Bancker Ferry

A ferry only makes sense where a river was the road. The Vermilion River, also called Bayou Vermilion, runs about 70 miles from near Lafayette, past Abbeville, to Vermilion Bay. Steamboats worked it, though low water and sunken logs slowed them. Railroads, and the paving of every highway into Lafayette in 1936, cut its importance for trade. Army engineers finished dredging in 1944 and left a channel nine feet deep, and the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway now crosses the river near Intracoastal City. In Abbeville a syrup mill opened on its banks in 1912.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Jungle Gardens and Avery Island — 13 mi
  A 170-acre garden and wildfowl refuge on a Gulf Coast salt dome, founded by Edward Avery McIlhenny, on an island that was a Marsh sugar plantation worked by enslaved people before Tabasco and the 1862 salt works.
• Cypremort Point State Park — 19 mi
  A 185-acre Vermilion Bay park reached by road, with a half-mile man-made beach, a marsh boardwalk, shore fishing and a boat launch, and a Chitimacha tradition of a great cypress here.
• Shadows-on-the-Teche — 20 mi
  A National Trust site in New Iberia built 1831 to 1834 for sugar planters David and Mary Weeks, now interpreted around the 1,112 people the Weeks family enslaved, among them Charity Polk, Amos, Patty, Isaac and Louisa.
• Vermilionville — 24 mi
  A living-history village of about 23 acres on Bayou Vermilion in Lafayette, opened in 1990 to interpret the Native peoples, Acadians, Creoles and people of African descent of the Attakapas region.

More markers nearby

• Our Lady of Prompt Succor Church — steps away
• Bancker — steps away
• Henry / Church — 2.8 mi
• St. Mary Congregational Church — 6.0 mi