Big Alabama Bayou

This bayou once ran past a town. Accounts of Sherburne differ. A local history says a Plaquemine grocer, Henry Sherburne, bought cheap cut-over land between Big and Little Alabama bayous and built tenant houses, a store, a church for Black residents and a two-room school, until about 1,000 people lived there. Another source calls it a logging town of the 1880s to 1930s, left when the timber ran out. The local history adds that a federal order closed it in 1939 for the floodway. The wildlife area's headquarters now stands near the townsite.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Atchafalaya Welcome Center — 6.5 mi
  A state welcome center inside the Atchafalaya Basin, the nation's largest river swamp, with exhibits on Basin history and life, a film, a crawfishing boat and French-speaking staff.
• Cypress Island Preserve at Lake Martin — 20 mi
  Nearly 10,000 acres of bottomland hardwood and cypress-tupelo swamp at the south end of Lake Martin, owned by The Nature Conservancy, with a boardwalk and a rookery of egrets, spoonbills and alligators.
• Longfellow-Evangeline State Historic Site — 22 mi
  A bayou-side state site on former Attakapas hunting ground, with a raised Creole cottage of about 1815, a reproduction 1800 farmstead and its slave quarters, and the story behind Longfellow's Evangeline.
• African American Museum, St. Martinville — 23 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.

More markers nearby

• Bottomland Hardwoods — steps away
• Atchafalaya Floodway — 2.6 mi
• Atchafalaya River (Atchafalaya Welcome Center) — 6.5 mi
• Louisiana Airborne Memorial Bridge — 6.5 mi