Winter Quarters State Historic Site

In the winter of 1863-64, after Vicksburg fell, Grant's army occupied the Mississippi Delta and burned nearly everything standing along the Tensas River. Winter Quarters, an 1805 house on a ridge near Newellton, is the only plantation home still standing on that stretch -- not by luck, but because its overseer got there first: written letters of protection from Union Generals McPherson and Smith, secured on the strength of owner Haller Nutt's known Union sympathies. Grant ordered it spared. Union troops wintered in the house instead of burning it.

The house is now a state historic site with interpretive exhibits on the Vicksburg campaign -- the grinding winter that turned northeast Louisiana into a corridor of war. The National Register property opens Wednesday through Sunday. It's a rare piece of built evidence from a campaign that remade the river -- standing today because someone made a bet on which side would win, and was right.