Bayou Teche

The Teche follows old beds cut by the Red River and the Mississippi roughly 2,000 years ago, running from Port Barre down to the lower Atchafalaya. Three nations lived along it when Europeans arrived, and the Chitimacha still live at Charenton. Cotton plantations dominated the upper bayou and sugar the lower, worked by enslaved Black people. Between 1863 and 1864 the Teche saw three military invasions, and neither side held it firmly. Today runoff from cane fields and livestock is among the sources of its water-quality problems.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Shadows-on-the-Teche — steps away
  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.
• African American Museum, St. Martinville — 8.2 mi
  A museum in the St. Martinville Cultural Heritage Center on the arrival of Africans in Southwest Louisiana, slavery, the free people of color and Reconstruction, with the fourteen-panel exhibit The Shackles of Memory.
• St. Martin de Tours Catholic Church — 8.2 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.
• Jungle Gardens and Avery Island — 8.8 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.

More markers nearby

• New Iberia Shipwreck — steps away
• George Rodrigue — steps away
• Shadows-on-the-Teche — steps away
• James Lee Burke — steps away