19 markers in the database.
New Orleans, LA
Standing in New Orleans, this monument to Andrew Jackson carries his ringing declaration in defense of national unity. Jackson first won fame here as the general whose ragtag force turned back the British at the Battle of New Orleans in 1815, the climactic victory of the War of 1812. He went on to become the seventh president, and his famous toast against disunion became a byword for federal resolve.
Baton Rouge, LA
In September 1779 the fighting of the American Revolution reached the Gulf Coast, where Spanish forces under Governor Bernardo de Gálvez captured the British-held fort at Baton Rouge. As Spain's ally-in-effect against Britain, Gálvez opened a southern front far from the thirteen colonies, and this marker recalls the men who fought there. It stands as a reminder that the Revolution was won on a wider map than the eastern seaboard alone.
New Orleans, LA
Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, the French-Canadian colonizer who founded New Orleans in 1718, spent decades governing France's struggling Louisiana colony along the lower Mississippi. Erected in 1955 for the Louisiana Purchase Sesquicentennial, this statue offers the "homage of Louisiana, Canada, and France" to the man who chose the crescent bend in the river where the city still stands.
New Iberia, LA
This New Iberia grave holds Willie 'Bunk' Johnson, a Louisiana trumpeter whose playing reached back to the earliest days of New Orleans jazz. Largely forgotten by the 1930s, he was rediscovered by music scholars in the 1940s and fitted with new teeth and a horn so he could record again. His late-career comeback made him a living link to the music's founding generation.
St. Mary Parish, LA
The Chitimacha are Louisiana's only tribe still living on a portion of their ancestral homeland, in the bayou country of St. Mary Parish. Like many Native nations, they sent their sons and daughters into America's armed forces in numbers far beyond their share of the population, serving through the World Wars and the conflicts that followed. This monument gathers that record of service into one place of honor, closing with the soldier's vow "Lest We Forget" and a phrase in the Chitimacha language, "Qapx Kimaa."
New Orleans, LA
This gleaming equestrian statue honors Joan of Arc — the "Maid of Orléans" who rallied French forces during the Hundred Years' War before her death in 1431 — and celebrates the deep bond between France and New Orleans, the American city named for the French house of Orléans. Rooted in that shared heritage, the golden Joan presides over the French Quarter as both saint and warrior.
New Orleans, LA
On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, breaching New Orleans's levees and flooding roughly four-fifths of the city in one of the deadliest and costliest disasters in American history. These storm-killed trees, left standing as stark sculpture, were dedicated on the fifth anniversary by University of New Orleans students as a living reminder of the storm's force and the city's long recovery.
Lafayette, LA
This great live oak had already stood for roughly three centuries by 1800, when the surrounding land was given to the Catholic Church in the young settlement that would become Lafayette. Its estimated age of nearly 500 years means it took root long before French and Spanish colonists reached the bayou country of south Louisiana, quietly outliving the empires that traded the region back and forth. Heritage live oaks like this one became gathering points and landmarks for the Acadian and Creole communities who settled Acadiana.
New Orleans, LA
This memorial in downtown New Orleans honors the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the Baptist minister who led the nonviolent civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. His campaigns for voting rights, desegregation, and economic justice reshaped the American South before his assassination in 1968.
Minden, LA
In antebellum Louisiana, education was a private and hard-won thing, and the town of Minden invested early: the Minden Academy was established in 1838, and by 1850 it had split into two schools, one of them the Minden Male Academy. Civic leader W.A. Drake donated both the land and the funds to build it, a common pattern in which a community's ambitions rested on the generosity of a few prominent citizens. Academy Park today preserves the ground where young men of the parish once received their classical schooling.
New Orleans, LA
Molly Marine was dedicated on November 10, 1943 — the Marine Corps birthday — in the heart of New Orleans, honoring the women who joined the Marine Corps Women's Reserve during World War II under the recruiting call "Free a Marine to Fight." Believed to be among the first monuments to a woman in U.S. military uniform, she stands trim in her service dress as thousands of women stepped into stateside duties so male Marines could deploy.
New Orleans, LA
Standing on the New Orleans riverfront, the Monument to the Immigrant honors the generations who arrived by ship at this Mississippi port — one of the nation's great gateways — seeking freedom and opportunity in a new land. New Orleans drew Irish, German, Italian, and many other newcomers whose labor and cultures reshaped the American South.
Iberia Parish, LA
In the sugar country of Iberia Parish, along Bayou Teche in south Louisiana, the plantation store was the commercial heart of an agricultural estate. Bearing the Olivier name—a family long tied to the Attakapas region's French and Creole planter society—this store would have supplied field workers, tenants, and neighbors with goods, often on credit against the coming harvest. Such stores outlasted slavery, carrying the sharecropping and tenant economy of the sugar belt deep into the modern era.
New Orleans, LA
This spot in New Orleans honors Henriette Delille, a free woman of color born in the city's Creole community in the early 19th century. In 1842 she founded the Sisters of the Holy Family, a Catholic order of Black women who taught, nursed, and cared for the enslaved and elderly at a time when such work by African Americans was fiercely constrained. Her cause for sainthood has since made her one of the most celebrated figures of Afro-Creole New Orleans.
Lake Charles, LA
This is one of the South's many Confederate memorials, raised generations after the Civil War during the era when Lost Cause organizations erected monuments to Confederate soldiers across the region. Standing in Lake Charles, the 'South's Defenders' monument honored those who fought for the Confederacy. In 2020 Hurricane Laura's winds toppled the statue from its perch, leaving the column and plinth behind — a reminder of how weather, time, and public debate have reshaped these contested landmarks.
New Orleans, LA
For nearly four decades in the late 1700s, Louisiana was a Spanish colony, and New Orleans served as capital of the Province of Luisiana after France ceded the territory in 1762. This custom house on Moss Street, dating to 1784, recalls the era when Spanish officials collected duties on the goods and shipping that flowed through the busy Gulf port. The city's Spanish decades left lasting marks on its architecture, law, and street names before Louisiana passed back to France and then to the United States in 1803.
New Orleans, LA
On June 24, 1973, a flash fire tore through the UpStairs Lounge, a second-floor bar in New Orleans' French Quarter that served as a gathering place for the city's gay community, killing thirty-two people in what was then the deadliest fire in the city's history. In the era's climate, many victims went unclaimed and some churches refused funerals, and the tragedy was met with public indifference or scorn. That silence, and the grief it failed to honor, helped galvanize an emerging movement for LGBT dignity and rights.
Minden, LA
This plaque honors the men and women of Minden who served in America's overseas conflicts, the kind of community remembrance that Veterans of Foreign Wars posts have placed in town squares across the country. Without naming a single battle, it speaks for generations who left small Louisiana towns for distant fronts across the twentieth century. Such memorials gave communities a shared place to grieve and give thanks.
Colfax, LA
This monument commemorates the white participants in the Colfax Massacre of 1873, when a white militia attacked and killed a large number of Black freedmen defending the Grant Parish courthouse during a disputed Reconstruction election. It was among the deadliest acts of racial violence in the Reconstruction era, and the Supreme Court case that grew from it, United States v. Cruikshank, gutted federal power to protect Black citizens' rights. The marker's own language — honoring men who fell 'fighting for white supremacy' — makes plain the Lost Cause worldview that later erected it.