Bayou Petite Anse

The island was Petite Anse before it was Avery Island, and it kept being useful. John Craig Marsh was buying into it in 1818, when it went by that name. In 1913 gravel dug from Petite Anse Island went into Keystone Lock and Dam, on the Teche between New Iberia and St. Martinville. After Hurricane Rita hit the island hard in September 2005, the family spent about $5 million on a 17-foot levee, pumps and backup generators.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Jungle Gardens and Avery Island — 0.3 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.
• Shadows-on-the-Teche — 8.4 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.
• Cypremort Point State Park — 13 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.
• St. Martin de Tours Catholic Church — 15 mi
  The Mother Church of the Acadians, founded in 1765 on St. Martin Square in St. Martinville, with a late 1870s Lourdes grotto and, a block away, the Evangeline Oak on Bayou Teche.

More markers nearby

• Avery Island Salt Dome — 0.2 mi
• First Rock Salt Mine — 0.2 mi
• McIlhenny — 0.4 mi
• Bird City — 0.4 mi