Site of Fort Selden

The army arrived on land around Grand Ecore where the Caddo had lived for a very long time. Companies of the 7th Infantry from Arkansas set up Fort Selden on Bayou Pierre above Grand Ecore in 1820 under Lieutenant Colonel Zachary Taylor, and moved in 1822 to the site later called Fort Jesup. Earlier, in 1718, the Brossart brothers brought a colony from Lyon, France, and French and Spanish grants then carved plantations along the Red and Cane rivers. John Sibley later bought Grand Ecore and 500 acres across the river.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Natchitoches Historic District — 4.2 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 — 4.3 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 — 12 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 — 14 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

• Site of Camp Salubrity — 2.5 mi
• Natchitoches Indians — 3.5 mi
• Louis Juchereau de St. Denis (1676-1744) — 3.6 mi
• Site of Fort Claiborne — 3.6 mi