Mississippi River

The Morganza Control Structure was bought with the 1927 flood. The Flood Control Act of 1928 authorized the floodway, and the structure was finished in 1954. Its 125 gated bays span about 4,000 feet and can send up to 600,000 cubic feet per second into the Atchafalaya Basin. The Corps opened it in 1973 and in May 2011; a 2019 opening was announced, postponed and never carried out. The guide levees protect over 100 square miles of upper Pointe Coupee farmland, and the water goes to the Basin's people, Morgan City among them.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Louisiana State Penitentiary Museum — 11 mi
  The Angola museum outside the penitentiary gate, opened in 1997 on the history of crime and punishment in Louisiana, on ground where convicts were leased out as what 64 Parishes calls legal slave labor.
• Rosedown Plantation State Historic Site — 16 mi
  A cotton plantation worked by hundreds of enslaved people, whose names survive in an 1862 succession list; the Turnbull house and gardens, and the quarters nobody has yet found.
• Audubon State Historic Site — 19 mi
  Oakley House, where Audubon taught drawing and painted 32 birds in 1821, and the two cabins behind it where four Black families lived through slavery, Reconstruction and Jim Crow.
• Port Hudson State Historic Site — 22 mi
  The 48-day siege of 1863 on the Mississippi bluffs, where the Louisiana Native Guards and Captain Andre Cailloux led the first assault; earthworks, a six-mile trail and a museum.

More markers nearby

• Old Hickory — 2.5 mi
• John Archer Lejeune — 2.6 mi
• Former Site of Melancon's Cafe — 5.2 mi
• St. Stephen's Episcopal Church and Cemetery — 6.7 mi