Lt. Commander John E. Hart

On June 12, 1863, Lieutenant Commander John E. Hart of the gunboat Albatross lay dying of fever off the town. His fellow officers came ashore under a flag of truce and asked that he be buried with Masonic rites at Grace Church. Church leaders and Confederate commanders agreed, and Masons from both North and South took part in the ceremony, which briefly paused the fighting. William Walter Leake, a Confederate cavalry officer, helped arrange it. Since 1999 the town has staged the funeral each June, under the title The Day the War Stopped.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Rosedown Plantation State Historic Site — 0.7 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.
• Audubon State Historic Site — 3.8 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 — 8.8 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 — 18 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

• Rosedown Plantation — 0.3 mi
• Rasberry Baptist Church — 0.8 mi
• Grace Episcopal Church — 1.0 mi
• British West Florida — 1.1 mi