Great Red River Flood of 1945

Cane River is the old channel of the Red River, which left the town's waterfront in the 1830s. After Captain Henry Shreve and the Corps of Engineers cleared the Great Raft, the river straightened around the bluff at Grand Ecore and ran about a mile east of town. The abandoned channel went dry through much of the year, and around 1916 the town dammed both ends to hold water. Downstream residents protested the loss of the spring outlet. Brick coursing at the site shows how high the backwater climbed in April 1945.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Natchitoches Historic District — 0.6 mi
  The riverfront blocks of the oldest permanent settlement in the Louisiana Purchase, founded in 1714 at a Natchitoches village, with a brick-paved Front Street, Cane River frontage and the largest bousillage construction in the South.
• Fort St. Jean Baptiste State Historic Site — 0.6 mi
  A reconstruction of the 1716 French fort beside the Natchitoches village, with a palisade of nearly 2,000 pine logs, a chapel and storeroom, and living-history programs, open Wednesday to Sunday.
• Cane River Creole National Historical Park — 8.3 mi
  Oakland and Magnolia, two Cane River cotton plantations kept as they stood, told through the enslaved families who worked them, the 1864 and 1804 freedom seekers and the tenant farmers who stayed into the 1960s.
• Los Adaes State Historic Site — 13 mi
  The Spanish presidio that was the capital of Texas from 1729 to 1770, some 15 miles from French Natchitoches, now an archaeological site where Native pottery is the most abundant find.

More markers nearby

• Roque House (circa 1797) — steps away
• The Red River Campaign — steps away
• First Mass in Natchitoches — steps away
• Basilica of the Immaculate Conception — steps away