Town of Lecompte

Lecompte's name comes from a racehorse. LeComte, owned by the Wells family, whose plantation lay south of town, won races at the Fair Grounds in New Orleans, and the horse was named for the breeder Ambrose LeComte, who lived in the area. When the railroad painted the name on the depot, a p was added by mistake, and the spelling stuck. The high school yearbook was called The LeComte and put the horse on its first page. James Madison Wells, the Reconstruction-era governor, is counted among the town's notable people, and U.S. Highway 71 runs through it.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Epps House: Solomon Northup's Gateway to Freedom — 6.3 mi
  The Creole cottage Solomon Northup helped build for the man who enslaved him, moved twice and now a small museum on the LSU Alexandria campus.
• Arna Bontemps African American Museum — 16 mi
  The restored Alexandria house where the Harlem Renaissance writer Arna Bontemps was born in 1902, on the Louisiana African American Heritage Trail.
• Kent Plantation House — 16 mi
  Rapides Parish's oldest known standing building, a Creole house with a February tour and a 2023 memorial that put the enslaved first.
• Forts Randolph and Buhlow State Historic Site — 17 mi
  Two Confederate earthen forts on the Red River at Pineville, built with enslaved labor and never attacked, beside the remains of Bailey's Dam.

More markers nearby

• Epps House (Solomon Northup's Gateway To Freedom) — 6.1 mi
• Epps House — 6.1 mi
• Headquarters 1st Calvary Division, Army of West La., May 8, 1864 — 6.4 mi
• Camp Claiborne — 7.3 mi