Bayou Manchac (Iberville River)

On March 26, 1699 a Bayogoula chief showed Iberville this bayou, which his people used to reach their village. Choctaw may be the source of the name Manchac, said to mean rear entrance. The British built Fort Bute here in 1764 to pull fur trade from New Orleans, and in 1766 some 224 exiled Acadians settled near San Gabriel de Manchac. The bayou once linked Baton Rouge to Lake Pontchartrain and Lake Maurepas. Twentieth-century river levees cut it off, and today it carries drainage and paddlers.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• LSU Rural Life Museum — 8.7 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.
• Old State Capitol — 14 mi
  James Dakin's 1850 Gothic castle on the river bluff, gutted in the Civil War, nearly demolished in 1991 and reopened in 1994 as a free museum of political history.
• Capitol Park Museum — 14 mi
  The Louisiana State Museum in Baton Rouge: a shrimp trawler and a Civil War submarine, galleries on the slave market, resistance and Jim Crow, and the music from Armstrong to Chenier.
• Louisiana State Capitol — 14 mi
  A 450-foot Art Deco tower Huey Long pushed through in 1930, finished in 14 months, and the hallway where he was shot in 1935; free to enter and ringed by 27 acres of grounds.

More markers nearby

• Galveztown — 6.2 mi
• Cal Ripken, Sr. — 9.2 mi
• The Civil War — 9.2 mi
• Civil War — 9.2 mi