Three Rivers Confluence

Where the Red, Old and Atchafalaya rivers meet, the Atchafalaya Basin begins and a floodgate complex stands guard. The Old River Control Structure was finished in 1963 and operating by 1964, with a low sill for routine flow and an overbank structure that works only when the river leaves its banks. The 1973 flood damaged it badly and nearly caused it to fail, so the Corps added an auxiliary structure in 1986, and the Sidney A. Murray Jr. Hydroelectric Station followed in 1990. In high water the marker itself can be under water.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Louisiana State Penitentiary Museum — 4.1 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.
• Tunica-Biloxi Museum — 26 mi
  The Tunica-Biloxi Tribe of Louisiana's own museum at Marksville, built around the Tunica Treasure that the tribe won back in court.

More markers nearby

• Old River — 1.8 mi
• Old River — 4.9 mi
• Buddy Guy — 5.4 mi
• Birthplace of Buddy Guy — 6.3 mi