Field Artillery Limber

A field gun did not travel alone. The limber, a two-wheeled cart carrying an ammunition chest, hooked to the gun's trail when an iron ring was dropped over a pintle hook, and a team of six horses, with four the minimum, drew the pair. In action the limber stood about six yards behind the gun. When its chest ran dry, it swapped places with the caisson's limber and a full chest moved forward. A chest for the Napoleon held 28 rounds and weighed about 650 pounds, so crews dragged it rather than lifted it.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Port Hudson State Historic Site — 0.7 mi
  The 48-day siege of 1863 on the Mississippi bluffs, where the Louisiana Native Guards and Captain Andre Cailloux led the first assault; earthworks, a six-mile trail and a museum.
• Audubon State Historic Site — 7.8 mi
  Oakley House, where Audubon taught drawing and painted 32 birds in 1821, and the two cabins behind it where four Black families lived through slavery, Reconstruction and Jim Crow.
• Rosedown Plantation State Historic Site — 9.2 mi
  A cotton plantation worked by hundreds of enslaved people, whose names survive in an 1862 succession list; the Turnbull house and gardens, and the quarters nobody has yet found.
• Louisiana State Capitol — 17 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.

More markers nearby

• Port Hudson — steps away
• U.S. Army 20-Pounder Parrott Rifle — steps away
• U.S. Navy 42-Pounder Gun, Model 1816 On Barbette Carriage — steps away
• Port Hudson Peace Monument — steps away