False River

False River is a trophy lake. It runs about 10.5 miles and covers roughly 3,200 acres, and undersized fish must be released. It has often held the state record for largest bass and carries the most striped bass per acre in Louisiana, from more than 265,000 fingerlings stocked between 1974 and 1981. Its only outlet is a three-gate control structure at Lighthouse Canal. In 2016 the water rose to a record 22.5 feet against a normal 16, and boat traffic closes above 18 feet. New Roads sits at the north end and Jarreau at the south.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Port Hudson State Historic Site — 13 mi
  The 48-day siege of 1863 on the Mississippi bluffs, where the Louisiana Native Guards and Captain Andre Cailloux led the first assault; earthworks, a six-mile trail and a museum.
• Rosedown Plantation State Historic Site — 13 mi
  A cotton plantation worked by hundreds of enslaved people, whose names survive in an 1862 succession list; the Turnbull house and gardens, and the quarters nobody has yet found.
• Audubon State Historic Site — 15 mi
  Oakley House, where Audubon taught drawing and painted 32 birds in 1821, and the two cabins behind it where four Black families lived through slavery, Reconstruction and Jim Crow.
• Louisiana State Capitol — 22 mi
  A 450-foot Art Deco tower Huey Long pushed through in 1930, finished in 14 months, and the hallway where he was shot in 1935; free to enter and ringed by 27 acres of grounds.

More markers nearby

• Julien Poydras — 5.0 mi
• Major General Delesseps S. "Chep" Morrisson — 5.1 mi
• Lieutenant General Russel L. Honoré — 5.1 mi
• Lieutenant General John Archer Lejeune — 5.1 mi