Pentagon Barracks

Capt. James Gadsden designed the barracks and oversaw construction from 1819 to 1825. Four two-story brick buildings stood by 1825; the fifth side, a commissary-warehouse of 1821, was torn down within months for faulty construction. Zachary Taylor, Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee and Lafayette are listed among visitors. LSU took full possession in 1886 and used the buildings as dormitories until it moved in 1926. Today they hold the lieutenant governor's offices and legislators' apartments. The buildings joined the National Register in 1973.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Capitol Park Museum — steps away
  The Louisiana State Museum in Baton Rouge: a shrimp trawler and a Civil War submarine, galleries on the slave market, resistance and Jim Crow, and the music from Armstrong to Chenier.
• Louisiana State Capitol — steps away
  A 450-foot Art Deco tower Huey Long pushed through in 1930, finished in 14 months, and the hallway where he was shot in 1935; free to enter and ringed by 27 acres of grounds.
• Old State Capitol — 0.6 mi
  James Dakin's 1850 Gothic castle on the river bluff, gutted in the Civil War, nearly demolished in 1991 and reopened in 1994 as a free museum of political history.
• LSU Rural Life Museum — 5.3 mi
  Four slave cabins moved from Welham Plantation and a working-plantation row of more than twenty saved buildings, on land the Burden family held as Windrush plantation since the 1830s.

More markers nearby

• Bogalusa to Baton Rouge March — steps away
• Zachary Taylor — steps away
• Battle of Baton Rouge, 1862 — steps away
• Zachary Taylor Home Site — steps away