Union Battery No. 4

The long gun here was a Parrott rifle, and Parrotts had a mixed name. Robert Parker Parrott's design wrapped a wrought-iron band around the breech of a cast-iron barrel, which made rifles cheaper and more accurate than many rivals and also prone to bursting. Many artillerists distrusted them. In late 1862 Henry J. Hunt tried to remove them from the Army of the Potomac, and when guns burst, crews sometimes chipped off the jagged metal and kept firing. Union siege batteries at Port Hudson used Parrotts of several sizes.

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. 3 — steps away
• Artillery Ridge — steps away
• Fort Babcock — 0.2 mi
• Slaughter Pen — 0.3 mi