Sharpshooter Tower

Rifle fire made every hour at Fort Desperate dangerous. Union sharpshooters lay behind logs, stumps and ravines around the fort and could not be driven out. Union rifle pits ran all around the works about 250 yards away, backed by artillery that kept up a heavy fire until the morning of June 14. The defenders dug and repaired mostly at night, since daylight fire stopped any work, and some nights they labored until dawn. By June 14 their fortifications were well advanced at every point.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Port Hudson State Historic Site — 0.6 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 — 8.2 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 — 9.5 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

• Fort Desperate Artillery — steps away
• Fort Desperate — steps away
• Union Sap — steps away
• Union Batteries 7 and 8 — steps away