Rapides Parish Governors

Two of the four governors lived through the same war on opposite sides, and both held enslaved people. Thomas Overton Moore, a cotton planter, ordered the militia to seize federal arsenals and forts before the secession convention voted, and in 1862 pressed the legislature to impress enslaved people to build fortifications. James Madison Wells owned nearly 100 enslaved people yet opposed secession. As governor he backed reconvening the 1864 convention, whose delegates were attacked in the New Orleans massacre of July 30, 1866, which killed 34 Black people and three white Radicals. Sheridan removed him in 1867.

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 — 0.9 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 — 4.7 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

• Old Rapides Bank Building — steps away
• Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback — steps away
• Thomas Courtland Manning — steps away
• Alexandria — steps away