Interest in the American Civil War Centennial in the 1960s prompted a local committee to initiate and raise state funds for a monument to honor the city’s namesake, Henry Watkins Allen. The Town of West Baton Rouge was renamed Port Allen in his honor in 1878. A controversial figure today, Allen was a slaveholder and owner of Allendale Plantation in West Baton Rouge Parish, an officer for the Confederacy who took up arms against the United States, and Louisiana’s second (and last) Governor of the Confederately held portions of the state. To create the monument, the committee secured the talents of Angela Gregory, a pioneering and well-respected woman sculptor in New Orleans with family roots in the parish. Erected with civic pride in 1962 beside the then-new West Baton Rouge Parish Courthouse, the monument was moved across the street, facing the Courthouse, in 1992.