Headquarters 1st Calvary Division, Army of West La., May 8, 1864

General Richard Taylor had perhaps 6,000 men to face Banks's 33,500, which is why Confederate cavalry in early May 1864 could harass the Union camp at Alexandria but not stop its engineers. Taylor's forces did not seriously try to halt the work on Bailey's Dam. Colonel James B. Likens's 35th Texas Cavalry and the 3rd Louisiana Cavalry shadowed the Union withdrawal along the east bank. Fire cut both ways in that campaign: Confederate soldiers burned the plantation of James Madison Wells, the future governor, during the withdrawal.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Epps House: Solomon Northup's Gateway to Freedom — steps away
  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 — 9.2 mi
  The restored Alexandria house where the Harlem Renaissance writer Arna Bontemps was born in 1902, on the Louisiana African American Heritage Trail.
• Kent Plantation House — 9.7 mi
  Rapides Parish's oldest known standing building, a Creole house with a February tour and a 2023 memorial that put the enslaved first.
• Forts Randolph and Buhlow State Historic Site — 10 mi
  Two Confederate earthen forts on the Red River at Pineville, built with enslaved labor and never attacked, beside the remains of Bailey's Dam.

More markers nearby

• Epps House — 0.3 mi
• Epps House (Solomon Northup's Gateway To Freedom) — 0.3 mi
• Town of Lecompte — 6.4 mi
• Little Walter — 8.2 mi