Site of Camp Salubrity

Ulysses S. Grant explained the name in his memoirs. The camp sat on a high, sandy pine ridge between Natchitoches and Grand Ecore, roughly three miles from each, with cool spring water and air above the mosquitoes that filled the river valley. His 4th Infantry went six months before its first death, and that was an accident. The troops were an Army of Observation, waiting for orders while annexation of Texas was debated. A local historian, Henry Maggio, researched the 2017 state marker for the Cane River National Heritage Area.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Natchitoches Historic District — 2.1 mi
  The riverfront blocks of the oldest permanent settlement in the Louisiana Purchase, founded in 1714 at a Natchitoches village, with a brick-paved Front Street, Cane River frontage and the largest bousillage construction in the South.
• Fort St. Jean Baptiste State Historic Site — 2.3 mi
  A reconstruction of the 1716 French fort beside the Natchitoches village, with a palisade of nearly 2,000 pine logs, a chapel and storeroom, and living-history programs, open Wednesday to Sunday.
• Cane River Creole National Historical Park — 10 mi
  Oakland and Magnolia, two Cane River cotton plantations kept as they stood, told through the enslaved families who worked them, the 1864 and 1804 freedom seekers and the tenant farmers who stayed into the 1960s.
• Los Adaes State Historic Site — 12 mi
  The Spanish presidio that was the capital of Texas from 1729 to 1770, some 15 miles from French Natchitoches, now an archaeological site where Native pottery is the most abundant find.

More markers nearby

• The Texas and Pacific Railroad Depot — 1.5 mi
• Natchitoches residents fought hard for civil rights — 1.5 mi
• Architecture of Segregation — 1.5 mi
• Site of Fort Claiborne — 1.6 mi