The Founding of Baton Rouge

The red pole Iberville's men saw in 1699 was a boundary, not a landmark. In the standard account it stood between the hunting grounds of the Houma and the Bayagoula, and the French rendered a Native term, possibly Istrouma, as le baton rouge. Nobody built the town around it. A French post came in 1721, Britain took the east bank in 1763 and called the fort New Richmond, and Spain seized it in 1779 and renamed it San Carlos. Incorporation as a town followed in 1817.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Old State Capitol — steps away
  James Dakin's 1850 Gothic castle on the river bluff, gutted in the Civil War, nearly demolished in 1991 and reopened in 1994 as a free museum of political history.
• Capitol Park Museum — 0.5 mi
  The Louisiana State Museum in Baton Rouge: a shrimp trawler and a Civil War submarine, galleries on the slave market, resistance and Jim Crow, and the music from Armstrong to Chenier.
• Louisiana State Capitol — 0.7 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.
• LSU Rural Life Museum — 5.0 mi
  Four slave cabins moved from Welham Plantation and a working-plantation row of more than twenty saved buildings, on land the Burden family held as Windrush plantation since the 1830s.

More markers nearby

• Slim Harpo — steps away
• Caroline Durieux — steps away
• Votes For Women — steps away
• Capture of Baton Rouge by Galvez, 1779 — steps away