Lake Peigneur

Most of the accounts stop at the whirlpool, but the lake kept changing. The rig, a tugboat, eleven barges and about 65 acres of Jefferson Island went down, and nine of the barges later floated back up. All 55 miners escaped. Federal investigators could not assign a cause. In 1983 Texaco and a drilling contractor paid the salt company $32 million, and the mine closed in 1986. Since 1994 the dome has stored natural gas, and the once shallow freshwater lake is now brackish and the deepest in Louisiana. The marker stands inside a garden that charges admission.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Jungle Gardens and Avery Island — 5.8 mi
  A 170-acre garden and wildfowl refuge on a Gulf Coast salt dome, founded by Edward Avery McIlhenny, on an island that was a Marsh sugar plantation worked by enslaved people before Tabasco and the 1862 salt works.
• Shadows-on-the-Teche — 9.8 mi
  A National Trust site in New Iberia built 1831 to 1834 for sugar planters David and Mary Weeks, now interpreted around the 1,112 people the Weeks family enslaved, among them Charity Polk, Amos, Patty, Isaac and Louisa.
• St. Martin de Tours Catholic Church — 14 mi
  The Mother Church of the Acadians, founded in 1765 on St. Martin Square in St. Martinville, with a late 1870s Lourdes grotto and, a block away, the Evangeline Oak on Bayou Teche.
• African American Museum, St. Martinville — 14 mi
  A museum in the St. Martinville Cultural Heritage Center on the arrival of Africans in Southwest Louisiana, slavery, the free people of color and Reconstruction, with the fourteen-panel exhibit The Shackles of Memory.

More markers nearby

• Dedicated to the Memory of Joseph Jefferson — steps away
• Bayou Petite Anse — 5.7 mi
• The Cleveland Oak — 5.7 mi
• Avery Island Salt Dome — 5.9 mi