Post-Civil War Alexandria

Union troops burned most of Alexandria in 1864, and one account says only two buildings were left standing. The census shows the slow climb back: 1,218 people in 1870 and 2,861 in 1890. In September 1868 a new charter set up a mayor, a treasurer, a justice of the peace and nine aldermen from four wards. The Alexandria Daily Town Talk began on March 17, 1883. Then the pace changed. The 1900 count was 5,648, and by 1910 the town had 11,213, nearly ten times its size in the first census after the fire.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Arna Bontemps African American Museum — steps away
  The restored Alexandria house where the Harlem Renaissance writer Arna Bontemps was born in 1902, on the Louisiana African American Heritage Trail.
• Forts Randolph and Buhlow State Historic Site — 1.0 mi
  Two Confederate earthen forts on the Red River at Pineville, built with enslaved labor and never attacked, beside the remains of Bailey's Dam.
• Kent Plantation House — 2.4 mi
  Rapides Parish's oldest known standing building, a Creole house with a February tour and a 2023 memorial that put the enslaved first.
• Louisiana Maneuvers and Military Museum — 4.8 mi
  A National Guard museum in a replica WWII barracks at Camp Beauregard, built around the huge 1940-41 war games in Central Louisiana. Free.

More markers nearby

• Alexander Fulton Park — steps away
• Alexandria — steps away
• Thomas Courtland Manning — steps away
• Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback — steps away