Fort Desperate

The men who named Fort Desperate arrived worn out. Most of the 15th Arkansas had been captured at Fort Donelson in February 1862 and held in Union prison camps, where many died of disease. Exchanged and reorganized, the regiment reached Port Hudson on November 1, 1862. Col. Benjamin W. Johnson, a lawyer and farmer from Magnolia, Arkansas, held this ground under Col. Steedman. By June 14 malaria, fever and dysentery had cut his men fit for duty to about 125. Johnson was captured at the surrender and spent the rest of the war in Union prisons.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Port Hudson State Historic Site — 0.6 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 — 8.2 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 — 9.5 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

• Fort Desperate Artillery — steps away
• Sharpshooter Tower — steps away
• Union Sap — steps away
• Union Batteries 7 and 8 — steps away