Grant's Canal

The ditch itself was small: a working party from Col. George Deitzler's brigade began a channel about five feet deep from the levee to Lake Providence in early February 1863. Engineers had looked at a chain of waterways some 200 miles long running to the Red River, then 150 miles up the Mississippi to Vicksburg. The levee was cut on March 17, and by March 23 river and lake stood nearly level. Grant came to doubt the route could carry troops and by month's end chose to march south from Milliken's Bend. The flooded bayous still shielded his flank.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Grant's Canal, Lake Providence — steps away
  About 1,000 feet of the ditch Union troops dug in early 1863 to get Grant's army around Vicksburg, with a boardwalk, a pier and a visitor center in the Byerley House.
• Louisiana State Cotton Museum — 2.2 mi
  A state museum on US 65 north of Lake Providence with a sharecropper's cabin, a commissary and a gin house, in the parish where John H. Scott worked for Black voting rights.
• Poverty Point World Heritage Site — 18 mi
  Louisiana's only World Heritage Site: six C-shaped ridges, a 43-acre plaza and Mound A, raised on Macon Ridge between about 1700 and 1100 BCE.

More markers nearby

• Battle for the Mississippi: The Vicksburg Campaign — steps away
• Grant's March Through Louisiana — steps away
• Parish of Carroll — 0.2 mi
• Soldiers' Rest — 0.5 mi