Via my colleague Craig Swain, a Louisiana historical marker at the site of a Confederate Navy shipyard has gone missing:
The state-purchased aluminum marker just north of Cross Bayou at North Market Street roughly denotes the location of a Cross Bayou shipyard where the Confederate ironclad Missouri and a fast vessel known as a ram, the CSS Webb, were built. The marker was erected on a traffic island near Dupont Fish Market.
“The rebar where it was mounted is just twisted like crazy,” said local historian and author Gary Joiner, who surveyed the spot with David Hill, commander of the local Lt. Gen. Richard Taylor Camp of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. “There’s some rounded concrete that’s part of the core where they anchored the post that held the sign. But they is the shrubbery is not screwed up. There’s no tire tracks, nothing. It’s bizarre.
How the heck would you pick something like that and carry it off? Maybe Andre the Giant, but not me.”
Hill said he first noticed the sign was knocked down and resting on some shrubbery in late May.
“In hindsight, I forgot about it,” he said. “When I remembered, I went down there and it was gone, and pole it used to stand on was very mangled.”
It’s not entirely clear whether this was an intentional act of vandalism, or if maybe someone knocked it down and hauled off the evidence before he could get caught. Here’s hoping it turns up or gets replaced soon.
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Image via Richard Taylor Camp, SCV
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Dead Confederates, A Civil War Era Blog 
The most reasonable answer is that somebody missed the turn and smacked the sign. Doubt they would have gone back to “get rid of the evidence.” More likely a city worker picked it up on his rounds, threw it in his truck and either took it to the dump or it’s stashed somewhere in a city street’s garage. What surprises me is that Hill, obviously devoted to Confederate history, saw it there in late May and didn’t bother to do anything about it.
If it’s aluminum it’s not all that heavy. My guess is that somebody saw it laying on the ground, decided it would make for a rather unusual souvenir and that it’s now sitting in a garage somewhere in the greater Shreveport area, where it will likely be for the next, oh, 30 years.
have they checked the walls of the local frat houses??
When I was in high school the band director inadvertently backed the bus over a stop sign in a neighboring town. Bent the pole 90 degrees, flat to the ground. Unbeknownst to him, band members broke it loose and sneaked it onto the bus. The next morning he discovered the stop sign, complete with six-foot pole, propped up in the corner of his office. It may still be there.