571. Franklinton, Washington Parish (LA50)

This looked to me like the 60’s personified.  And I guess it was a little bit forward thinking at the time because it was erected in 1960.  This is also my sixth Washington County (or county equivalent), so there’s that.  Not that important a thing, but do we not keep track of weird stats?  Strangely enough, the courthouse wasn’t what sucked up all my brain cycles here, it was the Veteran’s Memorial.

It was covered with the names of so many Confederate dead, and you can guess how I feel about that by now, but it also covered the dead off so many other wars so I let that pass, even if I still look a little sideways at them all sharing a memorial dedicated to preserving and defending the Union.  I noted that there are some who are listed as having died fighting for Texas Independence, but the date would put them at the beginning of the Mexican War.  I suspect they put the wrong attribution there, but I can’t be sure.  I can believe that the relatively short list of names makes more sense for Texas and I would have imagined more would have died in Mexico since far more people would have been involved.  Of course, this is only one county, so who knows?  I’ll talk crap about Louisiana for a great many things, but I’m not going to ding them for not being sharper on their Texas history.  That said, though…

…what the heck is the Carpetbagger Battle?  I have scoured Wikipedia and I can not for the life of me figure out what the heck it was!  I suspect, based on the date, that it was perhaps a smaller massacre resulting from the racial unrest in the State at the time.  This would have been only weeks after the Coushatta Massacre (which I didn’t know about when I was actually in Coushatta) and a year after Colfax, right in the middle of the end of Reconstruction.  I sure hope I’m wrong, but I’m not betting on it.  And if I’m right, that makes these guys being here even worse than the Confederates.  But that wasn’t important right then.  I came here for a cache!

The most favorited cache in the area was a few blocks away so I decided to go for a walk.  It turned out be a tethered bison suspended in a hole drilled through cinderblock.  For a town this size, this is probably a pretty clever urban hide.  For me, the hardest part was the location jumping around by the wall.  I don’t want to sound like I’m tooting my own horn because I still maintain that I’m the worst cacher in Christendom (and probably the other Abrahamic faiths, too), but I think I’m getting kinda good at this finding hidden things thing.  You have to understand…  I didn’t start considering my self a journeyman cacher, no longer a filthy n00b, until I hit 1000 caches.  At this point, I’m finally seeing things in tall trees; catching tiny, deep hides that far more experienced folks miss; starting to have stats (possibly weird, possibly not) that pass up other cachers I admire…  Maybe I don’t completely suck at this.  Once I got back to the car, I had more than enough time to muse on it until I reached…