U.S. Army 20-Pounder Parrott Rifle

Robert Parker Parrott left the Army in 1836 and ran the West Point Foundry at Cold Spring, New York, where he built his first rifle in 1860 and patented the design in 1861. A rival, Daniel Treadwell, later claimed Parrott had copied his built-up gun method, but a federal court dismissed the case in 1866. The 20-pounder was the largest field gun of the war. Its barrel weighed over 1,800 pounds, its range reached about 4,400 yards, and it took eight men to serve. Tubes from the foundry carry the letters WPF.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Port Hudson State Historic Site — 0.7 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 — 7.9 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 — 9.2 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

• Field Artillery Limber — steps away
• Port Hudson — steps away
• Port Hudson Peace Monument — steps away
• U.S. Navy 42-Pounder Gun, Model 1816 On Barbette Carriage — steps away