Best Comment Ever, Lincoln Theatre Edition

One of the more historic buildings featured on Abandoned Baton Rouge is the 1950s-era Lincoln Theatre, at one time a "blacks only" movie house. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke there when planning the Montgomery bus boycott. According to commenters on the post, musicians such as James Brown and Chuck Berry performed there, it showed porn and blaxsploitation films toward the end, and it was possibly the site of a race riot in 1972, although that was probably at the Temple theater. (Such is the ephemeral nature of "oral" history passed on in blog comments.)

A Gothic Winter's Day in Civil War Territory

I recently headed north of Baton Rouge with two new pals I met through this blog to see some Civil War sites and other nearby points of interest.

With battlefield exploration, you have to fill in a lot of blanks with your imagination. My own brain supplied vague jumbles of mustachioed men in double-breasted coats fighting each other with bayonet guns and cannons. I'm not going to front--I have not retained a lot of information about the Civil War from high school history class, not that much of it ever sunk in. For me, any battle descriptions go in one ear and out the other, unless it's told with some compelling human element or perhaps if it is acted out in a movie starring Patrick Swayze. 

But for those interested and knowledgeable on such matters, I can tell you that we visited the site of the Siege of Port Hudson. Back then, it looked like this:

 

See those mounds in the illustration? If my sources are correct (and I have no reason to believe they're not), I'll show you what some of those mounds look like now.