In early 1863 Ulysses S. Grant needed a way around the Confederate guns at Vicksburg. Union engineers proposed a water route from Lake Providence through about 200 miles of waterways to the mouth of the Red River, then up the Mississippi. A working party from Colonel George W. Deitzler's brigade began digging in early February, and the plan was to cut the levee so that Mississippi floodwater, about fifteen feet above the lake, would deepen the channel. The levee was cut on March 17, and by March 23 boats could pass. Grant judged the route unlikely to carry troops and marched overland from Milliken's Bend instead, though the flooded waterways shielded his flank, the National Park Service notes.
Lake Providence was also where enslaved people reached Union lines. George Field's February 1863 report from here described the conditions of the "contrabands" and Black men's eagerness to enlist despite Jefferson Davis's threat to execute captured Black soldiers. Freed people came into Union camps in northeast Louisiana that spring "at first in small groups, then by the hundreds," the National Archives writes, and the camps became refugee camps; many were later sent back to plantations to work for wages.
About 1,000 feet of the canal survives. It stayed an open ditch until 1953, when Senator Russell Long secured a law to fill it at residents' request. Grant's Canal Park, across US 65 from the Louisiana Welcome Center, has historical interpretation, an elevated boardwalk and a pier over Lake Providence, and the Byerley House at 600 Lake Street serves as the visitor information center.
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