Marsden Mounds

Marsden is the one site on Louisiana's Ancient Mounds Trail where visitors can walk among the mounds on public land, because it lies inside a state park. Five mounds and parts of an earthen embankment survive, four of them along the east edge of Macon Ridge, with the embankment appearing to link three. The largest, a 13-foot platform mound, stands in woods about 300 feet southwest; the others are 3 to 5 feet tall. Artifacts show people living here as early as 1500 BC, and charcoal from under a smaller mound dates to about AD 400 to 1200.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Poverty Point World Heritage Site — 12 mi
  Louisiana's only World Heritage Site: six C-shaped ridges, a 43-acre plaza and Mound A, raised on Macon Ridge between about 1700 and 1100 BCE.
• Tensas River National Wildlife Refuge — 13 mi
  Nearly 80,000 acres of bottomland hardwood forest and oxbow lakes, with the state's largest population of Louisiana black bears and Theodore Roosevelt's 1907 hunt nearby.
• Louisiana State Cotton Museum — 28 mi
  A state museum on US 65 north of Lake Providence with a sharecropper's cabin, a commissary and a gin house, in the parish where John H. Scott worked for Black voting rights.
• Grant's Canal, Lake Providence — 29 mi
  About 1,000 feet of the ditch Union troops dug in early 1863 to get Grant's army around Vicksburg, with a boardwalk, a pier and a visitor center in the Byerley House.

More markers nearby

• Insley Mounds — 6.9 mi
• Lower Jackson Mound — 10 mi
• Mound E — 11 mi
• Mound A — 11 mi