The Kentucky Rifle

The name outran the history. Samuel Woodworth's song The Hunters of Kentucky, dated to 1821 though a version may be older, was set to Irish tunes and cheered Kentucky riflemen at New Orleans. It helped fix the name Kentucky rifle on rifles that came from Pennsylvania, and it implied the riflemen won the battle, a credit historians give to Jackson's artillery. Its claim that the British meant to ransack the city is thought unlikely. Jackson, a Tennessean, used the song in his 1824 and 1828 campaigns, though his rival Henry Clay was the Kentuckian.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Chalmette Battlefield — 0.3 mi
  The ground of the January 8, 1815 Battle of New Orleans, beside Chalmette National Cemetery and the site of Fazendeville, a freedpeople's community founded in 1867 and bought out in the 1960s.
• The Cabildo — 4.4 mi
  The Spanish town hall on Jackson Square, finished in 1799, where Louisiana changed flags in 1803 and where the state Supreme Court sat in the same room until 1910, Plessy v. Ferguson among its cases.
• New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park — 4.4 mi
  A National Park Service unit created in 1994 to tell where jazz came from, with free programs and a visitor center in the French Quarter and park land inside Louis Armstrong Park.
• The Historic New Orleans Collection — 4.5 mi
  A French Quarter museum and research center founded in 1966, whose 2015 Purchased Lives exhibition took on New Orleans' place as the largest slave market in antebellum America.

More markers nearby

• Fazendeville — steps away
• Pakenham's Fall — 0.2 mi
• Chalmette National Cemetery — 0.3 mi
• Louisiana Militia — 0.4 mi