Former Site of Melancon's Cafe

The diner scene in Easy Rider was shot in Morganza in 1968, with Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper and Jack Nicholson at the table and local residents filling the other seats. The Louisiana work also took in Mardi Gras in New Orleans, filmed on 16mm. The picture cost roughly $360,000 to $400,000 to shoot, opened in July 1969 and grossed about $60 million worldwide. The film earned Oscar nominations for Nicholson as supporting actor and for its original screenplay. The roadside shooting that ends the film was staged near Krotz Springs, not here.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Rosedown Plantation State Historic Site — 14 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.
• Louisiana State Penitentiary Museum — 15 mi
  The Angola museum outside the penitentiary gate, opened in 1997 on the history of crime and punishment in Louisiana, on ground where convicts were leased out as what 64 Parishes calls legal slave labor.
• Audubon State Historic Site — 17 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.
• Port Hudson State Historic Site — 19 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.

More markers nearby

• Battle of Bayou Fordoche — 4.7 mi
• Mississippi River — 5.2 mi
• John Archer Lejeune — 5.9 mi
• Old Hickory — 6.0 mi