Deserting soldiers and the end of the war

Forts Randolph and Buhlow saw no action, yet the story told about them has grown. Free Black people and enslaved people, conscripted for labor, did most of the digging, with Confederate soldiers helping. Union forces took the surrender on June 3, 1865. The United Daughters of the Confederacy held a ceremony placing markers at the two forts in October 1927, and a marker on Highway 71 that HMdb's editor attributes to the Daughters, which presented the forts as a last stand, has been missing since about 2020. The forts became a state historic site in November 2010.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Forts Randolph and Buhlow State Historic Site — 0.2 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.
• Arna Bontemps African American Museum — 1.3 mi
  The restored Alexandria house where the Harlem Renaissance writer Arna Bontemps was born in 1902, on the Louisiana African American Heritage Trail.
• Kent Plantation House — 2.5 mi
  Rapides Parish's oldest known standing building, a Creole house with a February tour and a 2023 memorial that put the enslaved first.
• Louisiana Maneuvers and Military Museum — 4.0 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.

More markers nearby

• Why was Fort Randolph Built? — 0.2 mi
• The Red River Campaign — 0.4 mi
• Bailey's Dam — 0.4 mi
• Central Louisiana State Hospital Cemetery — 0.8 mi