Place:Baton Rouge, East Baton Rouge, Louisiana, United States

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NameBaton Rouge
Alt namesBâton-Rougesource: Wikipedia
TypeCity
Coordinates30.458°N 91.14°W
Located inEast Baton Rouge, Louisiana, United States     (1719 - )
Contained Places
Cemetery
Greenoaks Memorial Park
Magnolia Cemetery ( 1852 - )
Roselawn Memorial Park ( 1921 - )
source: Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names
source: Family History Library Catalog


the text in this section is copied from an article in Wikipedia

Baton Rouge is the capital of the U.S. state of Louisiana. On the eastern bank of the Mississippi River, it is the parish seat of East Baton Rouge Parish, Louisiana's most populous parish. Since 2020, it has been the 99th-most-populous city in the United States and the second-largest city in Louisiana, after New Orleans. It is the 18th-most-populous state capital. At the U.S. Census Bureau's 2020 tabulation, it had a population of 227,470; its consolidated population was 456,781 in 2020. It is the center of the Greater Baton Rouge area, Louisiana's second-largest metropolitan area, with a population of 870,569 as of 2020, up from 802,484 in 2010.

The Baton Rouge area owes its historical importance to its strategic site upon the Istrouma Bluff, the first natural bluff upriver from the Mississippi River Delta at the Gulf of Mexico. This allowed development of a business quarter safe from seasonal flooding. In addition, it built a levee system stretching from the bluff southward to protect the riverfront and low-lying agricultural areas. It is a culturally rich center, with settlement by immigrants from numerous European nations and African peoples brought to North America as slaves or indentured servants. It was ruled by seven different governments: French, British, and Spanish in the colonial era; the Republic of West Florida, as a United States territory and state, Confederate, and United States again since the end of the American Civil War.

Baton Rouge is a major industrial, petrochemical, medical, research, motion picture, and growing technology center of the American South.[1] It is the location of Louisiana State University, the LSU System's flagship university and the state's largest institution of higher education. It is also the location of Southern University, the flagship institution of the Southern University System, the nation's only historically black college system. The Port of Greater Baton Rouge is the 10th-largest in the U.S. by tonnage shipped, and is the farthest upstream Mississippi River port capable of handling Panamax ships. Major corporations participating in the Baton Rouge metropolitan statistical area's economy include Lamar Advertising Company, BBQGuys, Marucci Sports, Piccadilly Restaurants, Raising Cane's Chicken Fingers, ExxonMobil, Brown & Root, Shell Chemical Company and Dow Chemical Company.

Contents

History

the text in this section is copied from an article in Wikipedia

Prehistory

Human habitation in the Baton Rouge area has been dated to 12000–6500 BC, based on evidence found along the Mississippi, Comite, and Amite rivers. Earthwork mounds were built by hunter-gatherer societies in the Middle Archaic period, from roughly the fourth millennium BC. The speakers of the Proto-Muskogean language divided into its descendant languages by about 1000 BCE; and a cultural boundary between either side of Mobile Bay and the Black Warrior River began to appear between about 1200 BCE and 500 BCE, a period called the Middle "Gulf Formational Stage". The Eastern Muskogean language began to diversify internally in the first half of the first millennium AD.

The early Muskogean societies were the bearers of the Mississippian culture, which formed around 800 AD and extended in a vast network across the Mississippi and Ohio valleys, with numerous chiefdoms in the Southeast, as well. By the time the Spanish made their first forays inland from the shores of the Gulf of Mexico in the early 16th century, by some evidence many political centers of the Mississippians were already in decline, or abandoned. At the time, this region appeared to have been occupied by a collection of moderately sized native chiefdoms, interspersed with autonomous villages and tribal groups. Other evidence indicates these Mississippian settlements were thriving at the time of the first Spanish contact. Later Spanish expeditions encountered the remains of groups who had lost many people and been disrupted in the aftermath of infectious diseases, chronic among Europeans, unknowingly introduced by the first expedition.

Colonial period

French explorer Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville led an exploration party up the Mississippi River in 1698. The explorers saw a red pole marking the boundary between the Houma and Bayagoula tribal hunting grounds. The French name le bâton rouge ("the red stick") is the translation of a native term rendered as Istrouma, possibly a corruption of the Choctaw iti humma ("red pole"); André-Joseph Pénicaut, a carpenter traveling with d'Iberville, published the first full-length account of the expedition in 1723. According to Pénicaut:

From there [Manchacq] we went five leagues higher and found very high banks called écorts in that region, and in savage called Istrouma which means red stick [bâton rouge], as at this place there is a post painted red that the savages have sunk there to mark the land line between the two nations, namely: the land of the Bayagoulas which they were leaving and the land of another nation—thirty leagues upstream from the baton rouge—named the Oumas.
The red pole was presumably at Scott's Bluff, on what is now the campus of Southern University. It was reportedly a painted pole adorned with fish bones.

European settlement of Baton Rouge began in 1721 when French colonists established a military and trading post. Since then, Baton Rouge has been governed by France, Britain, Spain, Louisiana, the Republic of West Florida, the United States, the Confederate States, and the United States again. In 1755, when French-speaking settlers of Acadia in Canada's Maritime provinces were expelled by British forces, many took up residence in rural Louisiana. Popularly known as Cajuns, the descendants of the Acadians maintained a separate culture. During the first half of the 19th century, Baton Rouge grew steadily as the result of steamboat trade and transportation.

Modern history

Baton Rouge was incorporated in 1817. In 1822, the Pentagon Barracks complex of buildings was completed. The site has been used by the Spanish, French, British, Confederate States Army, and United States Army and was part of the short-lived Republic of West Florida. In 1951, ownership of the barracks was transferred to the state of Louisiana. In 1976, the complex was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Acquisition of Louisiana by the United States in 1803 was a catalyst for increased Anglo-American settlement, especially in the northern part of the state. In 1846, the state legislature designated Baton Rouge as Louisiana's new capital to replace "sinful" New Orleans. The architect James Dakin was hired to design the old Louisiana State Capitol, with construction beginning in late 1847.[2] Rather than mimic the United States Capitol, as many other states had done, he designed a capitol in Neo-Gothic style, complete with turrets and crenellations, and stained glass; it overlooks the Mississippi. It has been described as the "most distinguished example of Gothic Revival" architecture in the state and has been designated as a National Historic Landmark.

By the outbreak of the American Civil War, the population of Baton Rouge was nearly 5,500. The war nearly halted economic progress, except for businesses associated with supplying the Union Army occupation of the city, which began in the spring of 1862 and lasted for the duration of the war. The Confederates at first consolidated their forces elsewhere, during which time the state government moved to Opelousas and later Shreveport.[2] In the summer of 1862, about 2,600 Confederate troops under generals John C. Breckinridge (the former Vice President of the United States) and Daniel Ruggles attempted to recapture Baton Rouge.

After the war, New Orleans temporarily served as the seat of the Reconstruction era state government. When the Bourbon Democrats regained power in 1882, after considerable intimidation and voter suppression of black Republicans, they returned the state government to Baton Rouge, where it has since remained. In his 1893 guidebook, Karl Baedeker described Baton Rouge as "the Capital of Louisiana, a quaint old place with 10,378 inhabitants, on a bluff above the Mississippi".

In the 1950s and 1960s, the petrochemical industry boomed in Baton Rouge, stimulating the city's expansion beyond its original center. The changing market in the oil business has produced fluctuations in the industry, affecting employment in the city and area.

A building boom began in the city in the 1990s and continued into the 2000s, during which Baton Rouge was one of the fastest-growing cities in the South in terms of technology. Metropolitan Baton Rouge was ranked as one of the fastest-growing metropolitan areas in the U.S. (with a population under 1 million), with 602,894 in 2000 and 802,484 people as of the 2010 U.S. census.[3] After the extensive damage in New Orleans and along the coast from Hurricane Katrina on August 29, 2005, the city took in as many as 200,000 displaced residents.

In 2010, Baton Rouge started a market push to become a test city for Google's new super high speed fiber optic line known as GeauxFiBR.

In 2016, the Greater Baton Rouge metropolitan area was heavily affected by the shooting of police officers in July and flooding in August.

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This page uses content from the English Wikipedia. The original content was at Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. As with WeRelate, the content of Wikipedia is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.