 20, 1863, was unhappy with the city's entrenchments and ordered them strengthened and extended to anchor on the Pearl River north and south of town. Cotton bales and artillery positions protected the improved line. When Sherman arrived in July with about 40,000 men against Johnston's 30,000, the line held through a short siege. After the Confederates slipped away on the night of July 16, Union troops spent days destroying factories and railroads, and by July 23 Jackson was nicknamed Chimneyville.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Mississippi Civil Rights Museum — 0.8 mi
  A state museum in downtown Jackson, opened in 2017 beside the Museum of Mississippi History, that tells the movement from 1945 to 1970 through the people who made it.
• Farish Street Historic District — 1.0 mi
  Jackson's Black business and cultural center, where Medgar Evers kept the NAACP office and furniture-store owners recorded the blues, now a quiet National Register district.
• Old Capitol Museum — 1.0 mi
  Mississippi's Greek Revival statehouse of 1839, where the legislature voted to secede, Hiram Revels was elected to the U.S. Senate and the 1890 constitution was written, now a free state museum.
• Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument — 2.8 mi
  A modest ranch house in Jackson's Elraine neighborhood where Medgar Evers was shot in the driveway in 1963, now a unit of the National Park Service.

More markers nearby

• Willie Morris — steps away
• The Jackson Volcano — 0.2 mi
• Manship House — 0.3 mi
• Boyd House "The Oaks" — 0.4 mi