46 Fun Facts About Baton Rouge

French settlers expelled from Canada's Acadia in 1755 found a new home around Baton Rouge; what are their descendants called?

Cajuns: the name is simply 'Acadians' as generations of Louisiana tongues wore it down, and it stuck to the French-speaking communities they built in the bayou country.

The governor's mansion Huey Long built in Baton Rouge in 1930 closely resembles which famous building?

The White House: the story goes that Long wanted to know his way around the real one when he became president, though some call it simply a fine Georgian mansion.

Which French explorer led the expedition up the Mississippi that recorded the red stick in 1699?

Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville had been sent to find the mouth of the Mississippi from the sea and fortify it, finishing the job La Salle began, and noted the red pole on his way upriver.

After Union troops took Baton Rouge in 1862, Louisiana's Confederate government ended the war based in which city?

Shreveport took over after a stopover in Opelousas, and the seat of government came home to Baton Rouge only in 1882, twenty years after it left.

After France gave it up in 1763, Baton Rouge became part of which British colony?

West Florida ran along the Gulf Coast from the Mississippi with its capital at Pensacola, but Britain kept Baton Rouge for only 16 years before Spain took the fort.

Which Spanish commander captured Baton Rouge from the British in September 1779?

Bernardo de Gálvez took the fort even though a hurricane had sunk most of his ships before he set out, and Galveston in Texas still carries his name.

In 1810, rebels stormed the Spanish fort at Baton Rouge and declared the region what?

An independent republic that lasted just 74 days: American troops marched in that December, and the rebels, some of them reluctantly, hauled down their flag.

What design did the flag of Baton Rouge's 1810 rebels carry?

A single white star on a blue field flew over Baton Rouge for only 74 days, but the South brought the design back in 1861 and a hit song renamed it the Bonnie Blue Flag.

In the 1840s Louisiana's legislature chose Baton Rouge to replace which city as state capital?

New Orleans lost the seat of government after Baton Rouge handed the state a $20,000 plot on its river bluff in 1847 as the site for a new capitol.

Which author mocked the Old State Capitol as a 'whitewashed castle, with turrets and things'?

Mark Twain blamed Sir Walter Scott's medieval romances for what he called a little sham castle, and wished dynamite had been allowed to finish what a fire had begun.

Since its restoration in the 1990s, what has Louisiana's Old State Capitol housed?

The Museum of Political History fills a building with a rough past: a Union Army prison, gutted by fire in 1862, then rebuilt in 1882 with its famous spiral stair and stained-glass dome.

Louisiana's State Capitol in Baton Rouge holds which record among America's state capitols?

The tallest, at 450 feet and 34 storeys: Huey Long insisted on a tower instead of the usual dome and had it finished in little over a year.

Which future NBA giant played his college basketball in Baton Rouge, for LSU, before going first in the 1992 draft?

Shaquille O'Neal left LSU a year early for the NBA, then came back for what he had skipped: he finished his degree there in 2000, the same year he was the league's MVP.

By the official account, which young Baton Rouge doctor shot Huey Long inside the State Capitol in 1935?

Carl Weiss was cut down on the spot by Long's bodyguards, and Long died two days later; he lies buried in front of the building beneath his own statue.

What was Huey Long's famous nickname?

The Kingfish was a name he gave himself, borrowed from a scheming lodge boss on the radio comedy Amos 'n' Andy; he called himself 'a small fish here in Washington' but the Kingfish back home.

Which Kris Kristofferson song opens with the words 'Busted flat in Baton Rouge'?

Me and Bobby McGee took the city's name to the top of the American charts in 1971, sung by Janis Joplin on a record released a few months after her death.

For more than fifty years, what did LSU's Tiger Stadium contain beneath its stands besides football facilities?

Student dormitories: in 1931 the athletic director took $250,000 meant for new dorms and built the rooms into the stadium, which let him add seats on top; about 1,500 students lived there.

Which compass direction is in the name of the parish where Baton Rouge sits?

East, because a second parish, West Baton Rouge, faces the city from the opposite bank of the Mississippi, with its own seat at Port Allen.

Which director who went to high school in Baton Rouge set and shot his 1989 debut feature there?

Steven Soderbergh wrote 'sex, lies, and videotape' in eight days on a cross-country trip, and it won him the Palme d'Or at Cannes at just 26.

Baton Rouge is the third-southernmost continental US capital, after Tallahassee and which?

Austin lies about a fifth of a degree further south, while Tallahassee, up in the Florida Panhandle, sits level with Baton Rouge to within a mile or two; island Honolulu does not count.

In January 2025 Baton Rouge broke a one-day record that had stood since 1895, for what?

Snowfall: a Gulf Coast blizzard dumped more than half a foot on a city where snow is usually so rare that whole years pass without a measurable flake.

Which hurricane struck Baton Rouge on September 1, 2008, toppling trees and knocking out power across the city?

Gustav turned the tables on a city that had been the refuge three years earlier, when its population roughly doubled almost overnight with people fleeing Katrina.

Before a fire sent it to Baton Rouge in 1869, LSU stood across the Red River from Alexandria, near which town?

Near Pineville the school opened in 1860 as a seminary run on military lines, which is why LSU is nicknamed the Ole War Skule; a fire in 1869 drove it to Baton Rouge.

Which future Union general was LSU's first superintendent?

William Tecumseh Sherman resigned when Louisiana left the Union in January 1861 and went north, and within four years he was marching an army through Georgia.

What is the nickname of LSU's Tiger Stadium?

Death Valley holds more than 100,000, and on 8 October 1988 the roar that greeted a late winning touchdown against Auburn registered on a seismograph across campus.

The two grassy 20-foot mounds beside LSU's Field House were raised by whom?

Ancient hunter-gatherers built them thousands of years ago, which puts them among the oldest structures made by people in the Americas; since 2010 LSU has fenced them off on game days to keep tailgaters away.

LSU's live tiger mascot is named Mike in honour of whom?

An athletic trainer, Mike Chambers, led the 1936 drive in which students gave 25 cents each to buy a year-old tiger from the Little Rock Zoo; the animal arrived as Sheik and was renamed for him.

Since Mike VI died in 2016, what has changed for LSU's live tiger on game days?

He no longer leaves his habitat: for decades Mike was wheeled around the field in a cage topped with cheerleaders, until LSU ended the ritual over concerns about how a live mascot should be treated.

Whose country hit 'Callin' Baton Rouge' is played before every LSU home football game?

Garth Brooks sang it live in Tiger Stadium in April 2022, and more than 100,000 fans jumping along set the campus seismograph twitching, just as a famous touchdown had in 1988.

Southern University, in the Scotlandville area of Baton Rouge, is the flagship of the nation's only what?

A historically black college system, and its flagship is a transplant: the school began downriver and moved in 1914 to Scott's Bluff, above the Mississippi at Scotlandville.

Southern University's marching band, a star of Bayou Classic weekend, is known by what nickname?

The Human Jukebox was built into a national name by Isaac Greggs, who directed it for 36 years, and it travels each November to a Battle of the Bands staged the night before the Bayou Classic.

Southern University's Jaguars play which rival in the nationally televised Bayou Classic?

Grambling State has met Southern under that name since 1974, and not even Hurricane Katrina stopped it: with the Superdome storm-damaged, the 2005 game simply moved to Houston.

Which company runs the giant Baton Rouge refinery that Standard Oil built in 1909?

ExxonMobil inherited it from Standard Oil, whose 1909 plant set off Baton Rouge's rise as an industrial city; the population more than tripled in the 1940s alone.

Which chicken-finger chain opened its first restaurant, 'The Mothership', near LSU's North Gate in 1996?

Raising Cane's is named after founder Todd Graves's yellow Labrador; turned down by investors, he paid for the first restaurant by working as a refinery boilermaker and fishing for salmon in Alaska.

Which billboard giant is headquartered in Baton Rouge?

Lamar owes its start to a coin toss: in 1908 two Pensacola partners flipped to split an opera house and a poster business, Charles Lamar lost and took the posters, and the firm reached Baton Rouge in the 1920s.

The 1862 Confederate attempt to retake Baton Rouge was led by which former US vice president?

John C. Breckinridge was beaten off on the day, but the fight killed the Union commander, Thomas Williams, and the Federals abandoned Baton Rouge soon afterwards.

The 1862 Confederate attack on Baton Rouge lost its river support when what kind of warship broke down upstream?

An ironclad, the CSS Arkansas, was meant to drive off the Union gunboats; her engines failed twice, and her own crew blew her up rather than see her captured.

Which minister led the 1953 bus boycott in Baton Rouge?

Rev. T. J. Jemison, pastor of one of the city's largest Black churches, ran it on free carpools and settled within days, a compromise some of his own followers thought came too soon.

Which city's bus boycott borrowed its free car-pool system from Baton Rouge's 1953 protest?

Montgomery: three days into that boycott Martin Luther King phoned the Baton Rouge leader, and he later wrote that the account he was given of how it had been done was 'invaluable'.

Baton Rouge's museum destroyer USS Kidd served as the set for which Tom Hanks war film?

Greyhound was shot aboard her in 2018: the Kidd is the only destroyer of her class restored to her 1945 wartime fit, a ready-made set for a Battle of the Atlantic story.

The USS Kidd honours Rear Admiral Isaac Kidd, who was killed aboard which battleship at Pearl Harbor?

USS Arizona was his flagship; the destroyer's crew, with his widow's blessing, took the pirate Captain Kidd as their mascot and 'ransomed' rescued pilots back to their carriers for ice cream.

The USS Kidd's berth at Baton Rouge was built to leave her high and dry part of every year; why?

The river's level drops so far between spring flood and autumn that she was given a special cradle: she floats when the Mississippi is high and rests on blocks, hull exposed, when it falls.

Which 1820s army barracks beside Louisiana's State Capitol now houses the lieutenant governor's offices?

The Pentagon Barracks has only four buildings: the fifth side of the pentagon was torn down within months for faulty construction, and LSU cadets later bunked in the rest.

The Louisiana Art and Science Museum in Baton Rouge occupies what kind of 1925 riverside building?

A railroad depot: the 1925 station of the Yazoo and Mississippi Valley line has housed the museum since 1976, when it moved from the Old Governor's Mansion.

Which future president kept his family home in Baton Rouge during his years as an army officer?

Zachary Taylor made Baton Rouge his family home, and his victories in the Mexican War made him a national hero and carried him to the presidency in 1848.

The red pole that gave Baton Rouge its name marked the hunting boundary between the Bayagoula and which tribe?

Houma means 'red' in Choctaw, the same word that turns up in Oklahoma, 'red people', and that may lie behind Istrouma, the native name the French rendered as Baton Rouge.