Lieutenant General John Archer Lejeune

In the First World War Lejeune commanded the Army's 2nd Division, taking it through the St. Mihiel and Argonne-Meuse offensives, and earned Army and Navy Distinguished Service Medals and French honors. As the thirteenth Commandant, from 1920 to 1929, he modernized the Marine Corps, turning a colonial-style naval infantry into a combined-arms amphibious force, the shape it carried into the Second World War. A Marine had commanded an Army division in France; the doctrine he built afterward is what he is remembered for.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Rosedown Plantation State Historic Site — 8.1 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 — 8.9 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.
• Audubon State Historic Site — 10 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.
• Louisiana State Penitentiary Museum — 21 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

• Lieutenant General Russel L. Honoré — steps away
• Major General Delesseps S. "Chep" Morrisson — steps away
• Julien Poydras — steps away
• John Archer LeJeune — steps away