Site was War Fortress

              Site Was War Fortress
By ANN DEMENT
Journal Medical Writer
Shreveport's Veterans Administra-tion
Hospital houses countless battles
with human life and because of fate or
coincidence or some celestial plan it is
located on the exact site of an historic
guard.
The time was March 7, 1864. It was
the period of the Civil War and
Shreveport was the capitol of
Louisiana. Baton Rouge had fallen un-der
Union blows. The Capitol building
stood where the Court House now
stands and the city's population was
about 3,000.
A railroad and stagecoach ran from
Marshall, Tex. to Shreveport and a
year earlier currency had been issued
here, bearing the name "Shreveport,
La.", and the picture of Gen. P. G. T.
Beauregard.
THE PLACE was a lone fort, called
Fort Turnbull, southeast of Shreveport
high on a bluff overlooking the Red
River and within sight from the river.
Defense lines against Union land forces
were scattered from near this point in
strategic locations.
Union fleets were 70 miles south of
Shreveport on the Red River. Their ob-jectives
were to capture the city, seize
all the cotton and destroy all the cotton
gins along the way. General Lee's
calvary had driven Union land troops to
within 26 miles of Shreveport to prevent
them from joining their naval forces on
the river.
Resourcefulness and determination
rose among this group at the fort, and
since cannon were not available for
mounting, they assembled logs of cor-responding
size and charred them
black to resemble the artillery of the
day. Men, women and children helped
and the logs were mounted into posi-tion.
As the Union fleets came up the
river they could see the numerous
black cannon (or so they thought) pro-truding
from the fort on the bluff and
they were awed at the apparent
strength of the city, which heretofore
they had understood was defenseless.
However, a large Confederate steamer
had been sunk and extended for 15 feet
on either side of the river.
THIS, PLUS the low water level at
the time, and the aid of a sandbar, pre-vented
Union forces from passing.
What they didn't know, however, was
that if they had broken through, the
cannon on their boats could never have
been raised high enough to reach the,
target of the fort. As a Confederate of-ficer
returning to Shreveport re-marked,
"This is no real fort but mere-ly
a humbug" —so the fort came to be
known.
Today Shreveport's VA Hospital
stands majestically on the bluff of Fort
Humbug overlooking the river. In com-memoration
of the nation's bicenten-nial,
replicas of the humbug cannon
line the edge of the bluff with the
Veterans Administration hospital "Giv-ing
the best to those who gave the
Most."
Volunteers
VA volunteers are special people
who give of their time for other
special people. Volunteer Mary
Graves escorts veteran Walter
Roberts to his room from the Oc-cupational
Therapy Service.
(Journal Photo by Marc Menasco)
ca 1975