Union Battery No. 6

Battery F, 1st U.S. Artillery fired the Army's favorite field gun here, the 12-pounder Napoleon. Named for Napoleon III and adopted in 1857, it was a bronze smoothbore with a 4.62-inch bore that could throw solid shot, shell or canister. Canister was deadly out to about 350 yards. An ordnance chief later reported that none had worn out or burst during the war. Nine men served each gun, and both armies favored it; Confederate gunners often preferred Northern-made examples.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Port Hudson State Historic Site — 0.5 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 — 8.0 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 — 9.3 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

• Fort Babcock — steps away
• Steedman Headquarters — 0.2 mi
• Union Sap — 0.2 mi
• Port Hudson Peace Monument — 0.2 mi