White Alder Memorial Light

The White Alder, a Coast Guard buoy tender, had 20 aboard when the 455-foot Taiwanese freighter Helena struck it at about 6:29 p.m. on December 7, 1968, near mile 195 above Head of Passes. Three men lived and 17 died. The cutter sank in 75 feet of water, and river sediment buried it so fast that recovery was judged impractical. Three bodies were recovered, and the Coast Guard left the wreck with 14 crewmen inside. A memorial was dedicated at the New Orleans base on December 7, 1969.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• LSU Rural Life Museum — 15 mi
  Four slave cabins moved from Welham Plantation and a working-plantation row of more than twenty saved buildings, on land the Burden family held as Windrush plantation since the 1830s.
• Old State Capitol — 17 mi
  James Dakin's 1850 Gothic castle on the river bluff, gutted in the Civil War, nearly demolished in 1991 and reopened in 1994 as a free museum of political history.
• Capitol Park Museum — 18 mi
  The Louisiana State Museum in Baton Rouge: a shrimp trawler and a Civil War submarine, galleries on the slave market, resistance and Jim Crow, and the music from Armstrong to Chenier.
• Louisiana State Capitol — 18 mi
  A 450-foot Art Deco tower Huey Long pushed through in 1930, finished in 14 months, and the hallway where he was shot in 1935; free to enter and ringed by 27 acres of grounds.

More markers nearby

• Bayou Goula — 1.0 mi
• St. John Baptist Church — 1.6 mi
• Staff Housing, U.S. Public Health Service Hospital, Carville — 2.5 mi
• Triumph At Carville: A Tale of Leprosy in America — 2.6 mi