U.S. Navy 8 - Inch Shell Gun

The ship behind this gun gave the Confederacy its best-known ironclad. USS Merrimack, launched in 1855, carried 14 eight-inch guns. Federal crews burned and sank her on April 20, 1861 when the Navy left its Virginia yard, and the Confederacy raised the hull and rebuilt it as the ironclad CSS Virginia, commissioned February 17, 1862. The Navy's guns at the yard fell into Confederate hands, and this one ended up on the bluff at Port Hudson, far from Hampton Roads, where it fired at ships on the river.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Port Hudson State Historic Site — 0.9 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 — 9.3 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

• U.S. Navy 42-Pounder Gun, Model 1816 On Barbette Carriage — steps away
• U.S. Army 20-Pounder Parrott Rifle — steps away
• Port Hudson — steps away
• Field Artillery Limber — steps away