Fort Babcock

The men who dug Fort Babcock came from upstate New York. The 75th New York was organized at Auburn in 1861, served at Fort Pickens in Florida, and reached New Orleans in August 1862. It occupied Donaldsonville that October, fought at Georgia Landing on October 28, and took part in the Teche expedition and the fight at Fort Bisland in April 1863 before joining the siege. The fort carries the name of its lieutenant colonel, Willoughby Babcock, later a brevet brigadier general. After the surrender the regiment fought at Donaldsonville on July 12 and 13.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Port Hudson State Historic Site — 0.4 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 — 9.1 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

• Artillery Ridge — steps away
• Union Battery No. 6 — steps away
• Union Battery No. 4 — 0.2 mi
• Field Artillery Limber — 0.3 mi