Bayou Lafourche

Bayou Lafourche is a river that was turned into a water pipe. A natural distributary of the Mississippi, once called La Fourche des Chetimaches, it was sealed from the river by a dam at Donaldsonville in the early 1900s and became a stagnant ditch. A pumping station built about 1950 let river water flow back in, and some 300,000 Louisiana residents now drink from it. The first Acadian settlements in south Louisiana grew up near its banks and nearby Bayou des Ecores, which ties the waterway to Cajun history.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• E. D. White Historic Site — 20 mi
  A National Historic Landmark house of about 1790 on Bayou Lafourche, built by enslaved people and home to two Whites, a governor and a Chief Justice, with an exhibit on the bayou's history.
• Whitney Plantation — 21 mi
  A museum on a former sugar plantation along the River Road that tells its story through the people who were enslaved there, with memorials to 107,000 enslaved Louisianans and 2,200 children.
• LSU Rural Life Museum — 22 mi
  Four slave cabins moved from Welham Plantation and a working-plantation row of more than twenty saved buildings, on land the Burden family held as Windrush plantation since the 1830s.
• Wetlands Acadian Cultural Center — 24 mi
  A Jean Lafitte National Historical Park center on Bayou Lafourche with Acadian and bayou-life exhibits, a 200-seat theater and ranger-guided boat tours to the E. D. White house.

More markers nearby

• Fort Butler — steps away
• Fort Butler UDC Monument — steps away
• Fort Butler African American Soldiers Memorial — steps away
• Historic Donaldsonville — steps away