German Prisoner of War Camp

Louisiana held more than 20,000 prisoners of war between 1942 and 1945, mostly Germans from Rommel's Afrika Korps, in five base camps and over forty smaller satellite camps. Farmers lobbied for the system because wartime labor shortages threatened cotton and sugarcane. Enlisted prisoners had to work, picking cotton, cutting cane, sawmill work and even sandbagging the Red River in 1944, and they earned about eighty cents a day in scrip spendable at the camp commissary. Marksville's camp, which the city dates to 1944 and 1945, belongs to the last years of that system.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Avoyelles Parish Courthouse: Solomon Northup Marker — 0.6 mi
  The Marksville courthouse where Solomon Northup was freed in January 1853, with a marker and a 2026 bronze that shows him rising from the mud.
• Tunica-Biloxi Museum — 1.3 mi
  The Tunica-Biloxi Tribe of Louisiana's own museum at Marksville, built around the Tunica Treasure that the tribe won back in court.
• Epps House: Solomon Northup's Gateway to Freedom — 20 mi
  The Creole cottage Solomon Northup helped build for the man who enslaved him, moved twice and now a small museum on the LSU Alexandria campus.
• Arna Bontemps African American Museum — 25 mi
  The restored Alexandria house where the Harlem Renaissance writer Arna Bontemps was born in 1902, on the Louisiana African American Heritage Trail.

More markers nearby

• Hypolite Bordelon House — steps away
• Fort De Russy — 0.6 mi
• Louisiana's Atchafalaya Basin — 0.6 mi
• The First Bowie Knife — 0.6 mi