Steedman Headquarters

Isaiah George Washington Steedman was a physician before he was a colonel. Born in South Carolina and practicing medicine in Alabama, he became colonel of the 1st Alabama in February 1862 and was captured with most of it at Island No. 10. Exchanged, he reached Port Hudson in October 1862, and on May 22, 1863 he took command of the entire left wing, Fort Desperate included. After the surrender he was held at Johnson's Island, Ohio, where he ran the prison hospital. He returned to medicine in Alabama, then St. Louis, and died in 1917.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Port Hudson State Historic Site — 0.4 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 — 9.4 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 — steps away
• Fort Desperate Artillery — steps away
• Sharpshooter Tower — steps away
• Union Sap — steps away