In 1861, Centenary College closed its doors and the campus in Jackson became a Confederate hospital. Methodist students had slept in those dormitories two years earlier; soldiers died in them instead — 85 men, identified and unidentified, buried on the college grounds in what is now the Confederate Cemetery. The building still stands, Greek Revival and intact, and after the war it became a state school for the blind for nearly a century before the college itself relocated to Shreveport in 1908. Nearby, at Linwood Plantation outside St. Francisville, a young woman named Emma LeConte kept a diary that became one of the most widely cited firsthand accounts of Sherman's march. The property is privately held. But her diary is free online — read it before you come. Walk these hills with her sentences in your head and the war stops being backdrop. It becomes something someone actually lived through and wrote down.
