Zachary Taylor Home Site

Taylor's fame came from Buena Vista in February 1847, where his army beat a Mexican force of about 20,000 under Santa Anna; the Americans lost roughly 700 killed or wounded and the Mexicans over 1,500. Whigs nominated him in 1848 and he won with 163 of 290 electoral votes, the first president with no prior political office. A slaveholder himself, he opposed extending slavery into the Mexican Cession and urged California and New Mexico to seek statehood directly. He died on July 9, 1850.

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 — 0.3 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.
• Old State Capitol — 0.5 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

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