The Founding of "Red Stick"

By 1860 the place that took its name from a pole had 5,429 people, and nearly a third were Black, most of them enslaved. The legislature had moved the seat of government here in 1849, which turned a river town into a capital. Baton Rouge had been incorporated only in 1817, so the town was 43 years old at that count. The next great change came in 1909, when Standard Oil, a predecessor of ExxonMobil, built a facility that drew other petrochemical firms.

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 — 0.6 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 — 0.8 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

• Votes For Women — steps away
• The Founding of Baton Rouge — steps away
• John Archer Lejeune — steps away
• Capture of Baton Rouge by Galvez, 1779 — steps away