Town of Bowie

By 1905 Bowie held about 1,250 people, a sawmill cutting roughly 150,000 feet of lumber a day, and a company that ran its own hotel, boarding houses, physician and schools. In 1917 the lumber yard burned. It held about 95 million board feet, and the glow was said to reach twelve miles; a girl on Bayou Boeuf read by it. Losses ran a little over a million dollars, and one person, possibly two, died. A cigarette, a train spark and wartime sabotage were each blamed.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Laurel Valley Village — 11 mi
  A sugar plantation's workers' village south of Thibodaux, with cabins of about 1845, shotgun houses, a store and cemetery, and the 1887 strike and massacre in the parish around it.
• Southdown Plantation and Terrebonne Museum — 13 mi
  A Greek Revival sugar plantation house in Houma, worked by 233 enslaved people by 1852, with the last Terrebonne mill's story and a worker's cabin of about 1885.
• Wetlands Acadian Cultural Center — 14 mi
  A Jean Lafitte National Historical Park center on Bayou Lafourche with Acadian and bayou-life exhibits, a 200-seat theater and ranger-guided boat tours to the E. D. White house.
• Mandalay National Wildlife Refuge — 17 mi
  A 4,212-acre refuge of freshwater marsh and cypress-tupelo swamp southwest of Houma, with a nature trail to a boardwalk and observation deck and mostly boat-only access.

More markers nearby

• St. Mary's Nativity Church — 1.1 mi
• First American Casualty Of WW II — 2.9 mi
• Clotilda Plantation — 6.0 mi
• Lockport — 7.3 mi