Centenary State Historic Site

The original college building stands in Jackson, Greek Revival and intact. Centenary College operated here before moving to Shreveport in 1908. During the Civil War, the campus served as a Confederate hospital. After the college left, the campus sat empty for fifteen years, then became a tuberculosis hospital in the mid-1920s, then low-income housing and a trailer park from 1938 to 1965 -- a building that kept finding new uses rather than falling down.

Jackson has 124 structures listed on the National Register of Historic Places -- one of Louisiana's best-preserved antebellum commercial corridors. The landmark sits within a town that kept its built fabric. You're not visiting a single monument; you're walking into a place where the whole commercial grid survived.