John Archer Lejeune

Lejeune did not drift into the Marines. After graduating from the Naval Academy in 1888 he lobbied for a Marine commission, which came in 1890. His first test in command was at Cape San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 1898, where he led a landing party that covered the withdrawal of Navy sailors and civilian refugees. The Spanish-American War gave a young officer from a Louisiana cane parish his first campaign, and it started the career that ended in the Corps' highest office, Commandant, a post he held through the 1920s.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Louisiana State Penitentiary Museum — 9.4 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.
• Rosedown Plantation State Historic Site — 14 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.
• Audubon State Historic Site — 17 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.
• Port Hudson State Historic Site — 21 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.

More markers nearby

• Old Hickory — 0.3 mi
• Mississippi River — 2.6 mi
• Former Site of Melancon's Cafe — 5.9 mi
• St. Stephen's Episcopal Church and Cemetery — 6.5 mi