Port Allen Prisoner-Of-War Sub-Camp No. 7

The men in the Port Allen camp were German soldiers, between 500 and 774 of them, captured in North Africa and across Europe and aged 19 to 52. They lived in tents with wooden floors, with separate buildings for the kitchen, mess hall and showers. Each working day they went out to cut cane at six plantations: Cinclare, Poplar Grove, Westover, Smithfield, Devall and Alma, filling the places of local workers drawn off by the war. The camp ran from 1943 to 1946, and one fountain is all that is left.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Louisiana State Capitol — 1.2 mi
  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.
• Capitol Park Museum — 1.3 mi
  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.
• Old State Capitol — 1.4 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 — 6.4 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

• Third Parish Courthouse — steps away
• Cohn High School — 0.6 mi
• Zachary Taylor Home Site — 1.1 mi
• Battle of Baton Rouge, 1862 — 1.2 mi