Vacherie

Laura Plantation, which fronts this stretch of River Road, kept enslaved families on the land until the Civil War. By then 186 people worked it, living in about 69 cabins, and field workers stayed in the quarters until 1977. Freedpeople told their children Compair Lapin, the rabbit trickster, and Compair Bouki, the fool, in Louisiana Creole, versions of tales that came from Senegal. The folklorist Alcée Fortier collected them in the 1870s and published them in 1894. Joel Chandler Harris later made similar stories famous in English as Br'er Rabbit.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Whitney Plantation — 4.9 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.
• Laurel Valley Village — 16 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.
• Wetlands Acadian Cultural Center — 16 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.
• E. D. White Historic Site — 17 mi
  A National Historic Landmark house of about 1790 on Bayou Lafourche, built by enslaved people and home to two Whites, a governor and a Chief Justice, with an exhibit on the bayou's history.

More markers nearby

• Colonel Leopold L. Armant Historical Marker — 0.7 mi
• Bourgeois Homeplace / Site Familial des Bourgeois — 1.3 mi
• "Le Petit Versailles" Historical Marker — 1.8 mi
• James Mather — 2.6 mi