Zachary Taylor

Taylor came to Baton Rouge with the First Infantry in November 1822 and from late 1826 it was his main home. He was a slaveholder. In 1823 and 1824 he bought 22 enslaved people to improve the income of a plantation about 40 miles north of Baton Rouge, and in 1842 he bought Cypress Grove in Mississippi with 81 enslaved people on it. By 1850 it held 127, and the Anti-Slavery Reporter said he owned at least 200. He also bought land in West Feliciana Parish. The plantation never made money, and he managed it from a distance.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Capitol Park Museum — steps away
  The Louisiana State Museum in Baton Rouge: a shrimp trawler and a Civil War submarine, galleries on the slave market, resistance and Jim Crow, and the music from Armstrong to Chenier.
• Louisiana State Capitol — steps away
  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.
• Old State Capitol — 0.6 mi
  James Dakin's 1850 Gothic castle on the river bluff, gutted in the Civil War, nearly demolished in 1991 and reopened in 1994 as a free museum of political history.
• LSU Rural Life Museum — 5.3 mi
  Four slave cabins moved from Welham Plantation and a working-plantation row of more than twenty saved buildings, on land the Burden family held as Windrush plantation since the 1830s.

More markers nearby

• Bogalusa to Baton Rouge March — steps away
• Pentagon Barracks — steps away
• Battle of Baton Rouge, 1862 — steps away
• Zachary Taylor Home Site — steps away