Fort Sumter Saloon

The saloon was once the Union Saloon, which sits oddly with the tradition that its owner was a Confederate sympathizer. Charles Wieck opened a bar in 1859 and renamed it after the attack on Fort Sumter in 1861. The cannon outside may have had nothing to do with the war: John Sykes says it was one of the guns of Fort San Carlos, captured in 1810. Prohibition closed the bar in 1918. In 1969 city workers dug the cannon out, public protest followed, and it went back in nose down.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Capitol Park Museum — 0.3 mi
  The Louisiana State Museum in Baton Rouge: a shrimp trawler and a Civil War submarine, galleries on the slave market, resistance and Jim Crow, and the music from Armstrong to Chenier.
• Old State Capitol — 0.3 mi
  James Dakin's 1850 Gothic castle on the river bluff, gutted in the Civil War, nearly demolished in 1991 and reopened in 1994 as a free museum of political history.
• Louisiana State Capitol — 0.5 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.
• LSU Rural Life Museum — 5.1 mi
  Four slave cabins moved from Welham Plantation and a working-plantation row of more than twenty saved buildings, on land the Burden family held as Windrush plantation since the 1830s.

More markers nearby

• Baton Rouge Sit-Ins — steps away
• Congregation B'Nai Israel — steps away
• Zachary Taylor Home Site — 0.2 mi
• Caroline Durieux — 0.2 mi