The Capitol Park Museum is the Louisiana State Museum's Baton Rouge building, at 660 North Fourth Street. Its two permanent exhibits, Grounds for Greatness: Louisiana and the Nation and The Louisiana Experience: Discovering the Soul of America, run from American Indian, French, Spanish, British, African and Acadian heritage through to civil rights. The museum describes the result as a panoramic exploration of the state, and the objects on the floor carry that out at scale.
The big pieces are a 48-foot wooden shrimp trawler, a two-row sugar cane harvester, an oil-well head with a scale model of a drilling rig, and a rare Civil War submarine. Steamboat artifacts include trophy antlers from the Great Steamboat Race of 1870. The history of slavery is on the floor in its own terms, in exhibits on the slave market, on resistance, and on Jim Crow, including the Baton Rouge bus boycott of 1953. Music has its own cases: Pete Fountain's clarinet, Clifton Chenier's Grammy and an exhibit on Louis Armstrong.
The museum is open Tuesday to Saturday from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., with the last ticket sold at 3:30 p.m., and closed Sunday, Monday and select state holidays. Adults pay $13 and Louisiana residents $11 as of 2026, with children 6 and under free and $2 off for seniors, military and students with ID. A special exhibit, We The People, runs from June 23, 2026 to June 19, 2027.
The closest stops worth working into your route
Roadside plaques and monuments within a short detour