Bayou Plaquemine (Bayou Road)

A bayou that once linked the river to the Atchafalaya Basin now stops short. After the Plaquemine Lock closed in 1961, the Corps of Engineers supervised construction of a levee at the bayou's mouth on the Mississippi in 1974. The larger Port Allen lock had taken over the traffic, and the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway, completed in 1949, already carried barges across the region. That left a branch of the Mississippi cut off from the river it came from, with the lock standing beside it as a monument.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Old State Capitol — 13 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.
• LSU Rural Life Museum — 13 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.
• Capitol Park Museum — 13 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

• Bayou Plaquemine — 2.0 mi
• Old City Hall — 2.1 mi
• Bayou Plaquemine (Plaquemine Lock State Historic Site) — 2.1 mi
• Gary J. Hebert Memorial Lockhouse — 2.1 mi