Site of Fort Claiborne

Natchitoches' French and Spanish Creole families did not welcome this garrison, and parishioners sued to have it moved, arguing that its southeastern corner sat on communal land the church oversaw. When Protestants began burying their own in what became the American Cemetery, Catholic families exhumed their dead from the old post cemetery. Even so, Indian agent John Sibley signed treaties here with Caddo, Coushatta and other leaders, including Dehahuit, and the 1806 Red River expedition of Custis and Freeman set out from the fort. One guest house at Second and Lafayette remains.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Natchitoches Historic District — 0.7 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 — 0.7 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 — 8.5 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

• Louis Juchereau de St. Denis (1676-1744) — steps away
• Natchitoches Indians — steps away
• Roque House (circa 1797) — steps away
• Basilica of the Immaculate Conception — steps away