Historic Denham Springs

Denham Springs spent the twentieth century as a market town before it became an antique village. After the Illinois Central ran its first train on the Baton Rouge to Hammond line on February 26, 1908, the town became a shipping point for a large truck-crop region, and later cars and Baton Rouge's petrochemical plants made it a bedroom community. Downtown's hardware stores, drugstores and single movie theater gave way to antique shops, boutiques and restaurants. In August 2016 the Amite River flooded the town, and an official estimated three-quarters of the parish's homes a total loss.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• LSU Rural Life Museum — 11 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.
• Capitol Park Museum — 14 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.
• Louisiana State Capitol — 14 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.
• Old State Capitol — 14 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.

More markers nearby

• Denham Springs — 0.5 mi
• Walker, Louisiana — 5.5 mi
• Indians Along Amite River — 6.0 mi
• Watson — 6.3 mi