The town was founded in 1836 by the Shreve Town Company, a development corporation established to start a town at the meeting point of the Red River and the Texas Trail. On March 20, 1839, the town was incorporated as "Shreveport". Originally, the town consisted of 64 city blocks, created by eight streets running west from the Red River and eight streets running south from Cross Bayou, one of its tributaries.
Shreveport soon became a center of steamboat commerce, mostly cotton and agricultural crops. Shreveport also had a slave market, though slave trading was not as widespread as in other parts of the state. Both slaves and freedmen worked on the river steamboats which plied the Red River.
Shreveport was a Confederate stronghold and the headquarters of the Trans-Mississippi Department of the Confederate Army. Isolated from events in the east, the Civil War continued in the Trans-Mississippi theater for several months after Robert E. Lee's surrender in April 1865, and Shreveport briefly became the last capital of the Confederacy.
The Red River, opened by Shreve in the 1830s, remained navigable until 1914 when disuse, owing to the rise of the railroad, once again resulted in the river becoming unnavigable. In 1994, the Red River was restored to navigability by the Army Corps of Engineers with the completion of a series of lock and dam structures and a navigation channel. Today, Shreveport-Bossier City is again being developed as a port and shipping center. |