The Steamboat Era

After the Civil War the Teche was choked with wrecks. In 1868 and 1869 Captain E. B. Trinidad mapped the hazards and pressed the state, which set aside $30,000. The Army Corps of Engineers took over in 1870. A lock at Bayou Plaquemine in 1909 shortened the run to New Orleans, Keystone Lock and Dam opened between New Iberia and St. Martinville in 1913, and in 1920 a private company dredged the upper bayou as far as Port Barre. A graveled U.S. 90 reached Teche country in the early 1920s.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Shadows-on-the-Teche — steps away
  A National Trust site in New Iberia built 1831 to 1834 for sugar planters David and Mary Weeks, now interpreted around the 1,112 people the Weeks family enslaved, among them Charity Polk, Amos, Patty, Isaac and Louisa.
• African American Museum, St. Martinville — 8.1 mi
  A museum in the St. Martinville Cultural Heritage Center on the arrival of Africans in Southwest Louisiana, slavery, the free people of color and Reconstruction, with the fourteen-panel exhibit The Shackles of Memory.
• St. Martin de Tours Catholic Church — 8.1 mi
  The Mother Church of the Acadians, founded in 1765 on St. Martin Square in St. Martinville, with a late 1870s Lourdes grotto and, a block away, the Evangeline Oak on Bayou Teche.
• Jungle Gardens and Avery Island — 8.7 mi
  A 170-acre garden and wildfowl refuge on a Gulf Coast salt dome, founded by Edward Avery McIlhenny, on an island that was a Marsh sugar plantation worked by enslaved people before Tabasco and the 1862 salt works.

More markers nearby

• Kathleen Babineaux Blanco — steps away
• Louisiana's First Black Female Physician Dr. Emma Wakefield-Paillet — steps away
• William G. "Bunk" Johnson — steps away
• James Lee Burke — steps away