Hollywood Comes to Oakland Plantation

The Horse Soldiers, released in 1959 and directed by John Ford with John Wayne and William Holden, borrows from Colonel Benjamin Grierson's April 1863 raid: about 1,700 Illinois and Iowa cavalrymen rode from La Grange, Tennessee, to Baton Rouge in seventeen days, cutting the rail lines that fed Vicksburg. The film turned Grierson, a music teacher, into a railroad engineer. Its Louisiana exteriors were shot along Cane River Lake, where the crew built a bridge for the battle and hired local people as extras. Stuntman Fred Kennedy died in a horse fall during the climactic fight.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Cane River Creole National Historical Park — steps away
  Oakland and Magnolia, two Cane River cotton plantations kept as they stood, told through the enslaved families who worked them, the 1864 and 1804 freedom seekers and the tenant farmers who stayed into the 1960s.
• Melrose Plantation — 5.0 mi
  The Cane River estate built on land granted to Louis Metoyer, son of Marie Thérèse Coincoin, with the Yucca House and African House, later an artists' retreat; guided tours Thursday to Sunday.
• St. Augustine Church, Isle Brevelle — 5.3 mi
  The parish church at the heart of the Cane River Creoles of color, begun by Augustin Metoyer on his family's land and still holding Mass for the community that grew from Marie Thérèse Coincoin's children.
• Fort St. Jean Baptiste State Historic Site — 7.8 mi
  A reconstruction of the 1716 French fort beside the Natchitoches village, with a palisade of nearly 2,000 pine logs, a chapel and storeroom, and living-history programs, open Wednesday to Sunday.

More markers nearby

• Creole Architecture — steps away
• Working Iron — steps away
• The Enslaved Nanny's Room — steps away
• The Helaire Family of Oakland / The Shields Family of Oakland — steps away