The Great River Road in Louisiana: New Orleans to Baton Rouge
About 121 miles of the Louisiana Great River Road, from Congo Square past Destrehan and Whitney to Baton Rouge and the LSU Rural Life Museum.
The Route at a Glance
Louisiana's Great River Road was named an All-American Road in 2021, the second in the state after the Creole Nature Trail. The River Road itself runs about 70 miles between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, on both banks of the Mississippi, and this drive is longer because it follows both. It takes 121 miles, a little over three hours without stops, from Congo Square upriver to the LSU Rural Life Museum: US-90 and LA-48 on the east bank, the Hale Boggs Bridge (I-310), LA-18 and LA-1 on the west bank, and the I-10 bridge into Baton Rouge. New Orleans & the River Parishes and Baton Rouge, the Northshore & Plantation Country cover the country. This is the plantation road told from the quarters.
Congo Square starts it because the plantation economy is why the square exists. In 1724 the Code Noir made Sunday a day of rest for everyone in the colony, enslaved Africans included, and a city ordinance of 1817 limited assemblies of enslaved people for dancing to this one site. The same ground was used for slave sales and public executions. The city renamed it Beauregard Square in 1893 for a Confederate general, and the City Council made the name Congo Square official in 2011.
On LA-48, Destrehan Plantation holds the court record of the 1811 German Coast uprising. Enslaved people rose on the evening of January 8 at Manuel Andry's plantation upriver. A tribunal of five slaveholders met at Destrehan, and of 21 captured people tried there, 18 were executed by firing squad. Charles Deslondes, named as the revolt's leader, was seized from custody and killed without a trial, and white residents put heads on poles along the levee for more than thirty miles. Across the river on LA-18, Whitney Plantation is a museum about slavery that names its people. Anna was bought at a New Orleans auction house, and in 1835 Antoine Haydel, whose sister later owned the plantation, sexually assaulted her; her son Victor lived and worked at Whitney for most of his life. The granite walls of the Gwendolyn Midlo Hall Allées record the names of 107,000 people enslaved in Louisiana before 1820, and the Field of Angels remembers 2,200 enslaved children who died in St. John the Baptist Parish between 1823 and 1863.
Whitney's neighbors are industrial. The stretch between New Orleans and Baton Rouge is the part of the state called Cancer Alley, where many plants moved in during the 1950s to small, mostly Black communities, often on former plantation sites; Wallace, where Whitney stands, was 93.7 percent Black in 2000. The EPA reported in 2016 and 2020 that residents face more than ten times the health risk from hazardous air pollutants of other Louisiana residents, and the Louisiana Chemical Association disputes the cancer-risk claims made for the area.
LA-1 and the I-10 bridge bring the road into Baton Rouge. The Old State Capitol opened on January 28, 1850, and Union troops occupied it on December 28, 1862, when a cooking fire destroyed the interior. The Capitol Park Museum puts the slave market, resistance and Jim Crow in its permanent exhibits, along with the Baton Rouge bus boycott of 1953, which Eight Days in Baton Rouge tells. At the Louisiana State Capitol, Dr. Carl Weiss shot Huey Long on September 8, 1935, and Long died two days later. The drive ends at the LSU Rural Life Museum, where four slave cabins from Welham Plantation in St. James Parish, dating from the 1830s, stand in a row with an overseer's house and a commissary.
The Drive, Stop by Stop
7 stops along the route, in driving order from Congo Square, New Orleans, Louisiana to LSU Rural Life Museum, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
That's the drive. Take your time, pull over often, and let The Great River Road in Louisiana: New Orleans to Baton Rouge do what it does best.
← Explore more of Open Road Guide