Sardine Point / The Cut Off

This point sits beside a key site in Mississippi Valley archaeology. The Medora site gave its name to the Plaquemine culture, whose people built here around 1300 and stayed to about 1600. Louisiana State University and the WPA dug it in the winter of 1939-40 under James Ford and George Quimby, finding a platform mound about 125 feet across and 10 feet high, a second mound worn down to about 2 feet, a plaza roughly 400 by 200 feet, and a stone disc probably used for chunkey. It lies on Medora Plantation, which is private land.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Old State Capitol — 8.2 mi
  James Dakin's 1850 Gothic castle on the river bluff, gutted in the Civil War, nearly demolished in 1991 and reopened in 1994 as a free museum of political history.
• LSU Rural Life Museum — 8.6 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.
• Capitol Park Museum — 8.7 mi
  The Louisiana State Museum in Baton Rouge: a shrimp trawler and a Civil War submarine, galleries on the slave market, resistance and Jim Crow, and the music from Armstrong to Chenier.
• Louisiana State Capitol — 8.9 mi
  A 450-foot Art Deco tower Huey Long pushed through in 1930, finished in 14 months, and the hallway where he was shot in 1935; free to enter and ringed by 27 acres of grounds.

More markers nearby

• Morrisonville — 0.8 mi
• Bayou Plaquemine — 2.8 mi
• Gary J. Hebert Memorial Lockhouse — 2.8 mi
• Bayou Plaquemine (Plaquemine Lock State Historic Site) — 2.8 mi