Confluence Of Bayous

The bayou here was once a river's outlet. Bayou Lafourche began as a natural distributary of the Mississippi, and its earliest name was the Chetimachas River, after the Chitimacha people. In 1904 a dam at Donaldsonville sealed it off, starving the wetlands of sediment and fresh water and leaving a stagnant ditch. A pumping station at the river, built in 1950, restored the flow, and roughly 300,000 Louisianans now drink from it. People call it the longest Main Street in the world, with Thibodaux strung along it between Labadieville and Raceland.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Wetlands Acadian Cultural Center — steps away
  A Jean Lafitte National Historical Park center on Bayou Lafourche with Acadian and bayou-life exhibits, a 200-seat theater and ranger-guided boat tours to the E. D. White house.
• Laurel Valley Village — 2.3 mi
  A sugar plantation's workers' village south of Thibodaux, with cabins of about 1845, shotgun houses, a store and cemetery, and the 1887 strike and massacre in the parish around it.
• E. D. White Historic Site — 5.6 mi
  A National Historic Landmark house of about 1790 on Bayou Lafourche, built by enslaved people and home to two Whites, a governor and a Chief Justice, with an exhibit on the bayou's history.
• Southdown Plantation and Terrebonne Museum — 15 mi
  A Greek Revival sugar plantation house in Houma, worked by 233 enslaved people by 1852, with the last Terrebonne mill's story and a worker's cabin of about 1885.

More markers nearby

• Leonidas Polk — steps away
• St. Joseph Co-Cathedral — 0.3 mi
• Rienzi Plantation House — 0.7 mi
• Moses, Allen Chapel, Calvary Cemeteries — 0.8 mi