Denham Springs

William Denham is credited with discovering the springs, a story that is doubtful; early residents were probably drinking the water long before he arrived. A native of Wilkinson County, Mississippi, he married Mercy Hogue in 1828 and three months later bought a 640-acre tract, along with an enslaved person, for $1,350. In 1855 he sold to Stamaty Covas of New Orleans, under whom a health resort and hotel flourished before the Civil War. After the war George L. Minton picked up the land for $124 in delinquent taxes and began selling lots.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• LSU Rural Life Museum — 10 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.
• Capitol Park Museum — 13 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.
• Louisiana State Capitol — 14 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.
• Old State Capitol — 14 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.

More markers nearby

• Historic Denham Springs — 0.5 mi
• Walker, Louisiana — 5.9 mi
• Indians Along Amite River — 6.4 mi
• Watson — 6.7 mi