U.S. Navy 42-Pounder Gun, Model 1816 On Barbette Carriage

The night of March 14, 1863 showed what the bluff guns could do. Admiral David Farragut tried to run his fleet past Port Hudson in the dark. Smoke and groundings slowed the ships. Hartford and Albatross got through, but Richmond was disabled, Monongahela and Kineo ran aground, and USS Mississippi, aground and burning, was abandoned and blew up at 5:05 a.m. Union losses were 78 killed or missing and 35 wounded. The Confederates lost 3 killed and 22 wounded.

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 — 7.8 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

• Port Hudson — steps away
• Field Artillery Limber — steps away
• U.S. Army 20-Pounder Parrott Rifle — steps away
• Port Hudson Peace Monument — steps away