Port Hudson Peace Monument

Two soldiers share this obelisk, one Union and one Confederate. Archaeologists found their remains during surveys in the 1980s and identified them as soldiers by buttons and belt buckles. They were reburied together on May 27, 1990, the anniversary of the Native Guards' assault, as a gesture of reconciliation. The peace the stone honors sits on a battlefield where one side was fighting to keep people enslaved and where Black regiments, many of them formerly enslaved, charged the works. One account dates the reburial to 1997.

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 — 7.9 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 — 9.3 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

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