Mile 20.0 - RBD Fort Jackson

20 RBD Fort Jackson

Paddlers can make landing on a rocky landing directly downstream of the Louisiana Responder, or pull up directly below ramparts of the fort, also a rocky landing. If these rough landings don’t fit your temperament, keep downstream another 200 yards to find a much softer landing before (or behind) a sandy spit that extends outwards to a sharp point near 19.5 LBD. Shallow muddy sandbars emerge here in low/med water at low tide. You could pull up and make camp here, but there is vehicle access and you might have visitors. Popular fishing spot. If you want to visit Fort Jackson, safeguard your vessel and do so. But you will locate the best camping options another half mile further downstream, around the bend, where the river turns southward, and a narrow beach is found with a sandy ridge running above. Best camping in the area.

Fort Jackson, built upon the recommendations of Gen. Andrew Jackson, following the War of 1812, and replaced an earlier fortification, Fort Bourbon, which was located less than two miles away. Fort Bourbon was an earth and timber breastworks redoubt built in 1792. It was destroyed by a hurricane, and eventually surrendered to the Mississippi River. In his attack upon New Orleans during the Civil War, Farragut's fleet pounded both forts for ten days, before they surrendered to the Union forces. In the years that followed, Fort Jackson was used as a prison, a training facility, and fortified again during the Spanish American War, when disappearing guns with elevators were added, along with additional concrete bunkers. During World War I, it was once more used as a training facility, and then was retired after the war. Fort Jackson is located along LA Highway 23, at Plaquemines Bend (about 12 miles above Venice, LA), and is now accessible to the public as a historical tourist and cultural recreational center.

Fort Jackson was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1960. It has been owned by Plaquemines Parish since 1962. In the 1960s, Leander Perez threatened to turn it into a prison for any hippies and advocates of desegregation who entered the Parish. The fort was badly damaged by Hurricane Katrina’s storm surge in 2005. Between Katrina and Hurricane Rita the following month, much of the fort sat under water for up to six weeks. Many of the historic exhibits in the fort were destroyed, and the fort itself suffered structural damage. The fort was used to treat oily birds in the early weeks of the Deepwater Horizon Spill of.