Jackson

Jackson's other institution opened in 1848. The legislature created the State Insane Asylum in 1847, and this upland site won because its dry, well-drained ground had fewer mosquitoes than New Orleans. The Greek Revival main building took until 1854, and the 1860 census counted 98 patients. Dr. John Welch Jones, superintendent from 1874, found the treasury empty and patients without clothing, paid costs himself for three months, and put the strongest patients to farm work and brickmaking; capacity rose from 166 to over 600. Richard Avedon photographed conditions here in 1963. The hospital still operates.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Audubon State Historic Site — 6.3 mi
  Oakley House, where Audubon taught drawing and painted 32 birds in 1821, and the two cabins behind it where four Black families lived through slavery, Reconstruction and Jim Crow.
• Rosedown Plantation State Historic Site — 9.7 mi
  A cotton plantation worked by hundreds of enslaved people, whose names survive in an 1862 succession list; the Turnbull house and gardens, and the quarters nobody has yet found.
• Port Hudson State Historic Site — 11 mi
  The 48-day siege of 1863 on the Mississippi bluffs, where the Louisiana Native Guards and Captain Andre Cailloux led the first assault; earthworks, a six-mile trail and a museum.
• Louisiana State Penitentiary Museum — 25 mi
  The Angola museum outside the penitentiary gate, opened in 1997 on the history of crime and punishment in Louisiana, on ground where convicts were leased out as what 64 Parishes calls legal slave labor.

More markers nearby

• Battle of Jackson, Station Four — steps away
• Battle of Jackson, Station Five — steps away
• Battle of Jackson, Station Three — steps away
• Battle of Jackson, Station Two — steps away