Crooks Mound

Archaeologists under James A. Ford excavated Crooks Mound completely in 1938 and 1939. It held about 1,175 burials, nearly all in the larger conical mound, built in three stages by people of the Marksville culture between roughly 100 BC and AD 400. Few graves held copper, which suggests the dead were mostly ordinary people. No house sites turned up nearby, so the place served only the dead. The land is private and closed to the public, and the mound seen from the road is a reconstruction.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Catahoula National Wildlife Refuge — 3.5 mi
  A 25,000-acre bottomland refuge beside Catahoula Lake, a Ramsar wetland that is a major early-season stop for ducks on the Mississippi Flyway.
• Frogmore Cotton Plantation and Gins — 21 mi
  A working cotton farm near Ferriday that tells the plantation story through the people enslaved there, with quarters, an ancient mound and a rare steam-engine gin.
• Louisiana Maneuvers and Military Museum — 25 mi
  A National Guard museum in a replica WWII barracks at Camp Beauregard, built around the huge 1940-41 war games in Central Louisiana. Free.
• Forts Randolph and Buhlow State Historic Site — 29 mi
  Two Confederate earthen forts on the Red River at Pineville, built with enslaved labor and never attacked, beside the remains of Bailey's Dam.

More markers nearby

• Dewey W. Wills Wildlife Management Area — 1.5 mi
• Troyville Earthworks — 14 mi
• Troyville Earthworks — 14 mi
• Red River — 19 mi