Mississippi Meanders

Harold N. Fisk's 1944 report, Geological Investigation of the Alluvial Valley of the Lower Mississippi River, was prepared for the Mississippi River Commission. He worked on it for three years, traveling about 650 miles from Wycliffe, Kentucky, to Head of Passes, and drew on his own fieldwork, engineering topographic maps and deep borings from the young oil industry. Colored loops on his maps mark each stage of the river's wandering. They document how the river moves over thousands of years, a counterpoint to the levees the Commission began building in the 1870s.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 — 2.4 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 — 2.4 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 — 2.8 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.
• The Cabildo — 2.8 mi
  The Spanish town hall on Jackson Square, finished in 1799, where Louisiana changed flags in 1803 and where the state Supreme Court sat in the same room until 1910, Plessy v. Ferguson among its cases.

More markers nearby

• Duelling Grounds — steps away
• Allard Plantation — 0.4 mi
• Metairie And Gentilly Ridges — 0.4 mi
• Beatles Only Concert Performance in Louisiana — 0.4 mi