Bayou Plaquemine (Plaquemine Lock State Historic Site)

Fourteen years of building went into a lock that lifted boats 51 feet. Work began in 1895, and Colonel George Goethals of the Army Corps of Engineers, later chief engineer of the Panama Canal, is credited with the design. Dynamite blasts damaged St. John the Evangelist Church nearby. The lock opened on April 9, 1909 and had the highest freshwater lift of any lock in the world. It closed in 1961 after 52 years, replaced by a larger lock at Port Allen. The National Register listed the site in 1972, and it covers about 19 acres today.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• 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.
• 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.
• Capitol Park Museum — 12 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

• Gary J. Hebert Memorial Lockhouse — steps away
• Old City Hall — steps away
• Bayou Plaquemine — 0.3 mi
• Bayou Plaquemine (Bayou Road) — 2.1 mi