Town of Baker

Baker was originally Cottonville, named for the cotton plantation that stood here. In 1888 it was renamed for Josephus Smith Baker, a prominent settler who owned Baker Plantation. After hurricanes Katrina and Rita, Renaissance Village, a FEMA site in Baker, housed more than 3,000 people, over 500 of them children. The Baker Buffalo Festival began in 1993 as a school fundraiser and is held the last full weekend of September. Today Baker is a majority-Black city.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Louisiana State Capitol — 9.4 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.
• Capitol Park Museum — 9.6 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.
• Port Hudson State Historic Site — 9.8 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.
• Old State Capitol — 10 mi
  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.

More markers nearby

• Town of Zachary — 4.0 mi
• The First West Florida Convention, 1810 — 4.8 mi
• Southern University — 5.0 mi
• Scott's Bluff — 5.2 mi