Troyville Earthworks

Louisiana's tallest mound was taken apart for a bridge. Major Amos Stoddard measured the Great Mound at about 80 feet in 1812. In the early 1930s its earth was hauled away as fill for a bridge approach built under Governor Huey Long's road program, and the owner reportedly sold the dirt to the contractor for $100. By 1932 the mound was nearly leveled, and Smithsonian archaeologist Winslow Walker was left to salvage what he could, recording layered clays, cane, a stepped ramp and post structures. Archaeologists count it among the most irreplaceable losses in North American archaeology.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Frogmore Cotton Plantation and Gins — 8.8 mi
  A working cotton farm near Ferriday that tells the plantation story through the people enslaved there, with quarters, an ancient mound and a rare steam-engine gin.
• Catahoula National Wildlife Refuge — 12 mi
  A 25,000-acre bottomland refuge beside Catahoula Lake, a Ramsar wetland that is a major early-season stop for ducks on the Mississippi Flyway.
• Vidalia Landing Riverfront — 24 mi
  A riverwalk on the Mississippi at Vidalia, built on the site of the old town that moved west in 1938 when the river was cut off.

More markers nearby

• Troyville Earthworks — steps away
• Fort Beauregard — 10.0 mi
• Crooks Mound — 14 mi
• Dewey W. Wills Wildlife Management Area — 15 mi