Atchafalaya Floodway

Bayou Chene is the place the floodway erased. Cutting bald cypress and tupelo was the main work of many of its residents by the 1870s, and in the early 1900s the community was the center of the basin's cypress and fur trades. It lasted from about 1830 to 1953, and its post office closed in 1952. After the levees of the 1930s and 1940s went up, flooding inside them grew more frequent, and the old settlement sites are now buried under silt, water or both. The Morganza Spillway upstream was opened in 1973 and again in 2011.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Atchafalaya Welcome Center — 4.6 mi
  A state welcome center inside the Atchafalaya Basin, the nation's largest river swamp, with exhibits on Basin history and life, a film, a crawfishing boat and French-speaking staff.
• Cypress Island Preserve at Lake Martin — 18 mi
  Nearly 10,000 acres of bottomland hardwood and cypress-tupelo swamp at the south end of Lake Martin, owned by The Nature Conservancy, with a boardwalk and a rookery of egrets, spoonbills and alligators.
• Longfellow-Evangeline State Historic Site — 20 mi
  A bayou-side state site on former Attakapas hunting ground, with a raised Creole cottage of about 1815, a reproduction 1800 farmstead and its slave quarters, and the story behind Longfellow's Evangeline.
• African American Museum, St. Martinville — 21 mi
  A museum in the St. Martinville Cultural Heritage Center on the arrival of Africans in Southwest Louisiana, slavery, the free people of color and Reconstruction, with the fourteen-panel exhibit The Shackles of Memory.

More markers nearby

• Bottomland Hardwoods — 2.6 mi
• Big Alabama Bayou — 2.6 mi
• Atchafalaya River (Atchafalaya Welcome Center) — 4.6 mi
• Louisiana Airborne Memorial Bridge — 4.6 mi