Bottomland Hardwoods

Loggers worked the Atchafalaya Basin from both sides through the 1800s and, by one account, met in the middle by the early 1900s, leaving stumps standing in the water like gravestones. The cutting did not end with them. More recently cypress was being taken for garden mulch, and the Atchafalaya Basinkeeper's Save Our Cypress campaign helped stop it. The St. Martin Parish School Board agreed to log its 450 acres of cypress, then reversed after a coalition of groups objected. A single company was still logging, cutting only swampland it owned.

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

• Big Alabama Bayou — steps away
• Atchafalaya Floodway — 2.6 mi
• Atchafalaya River (Atchafalaya Welcome Center) — 6.5 mi
• Louisiana Airborne Memorial Bridge — 6.5 mi