Port Allen, Louisiana

Port Allen sits directly across the Mississippi River from Baton Rouge, and for most of its history the two cities have existed in each other's shadow. The area was first settled in the seventeen nineties as La Ville de Saint Michel and later called West Baton Rouge. The current name honors Henry Watkins Allen, the seventeenth governor of Louisiana, who before the Civil War ran a sugar plantation here called Allendale, worked by enslaved laborers.

Allen built his own private railroad through the property. The town was incorporated in nineteen sixteen and made parish seat of West Baton Rouge Parish. The parish itself was created in eighteen oh seven when the original Baton Rouge Parish was split by the Mississippi River into east and west halves, the name coming from the French for red stick, bâton rouge, a boundary marker the French found here in colonial times.