Port Hudson

Port Hudson was designated a National Historic Landmark on May 30, 1974, and the earthworks that survive sit on a terrace about 65 to 80 feet above the creeks. Preservation has come in pieces. The Conservation Fund bought 256 more acres through its Battlefield Revolving Fund, with help from the American Battlefield Trust, and a federal battlefield grant has since paid for a small adjoining tract. What visitors walk today is a fraction of a line that once ran about four and a half miles around the town on its bluff above the river.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Port Hudson State Historic Site — 0.7 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 — 7.8 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.
• Rosedown Plantation State Historic Site — 9.2 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 — 17 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

• Field Artillery Limber — steps away
• U.S. Army 20-Pounder Parrott Rifle — steps away
• U.S. Navy 42-Pounder Gun, Model 1816 On Barbette Carriage — steps away
• Port Hudson Peace Monument — steps away