Lake Pontchartrain Basin

Iberville named the lake in 1699 for Louis Phelypeaux, comte de Pontchartrain, who served Louis XIV as Minister of the Marine, Chancellor and Controller-General of Finances; the name comes from the place in France where his chateau stood, near a bridge over the Mauldre. An Indigenous name, Okwata, is glossed as wide water. The lake covers about 630 square miles, roughly 40 miles east to west and 24 north to south. The Causeway across it, built in the 1950s and 1960s, is described as the longest continuous bridge over water.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Destrehan Plantation — 10 mi
  A River Road house begun in 1787 where, in January 1811, a tribunal of five slaveholders tried people who had risen on the German Coast, and where an exhibit now tells the revolt.
• St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 — 12 mi
  New Orleans' oldest surviving city of the dead, opened in 1789 after the fire of 1788 and the burial place of Homer Plessy, reachable only on a guided tour since March 2015.
• Congo Square — 12 mi
  The 2.35-acre corner of Louis Armstrong Park where, from 1817, New Orleans confined Sunday dancing by enslaved people to one place, and where crowds of hundreds gathered to drum, dance and trade.
• The Historic New Orleans Collection — 12 mi
  A French Quarter museum and research center founded in 1966, whose 2015 Purchased Lives exhibition took on New Orleans' place as the largest slave market in antebellum America.

More markers nearby

• Parish of Jefferson — 3.2 mi
• LaFreniere Plantation — 3.4 mi
• Park Site — 3.5 mi
• Cannes Brûlées — 4.8 mi