Bayou Des Glaises

In May 1927 two levee breaches flooded Avoyelles Parish, and nearly all of it went under; the only dry ground was a small stretch of the Fifth Ward known as the Island. Red Cross tent cities for refugees went up at Marksville and Mansura. Bayou des Glaises, a slow, low waterway about 60 miles long that began as an old Mississippi channel, runs through that country. At Big Bend the iron bridge served as an escape route, and the railroad town of Naples was destroyed.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Louisiana State Penitentiary Museum — 14 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.
• Tunica-Biloxi Museum — 16 mi
  The Tunica-Biloxi Tribe of Louisiana's own museum at Marksville, built around the Tunica Treasure that the tribe won back in court.
• Avoyelles Parish Courthouse: Solomon Northup Marker — 17 mi
  The Marksville courthouse where Solomon Northup was freed in January 1853, with a marker and a 2026 bronze that shows him rising from the mud.
• Rosedown Plantation State Historic Site — 31 mi
  A cotton plantation worked by hundreds of enslaved people, whose names survive in an 1862 succession list; the Turnbull house and gardens, and the quarters nobody has yet found.

More markers nearby

• A Historic Landmark — steps away
• Big Bend: Development of a Community — steps away
• Sarto Old Iron Bridge — steps away
• Battle Of Yellow Bayou — 6.4 mi