Louisiana’s coastal region, commonly known as the bayou, presents a landscape of swamps, marshes, and slow-moving water. Beneath this familiar scenery, however, are a series of lesser-known stories involving engineering projects, ecological changes, and historical events that have shaped the area.
A sinkhole opened near Bayou Corne in Assumption Parish in August 2012, swallowing about two acres of ground. The cause was traced to a salt dome cavern mined more than 3,000 feet below the surface, which had been excavated closer to the edge of the formation than anticipated. Governor Bobby Jindal ordered an evacuation that day, moving roughly 350 residents from the area. The hole has since expanded to cover nearly 37 acres, and the site now appears as a lake alongside Highway 70.
The region is also home to the Live Oak Society, an organization founded in 1934 whose members are trees rather than people. To qualify, a live oak must have a trunk girth of at least eight feet. The society’s membership now numbers more than 10,000 trees across 15 states, with the founder’s role as the only human member.
In eastern New Orleans, the NASA facility at Michoud has played a significant role in American spaceflight. During the Apollo program, workers there built the first stages of the Saturn 1B and Saturn V rockets. The facility’s main building covers 43 acres under one roof, a space large enough to contain more than 30 football fields. The plant never closed and continues to produce flight hardware.
Louisiana’s state flag features a brown pelican, an emblem that was once a symbol of a bird no longer present in the state. By 1962, pesticide use had reduced the state’s pelican population to just six individuals. The species was declared locally extinct the following year. A restocking effort rebuilt the population over decades, and the brown pelican was removed from the federal endangered species list in 2009.
A bricklayer named Kenny Hill spent twelve years from 1988 to 2000 creating approximately 100 cement statues on a property at Chauvin on Bayou Petit Caillou. The site features a 45-foot lighthouse built from 7,000 bricks, surrounded by figures including cowboys, soldiers, angels, and Hill himself. He abandoned the site in 2000, and accounts differ on whether he left because of unpaid rent or an eviction over uncut grass. The lighthouse remains standing today.
The pumps that keep New Orleans dry were invented in the city. In 1913, Baldwin Wood applied for a patent on the Wood screw drainage pump, designed to handle the challenges of pumping water from a city that sits below the level of surrounding water. After successful use in New Orleans, similar pumps were built for use in the Netherlands, China, and India.
For most of the 20th century, Louisiana led the nation in wild fur production. From the early 1900s through the 1980s, the coastal marsh supported a cash trade in muskrat and other furs. The market grew with the popularity of knee-length muskrat coats in the 1920s, supporting trapping camps and fur buyers across the wetland.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has repeatedly built an underwater barrier in the Mississippi River south of New Orleans. During drought conditions, dense salt water from the Gulf of Mexico moves upriver along the riverbed beneath the fresh water flowing downstream. This salt wedge can reach drinking water intakes. The Corps has built a sill of dredged material across the channel in various years, most recently raising its height in 2023 when saltwater went over the top of an earlier structure.
On Avery Island, the hot peppers used in a globally distributed hot sauce are graded by hand. Pickers compare the color of each pepper to a small wooden dowel painted the preferred shade of red. The sauce is sold in more than 160 countries and territories, yet the standard for which peppers make it into the bottle is still a painted stick carried through the fields.
White Lake in Vermilion Parish was the site where Louisiana’s last wild whooping crane was captured in March 1950. The bird, called Mack, was transported to a refuge in Texas, ending the state’s resident population. In 2011, captive-bred juveniles were released at the same lake, and a wild chick hatched there later, the first born in Louisiana in 75 years.
The Mississippi River Chenier Plain runs along the coast from the Texas line to southwest Louisiana. The oak-lined ridges visible in the marsh are actually ancient beaches, built at the water’s edge and left inland as the delta shifted. The highest ground in the plain rises to just under 20 feet.
Spanish moss, the gray plant hanging from live oaks across the region, is often blamed for killing trees. It is actually a flowering plant in the bromeliad family, related to the pineapple. It grows perched on branches, drawing water and nutrients from the air and rain, and takes nothing from the tree itself. The plant was once harvested, cured, and used as upholstery filler in furniture, car seats, and even horse collars.
The Plaquemine Lock, completed in 1909 in Iberville Parish, once held the record for the highest freshwater lift of any lock in the world, at 51 feet. The lock connected the Mississippi River to Bayou Plaquemine, lifting boats the height of a five-story building. It closed in 1961 after 52 years of service. George W. Goethals, credited on the work, later chaired the commission that built the Panama Canal.
Behind the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans lies a triangle of shallow water dotted with the stumps of dead cypress trees. The area was once a freshwater swamp, but saltwater entered after a massive shipping channel was built through the wetlands in the 1960s. The trees died standing, leaving a drowned forest in water shallow enough to walk through.
Avery Island is the exposed top of a salt column that rises from deep underground. The salt deposits in coastal Louisiana sit at depths of at least 35,000 feet in some areas, deeper than Mount Everest is tall. The island is one of five salt domes along the Louisiana coast.
Manila Village, a settlement built on platforms above the water in Barataria Bay, was established by Filipino immigrants in the 1880s. The village produced dried shrimp, with workers removing shells by walking over the shrimp in a shuffling circular pattern known as the shrimp dance. Hurricane Betsy destroyed the village in 1965, and the site is now almost entirely submerged.
Black bears live in the Atchafalaya River Basin across several parishes. The Louisiana black bear was granted threatened status in 1992, with habitat loss cited as the primary threat. At the low point, only three known breeding subpopulations survived. The population has since recovered to an estimated 500 to 750 bears, and the species was delisted in 2016. Some of the basin’s bears descend from animals captured in Minnesota and released in Louisiana between 1964 and 1967.
In November 1980, a drilling crew working from a floating platform above a salt mine at Lake Peigneur pierced the mine ceiling. The lake drained into the mine, creating a crater that sucked down barges and rigs. The Delcambre Canal, which drains the lake south, reversed course as water rushed into the hole. The crew abandoned the platform before the collapse.
The Chicot Aquifer, which sits beneath the rice-growing region of southwestern Louisiana, is being pumped heavily. Rice irrigation alone drew about 440 million gallons a day in 2020, and total withdrawals from the aquifer reached about 960 million gallons a day, more than half of all groundwater pumped in the state. Water levels in some areas have declined as much as 100 feet since the early 1900s.
At the Sulfur Mine in Calcasieu Parish, the Frasch process was developed to extract sulfur from deep underground deposits that were impossible to mine conventionally. The method involved pumping superheated water into wells to melt the sulfur, then lifting it to the surface with compressed air. The first commercial success came in 1903, and the technique was later used in Mexico, Poland, and Iraq.
Nutria, introduced to Louisiana through a refuge in Plaquemines Parish, graze on marsh vegetation. Unlike other marsh herbivores, they use their forepaws to excavate roots and tubers, which can reduce below-ground plant biomass and affect the soil-building process in marshes. The effects vary depending on local conditions, including sediment deposition.
The cultivation of oysters on Louisiana’s coast is credited to Luke Jurisich, a Dalmatian immigrant who began actively cultivating oysters in Bayou Cook during the Civil War. His methods gave rise to what is now a multi-million dollar industry. Jurisich came from the village of Duba on the Dalmatian coast, and his family name remains common among Louisiana oystermen.
Peveto Woods, approximately 40 acres in Cameron Parish, serves as a sanctuary for migratory songbirds. As many as 2 million birds pass through the site each year, and scientists from the University of Southern Mississippi have used it for research since 1984.
Hurricane Audrey came ashore on the Cameron Parish coast on June 27, 1957. Forecasters had estimated landfall for the following afternoon, leading many residents to delay evacuation plans. The storm accelerated overnight and struck as a strong Category 3 hurricane. At least 417 people died, and the surge crossed most of Cameron Parish, which had no high ground to reach.
At South Pass at the mouth of the Mississippi River, the channel had silted shut in the late 1800s, with areas as shallow as eight feet. James Buchanan Eads proposed an unconventional solution: narrow the channel with jetties and let the river’s own velocity scour out the bottom. He funded the project himself, with Congress agreeing to reimburse him only if it worked. The jetties were completed in 1879 and maintained a 30-foot channel.
Versailles, a Vietnamese Catholic neighborhood in eastern New Orleans, recovered from Hurricane Katrina faster than the rest of the city. A 2009 study found that the overall return rate for the city was less than 50% one year after the storm, while the Vietnamese community’s return rate was about 50% higher than the citywide rate. Many families in the neighborhood had already fled North Vietnam after partition in 1954, making the flood their second major displacement.
The United Houma Nation claims approximately 17,000 members living along the Terrebonne and Lafourche bayous. Louisiana officially recognized the tribe in 1977, and the tribe submitted a petition for federal acknowledgement in 1985. The 1990 census indicated that a majority of the Houma living in Terrebonne Parish spoke Cajun French as their first language.
Norbert Rillieux, a free man of color born in New Orleans in 1806, developed the multiple-effect evaporator that revolutionized sugar refining. His first installation of the device occurred in 1834, though he did not receive patents until 1843 and 1846. He later returned to France, where he took up Egyptology and studied hieroglyphics until his death in 1894.
A hurricane struck the Louisiana coast on August 10, 1856, destroying a resort on Isle Dernière, a barrier island off the Terrebonne Parish coast. Of the 401 people at the resort, at least 198 were killed in the storm. The island, once a single landmass, was cut into a line of smaller islands that remain today.
The Chitimacha language lost its last fluent speakers in the 1930s and 1940s. Before the language disappeared, the linguist Morris Swadesh recorded conversations with the last two fluent speakers, Chief Benjamin Paul and Mrs. Deline Darden Stouff. The recordings, originally made on 22 wax cylinders, were later transferred to two reels of tape held by the American Philosophical Society.
A fire in the Belle Isle Salt Mine near Franklin in St. Mary Parish killed all 21 men underground in March 1968. The deaths were attributed to carbon monoxide poisoning, with one miner dying from blunt force trauma. It remains one of the worst mine disasters in federal records. An explosion at the same mine in 1979 killed five more men.
An uprising of enslaved people began in January 1811 on a plantation in St. John the Baptist Parish and moved downriver into St. Charles Parish. Eyewitness estimates of the number of rebels ranged from 150 to 500. After the uprising was suppressed, white residents placed the heads of executed rebels on poles along the river road as a deterrent. The event is known as the German Coast Uprising.
Bayou Lafourche, which leaves the Mississippi River at Donaldsonville, was cut off from its source by a dam completed in 1904. The dam was intended to prevent flooding at Donaldsonville but was never removed. The bayou below the dam has run on a greatly reduced flow for more than a century, and the dam now reads as part of the Mississippi River levee.
The Bohemia Spillway in Plaquemines Parish was created in 1924 when the legislature authorized the Orleans Levee Board to acquire land for a spillway to protect the city of New Orleans upriver. A levee near Bohemia Plantation was intentionally opened, permanently flooding inhabited land. In 1984, the legislature declared the purpose of the land had ceased and ordered it returned to its former owners.
The Wax Lake Outlet, a dredge channel opened in 1941 to reduce flooding in Morgan City, has inadvertently created new land. The delta it feeds has been growing at about 1.2 square kilometers per year since the 1970s. Along with the neighboring Atchafalaya Delta, it adds roughly one square mile of new land annually, making it the one corner of the Louisiana coast that is expanding rather than eroding. The growth rate varies considerably from year to year.
