Hill's Plantation

Hill's Plantation lies on the route of the Navy's strangest Vicksburg gamble. In March 1863 Admiral David Porter took five ironclads and mortar rafts up Steele's Bayou, looking for a way around Pemberton's flank. Deer Creek wound twenty-six miles to cover thirteen, and overhanging trees slowed the fleet to a mile every two hours. Confederates then felled trees ahead and behind it, and a person enslaved on a nearby plantation reported trees falling astern. Porter ordered his captains ready to scuttle. Sherman's troops arrived on 22 March, and the flotilla was back on the Mississippi by the 27th.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Delta National Forest — 10 mi
  The only bottomland hardwood forest in the national forest system, some 60,000 acres of oak, ash and cypress in Sharkey County, run with the state as Sunflower Wildlife Management Area.
• Grant's Canal, Lake Providence — 14 mi
  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 — 16 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.
• USS Cairo Gunboat and Museum — 25 mi
  The raised hull of a Union river ironclad sunk by a mine in the Yazoo in 1862, displayed at Vicksburg National Military Park with the artifacts the river mud preserved.

More markers nearby

• Sharkey County Courthouse — 13 mi
• Parish of Carroll — 14 mi
• Grant's Canal — 14 mi
• Grant's March Through Louisiana — 14 mi