Smith's Landing

Ralph Smith Smith was an engineer, planter and steamboat operator, and his railroad was a link in a cotton chain. The five-foot-gauge line ran from the Alexandria docks to Smith's Landing, 16 miles, and was later extended to about 40 miles, to a bayou near Cheneyville. Cotton and sugar cane rode it to meet Red River steamboats, and he owned three boats that carried cotton on to New Orleans. In 1864 Union troops used its rails, ties, bridge timbers and rolling stock to build Bailey's Dam, and the Alexandria car house burned on May 13.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Epps House: Solomon Northup's Gateway to Freedom — 6.4 mi
  The Creole cottage Solomon Northup helped build for the man who enslaved him, moved twice and now a small museum on the LSU Alexandria campus.
• Arna Bontemps African American Museum — 16 mi
  The restored Alexandria house where the Harlem Renaissance writer Arna Bontemps was born in 1902, on the Louisiana African American Heritage Trail.
• Kent Plantation House — 16 mi
  Rapides Parish's oldest known standing building, a Creole house with a February tour and a 2023 memorial that put the enslaved first.
• Forts Randolph and Buhlow State Historic Site — 17 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.

More markers nearby

• Town of Lecompte — steps away
• Lecompte High School — 0.4 mi
• Epps House (Solomon Northup's Gateway To Freedom) — 6.2 mi
• Epps House — 6.2 mi