Pass Manchac

Linguist John Swanton proposed that Manchac comes from a Choctaw phrase, Imashaka, meaning the rear entrance. The pass joins Lake Maurepas to Lake Pontchartrain, and a lighthouse stood here, one of five on Lake Pontchartrain. Its last tower was finished in 1857, automated in 1941 and abandoned by the Coast Guard in 1987. Hurricane Isaac destroyed it in August 2012, though the lantern room had been taken away for restoration and has been in the Lake Pontchartrain Basin Maritime Museum in Madisonville since 2008. Willie Akers became the settlement's first postmaster in 1875.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Tickfaw State Park — 15 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.
• Fontainebleau State Park — 23 mi
  Lakeshore park on the Northshore where Tchefuncte potters, Acolapissa and Choctaw lived, and where 153 people were enslaved at Marigny's sugar and brick plantation by 1840; the mill ruin still stands.
• Whitney Plantation — 23 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.
• Destrehan Plantation — 24 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

• USS Ponchatoula Memorial — 11 mi
• Ponchatoula Depot — 11 mi
• PFC Raymond "Mike" Clausen, Jr. — 11 mi
• Springfield — 13 mi