Tag: Lake Providence
Lake Providence is a town in and the parish seat of East Carroll Parish, Louisiana, United States. The population was 5,104 at the 2000 census.
The Lake Providence area was first opened for European-American settlement in the late 1830s, after Indian Removal. New settlers drained the cypress swamps and cleared the land for cultivation. By 1861, at the start of the American Civil War, the region consisted entirely of large cotton plantations worked by thousands of slave laborers.
The town of Lake Providence got its start with the arrival of the Union Army in the spring of 1862. Under the direction of General Ulysses S. Grant, Lake Providence was established as a supply depot and base of operations for the Vicksburg Campaign. As freed or runaway slaves swarmed into the camp from surrounding plantations, the population quickly soared from a few hundred, to several thousand. What began as a simple military supply camp quickly transformed into a “city of negroe refugees,” also called…
