Gary J. Hebert Memorial Lockhouse

The lockhouse earned its keep as the pump house. The Plaquemine Lock ran on gravity flow until hydraulic pumps went in during the late 1940s, and the pump house held that machinery. After the lock closed in 1961 the site sat abandoned until a campaign led by Gary Hebert, an Iberville Parish newspaper publisher, saved it. The National Register listed it in 1972. Inside, a museum covers early river traffic, and a working scale model shows how the chamber filled and emptied beside the old 51-foot lift, once the highest freshwater lift of any lock in the world.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• LSU Rural Life Museum — 11 mi
  Four slave cabins moved from Welham Plantation and a working-plantation row of more than twenty saved buildings, on land the Burden family held as Windrush plantation since the 1830s.
• Old State Capitol — 11 mi
  James Dakin's 1850 Gothic castle on the river bluff, gutted in the Civil War, nearly demolished in 1991 and reopened in 1994 as a free museum of political history.
• Capitol Park Museum — 11 mi
  The Louisiana State Museum in Baton Rouge: a shrimp trawler and a Civil War submarine, galleries on the slave market, resistance and Jim Crow, and the music from Armstrong to Chenier.
• Louisiana State Capitol — 12 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

• Bayou Plaquemine (Plaquemine Lock State Historic Site) — steps away
• Old City Hall — steps away
• Bayou Plaquemine — 0.3 mi
• Bayou Plaquemine (Bayou Road) — 2.1 mi