Fort St. Jean Baptiste (Reconstruction)

The fort beside Cane River Lake is a reconstruction, built from plans drawn after the Natchez attack of 1731 showed how weak the first post was. French engineer Francois Broutin drew a larger, stronger fort in 1733, and builders also used earlier plans by Du Tisne and archival research in Louisiana, Canada and France. The state acquired the ground in 1979, a few hundred yards from the original site. The palisade took about 2,000 treated pine logs and the buildings roughly 250,000 board feet of lumber, with hinges and latches from a local foundry.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Natchitoches Historic District — 0.5 mi
  The riverfront blocks of the oldest permanent settlement in the Louisiana Purchase, founded in 1714 at a Natchitoches village, with a brick-paved Front Street, Cane River frontage and the largest bousillage construction in the South.
• Fort St. Jean Baptiste State Historic Site — 0.5 mi
  A reconstruction of the 1716 French fort beside the Natchitoches village, with a palisade of nearly 2,000 pine logs, a chapel and storeroom, and living-history programs, open Wednesday to Sunday.
• Cane River Creole National Historical Park — 8.2 mi
  Oakland and Magnolia, two Cane River cotton plantations kept as they stood, told through the enslaved families who worked them, the 1864 and 1804 freedom seekers and the tenant farmers who stayed into the 1960s.
• Los Adaes State Historic Site — 13 mi
  The Spanish presidio that was the capital of Texas from 1729 to 1770, some 15 miles from French Natchitoches, now an archaeological site where Native pottery is the most abundant find.

More markers nearby

• The Red River Campaign — steps away
• Prudhomme-Rouquier House — steps away
• Great Red River Flood of 1945 — steps away
• First Mass in Natchitoches — steps away