Leonidas Polk

Polk was a bishop who owned people. Tennessee's census counted 400 enslaved people held by him in 1850, up from 111 in 1840, and enslaved people also lived at Leighton, his plantation on Bayou Lafourche. In 1861 he resigned as bishop to serve the Confederacy and rose to lieutenant general in 1862. Many historians call his September 1861 order sending troops into Kentucky a blunder. A Union shell killed him at Pine Mountain, Georgia, on June 14, 1864, and in 1945 his remains were reinterred at Christ Church Cathedral in New Orleans.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Wetlands Acadian Cultural Center — steps away
  A Jean Lafitte National Historical Park center on Bayou Lafourche with Acadian and bayou-life exhibits, a 200-seat theater and ranger-guided boat tours to the E. D. White house.
• Laurel Valley Village — 2.2 mi
  A sugar plantation's workers' village south of Thibodaux, with cabins of about 1845, shotgun houses, a store and cemetery, and the 1887 strike and massacre in the parish around it.
• E. D. White Historic Site — 5.7 mi
  A National Historic Landmark house of about 1790 on Bayou Lafourche, built by enslaved people and home to two Whites, a governor and a Chief Justice, with an exhibit on the bayou's history.
• Southdown Plantation and Terrebonne Museum — 15 mi
  A Greek Revival sugar plantation house in Houma, worked by 233 enslaved people by 1852, with the last Terrebonne mill's story and a worker's cabin of about 1885.

More markers nearby

• St. Joseph Co-Cathedral — steps away
• Confluence Of Bayous — steps away
• Moses, Allen Chapel, Calvary Cemeteries — 0.6 mi
• Rienzi Plantation House — 0.7 mi