Bayou Courtableau

The bayou's namesake, Jacques Courtableau, was a landowner who in 1765 granted land to 32 Acadian immigrants. In the 1930s the water itself became the problem. After levees went up along the Atchafalaya, the Teche country and its rice farms lost much of their fresh water, and from 1976 to 1982 the Army Corps of Engineers built a pumping station at Krotz Springs to move water into Bayou Courtableau. The bayou that once floated steamboats now depends on machinery to keep its water coming.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Le Vieux Village and the Venus House — 5.9 mi
  A heritage park in Opelousas built around the Venus House of about 1791, the home of a free Creole woman of color, Marie Francois Venus, with an old schoolhouse, Methodist church and the visitor center's zydeco music exhibit.
• Prairie Acadian Cultural Center — 24 mi
  A National Park Service center in Eunice on the Cajun prairie, with exhibits on the Acadians who settled the prairies, a Courir de Mardi Gras display, free music and cooking demonstrations, and the shuttered Liberty Theatre nearby.
• Atchafalaya Welcome Center — 27 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.
• Louisiana State Penitentiary Museum — 36 mi
  The Angola museum outside the penitentiary gate, opened in 1997 on the history of crime and punishment in Louisiana, on ground where convicts were leased out as what 64 Parishes calls legal slave labor.

More markers nearby

• Washington — steps away
• Washington Museum — 0.2 mi
• Washington School — 0.2 mi
• Steamboat Warehouse — 0.2 mi