Historical Marker
Manila Village
Jean Lafitte, Jefferson County · Louisiana
The money in Manila Village was in dried shrimp. Crews seined the catch, boiled it in brine, spread it on a drying platform about the size of a football field and trampled it to crack off the shells, a job called dancing the shrimp. Most of the product went to China or to Chinese markets in the United States. Families lived in cottages around the platform, and a general store took the company's own coins. More than a hundred platform camps worked Barataria Bay. The trade peaked in the 1930s, then lost out to refrigeration and canning.
Where it stands
29.73487, -90.12592 · Directions
Worth the stop nearby
- Barataria Preserve — 3.4 miA Jean Lafitte National Historical Park unit of bayou, swamp and marsh on the site of a Chitimacha and Houma shell-mound landscape, with the visitor center and most trails closed for about two years of repairs.
- Lafayette Cemetery No. 1 — 14 miThe Garden District's 1833 cemetery of about 1,100 family tombs, closed to visitors in 2019 and reopened on October 1, 2026 for small guided tours run by the Preservation Resource Center.
- New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park — 16 miA National Park Service unit created in 1994 to tell where jazz came from, with free programs and a visitor center in the French Quarter and park land inside Louis Armstrong Park.
- The Historic New Orleans Collection — 16 miA 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.