Union Battery No. 3

Mortars did the siege's quiet work. Six mortar schooners carrying 13-inch mortars fired from the river near Prophet's Island, below the town, and they shelled the Confederate works the night before the May 27 assault as well. Shells that failed to explode were sometimes buried in front of the Union lines as torpedoes, an early use of land mines. Inside the works the heavier toll came from hunger, scurvy, dysentery and malaria, and a garrison of about 7,500 held on for 48 days.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Port Hudson State Historic Site — 0.3 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.
• Audubon State Historic Site — 7.7 mi
  Oakley House, where Audubon taught drawing and painted 32 birds in 1821, and the two cabins behind it where four Black families lived through slavery, Reconstruction and Jim Crow.
• Rosedown Plantation State Historic Site — 8.9 mi
  A cotton plantation worked by hundreds of enslaved people, whose names survive in an 1862 succession list; the Turnbull house and gardens, and the quarters nobody has yet found.
• Louisiana State Capitol — 17 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.

More markers nearby

• Union Battery No. 4 — steps away
• Artillery Ridge — steps away
• Slaughter Pen — 0.3 mi
• Fort Babcock — 0.3 mi