Washington

By one account Washington was the largest inland port between New Orleans and St. Louis for much of the 1800s, once a turning basin let steamboats reverse here in 1848. In the Civil War Union troops under Nathaniel Banks occupied it, when it was larger than Opelousas, and carried off supplies valued at $10 million or more. The railroad and the end of steamboating thinned the town, but about 200 buildings, roughly 80 percent of it, were listed as the Washington Historic District in 1978, which is why the streets still look like a river port.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Le Vieux Village and the Venus House — 5.9 mi
  A heritage park in Opelousas built around the Venus House of about 1791, the home of a free Creole woman of color, Marie Francois Venus, with an old schoolhouse, Methodist church and the visitor center's zydeco music exhibit.
• Prairie Acadian Cultural Center — 24 mi
  A National Park Service center in Eunice on the Cajun prairie, with exhibits on the Acadians who settled the prairies, a Courir de Mardi Gras display, free music and cooking demonstrations, and the shuttered Liberty Theatre nearby.
• Atchafalaya Welcome Center — 27 mi
  A state welcome center inside the Atchafalaya Basin, the nation's largest river swamp, with exhibits on Basin history and life, a film, a crawfishing boat and French-speaking staff.
• Louisiana State Penitentiary Museum — 36 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.

More markers nearby

• Bayou Courtableau — steps away
• Washington Museum — steps away
• Leon Wolff Mercantile — steps away
• Steamboat Warehouse — steps away