Bonnet Carre Spillway

Two burial grounds lie inside the floodway: Kenner and Kugler cemeteries, resting places of enslaved people and free African Americans from the neighboring sugar plantations. Whenever the gates open, floodwater covers them. That happened twice in 2019, when the spillway ran for 43 days and then 79 days, the first double opening in its history. Downstream, the fresh water has damaged Mississippi Sound fisheries, which led to a 2011 federal damages award and continuing litigation. Civil War veterans buried here were moved to Chalmette National Cemetery in 1930.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Destrehan Plantation — 5.5 mi
  A River Road house begun in 1787 where, in January 1811, a tribunal of five slaveholders tried people who had risen on the German Coast, and where an exhibit now tells the revolt.
• Whitney Plantation — 13 mi
  A museum on a former sugar plantation along the River Road that tells its story through the people who were enslaved there, with memorials to 107,000 enslaved Louisianans and 2,200 children.
• Lafayette Cemetery No. 1 — 21 mi
  The Garden District's 1833 cemetery of about 1,100 family tombs, closed to visitors in 2019 and reopened on October 1, 2026 for small guided tours run by the Preservation Resource Center.
• St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 — 22 mi
  New Orleans' oldest surviving city of the dead, opened in 1789 after the fire of 1788 and the burial place of Homer Plessy, reachable only on a guided tour since March 2015.

More markers nearby

• Trepagnier Plantation — 1.0 mi
• Slave Revolt — 1.0 mi
• Prospect Plantation (1815-1920) — 1.0 mi
• Thomas J. Sellers — 1.0 mi