Maurepas Island

The lake behind the island is a shallow, brackish estuary of about 93 square miles, only some ten feet deep on average and ringed by swamp. The Amite, Tickfaw, Natalbany and Blind rivers feed it, and Pass Manchac links it to Lake Pontchartrain, whose tides matter more to its water level than the rivers do. Both lakes carry the Phélypeaux family's titles, Pontchartrain the father's and Maurepas the son's. The Maurepas Swamp Wildlife Management Area now covers 122,098 acres, built from donations by the Richard King Mellon Foundation.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Tickfaw State Park — 6.2 mi
  A floodplain park on the Tickfaw River, with cypress-tupelo swamp, bottomland hardwoods and about 4.75 miles of trails and boardwalks, plus a nature center with an 800-gallon river aquarium.
• Whitney Plantation — 18 mi
  A museum on a former sugar plantation along the River Road that tells its story through the people who were enslaved there, with memorials to 107,000 enslaved Louisianans and 2,200 children.
• LSU Rural Life Museum — 29 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.
• Destrehan Plantation — 30 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.

More markers nearby

• French Settlement — 8.5 mi
• Carter Plantation — 9.8 mi
• Centerville, Louisiana — 9.9 mi
• Springfield's Role in West Florida Revolution — 11 mi