First American Casualty Of WW II

Freddie Falgout died the night before his twenty-first birthday. On August 20, 1937, during a movie on the well deck of the cruiser Augusta, moored in the Huangpu River off Shanghai, a misdirected antiaircraft shell burst among the sailors. Seventeen were wounded, and a fragment in his heart killed him at once. It is unclear who fired it. His body came home in October, and more than ten thousand people attended the funeral. The ship's memorial plaque survived a 1940 refit, and a 1987 congressional recognition called him the first American military casualty of the war.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Southdown Plantation and Terrebonne Museum — 13 mi
  A Greek Revival sugar plantation house in Houma, worked by 233 enslaved people by 1852, with the last Terrebonne mill's story and a worker's cabin of about 1885.
• Laurel Valley Village — 14 mi
  A sugar plantation's workers' village south of Thibodaux, with cabins of about 1845, shotgun houses, a store and cemetery, and the 1887 strike and massacre in the parish around it.
• Wetlands Acadian Cultural Center — 16 mi
  A Jean Lafitte National Historical Park center on Bayou Lafourche with Acadian and bayou-life exhibits, a 200-seat theater and ranger-guided boat tours to the E. D. White house.
• Mandalay National Wildlife Refuge — 17 mi
  A 4,212-acre refuge of freshwater marsh and cypress-tupelo swamp southwest of Houma, with a nature trail to a boardwalk and observation deck and mostly boat-only access.

More markers nearby

• Clotilda Plantation — 3.2 mi
• Lockport — 4.5 mi
• NAS Houma (LTA) — 10 mi
• Residence Plantation — 10 mi