Bayou Plaquemine

The town takes its name from the French word for persimmon, and it grew where the bayou left the Mississippi. The Chitimacha were the area's earlier inhabitants, and Plaquemine was settled by 1775. The town was incorporated in 1838 with Zenon Labauve as its first mayor, and it has been the seat of Iberville Parish government ever since. The junction kept the town prosperous through the steamboat years. The census counted 1,663 residents in 1860 and 3,590 in 1900, and 4,955 in 1910, the high point of the early series.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Old State Capitol — 11 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 — 11 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 — 11 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 — 12 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 (Plaquemine Lock State Historic Site) — 0.3 mi
• Gary J. Hebert Memorial Lockhouse — 0.3 mi
• Old City Hall — 0.3 mi
• Bayou Plaquemine (Bayou Road) — 2.0 mi