Old River

In the decades after Captain Henry Shreve's 1831 cut at Turnbull's Bend, the Lower Old River flowed more and more west into the Atchafalaya, and by 1880 it rarely flowed east. Between 1850 and 1950 the Atchafalaya's share of the combined flow rose from under 10 percent to about 30 percent. In 1953 the Army Corps of Engineers concluded that, left alone, the Mississippi could switch to the Atchafalaya by about 1990. The cities and industry of the lower river depended on its staying put. The Corps' answer stands to the south.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Louisiana State Penitentiary Museum — 7.2 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 — 22 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 — 24 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.

More markers nearby

• Three Rivers Confluence — 4.9 mi
• Old River — 6.4 mi
• Buddy Guy — 9.3 mi
• Birthplace of Buddy Guy — 11 mi