Port Hudson National Cemetery

The Department of Veterans Affairs says the ground was first used as a cemetery in 1863 and that in 1866 the government set aside 8.4 acres and made it a national cemetery. The VA counts nearly 4,000 Union dead from the siege, nearly all buried here, with only about 600 graves identified. The 1st and 3rd Louisiana Native Guards, two Black regiments, fought in the May 27, 1863 assault, and the post served as a recruiting center for Black soldiers until it closed in summer 1866. The site is part of a National Historic Landmark.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Port Hudson State Historic Site — 2.1 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.
• Rosedown Plantation State Historic Site — 11 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.
• Louisiana State Capitol — 15 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.

More markers nearby

• Battle of the Plains Store — 4.6 mi
• The First West Florida Convention, 1810 — 4.9 mi
• Town of Zachary — 7.4 mi
• Town of Baker — 8.0 mi