Winter Quarters State Historic Site

In the winter of 1862–63, when Grant's army swept through the Mississippi Delta on the long approach to Vicksburg, they burned nearly everything standing. Winter Quarters, an 1805 house built on a Tensas River ridge near Newellton, is the only plantation home still standing on that march route. The Union forces occupied it, used it as a field hospital, and left it intact. Bullet damage is still visible in the walls. The house is now a state historic site with interpretive exhibits on the Vicksburg siege — the grinding winter campaign 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, and one of the few places where you can stand inside the war rather than read about it.