French, British and Spanish Fort
Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville visited the area circa 1700. France retained Baton Rouge until the British took control of the city in 1763.
In 1779, during the American Revolutionary War, the British erected a dirt Fort Richmond on the banks of the Mississippi River. Bernardo de Gálvez, Spanish Governor of Louisiana, arrived at Baton Rouge on 20 September 1779 and found three hundred British troops garrisoning Fort Richmond. In the Battle of Baton Rouge (1779), engineers under Spanish Governor Gálvez quickly constructed a siege line, enabling the Spanish troops to shell Fort Richmond; the British surrendered the next day. The Spanish garrisoned the fortification and renamed it Fort San Carlos.
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Famous quotes containing the words british, spanish and/or fort:
“Among the virtues and vices that make up the British character, we have one vice, at least, that Americans ought to view with sympathy. For they appear to be the only people who share it with us. I mean our worship of the antique. I do not refer to beauty or even historical association. I refer to age, to a quantity of years.”
—William Golding (b. 1911)
“The French courage proceeds from vanity—the German from phlegm—the Turkish from fanaticism & opium—the Spanish from pride—the English from coolness—the Dutch from obstinacy—the Russian from insensibility—but the Italian from anger.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“How often we read that the enemy occupied a position which commanded the old, and so the fort was evacuated! Have not the school-house and the printing-press occupied a position which commands such a fort as this?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)