To close or not to close Bayou Plaquemine

For most of the steamboats that visited Bayou Teche before the Civil War, the way to New Orleans was through the town of Plaquemine, where Bayou Plaquemine met the Mississippi River. But until locks were built there in the early 1900s, keeping that route open was a big problem. The rush of Mississippi water ate away at the mouth of the bayou, threatening to undermine buildings on its banks, and allowing more and more debris to be pulled into the waterway and clog it.

As early as 1770, people from St. Martinville and the surrounding area traveled across the Atchafalaya Basin to the junction in Iberville Parish to build and repair rickety structures in an attempt to control the current at the bayou’s mouth. The Mississippi usually made quick work of whatever they tried to build.

The importance of the bayou was underscored in 1819, when a committee made up of citizens from St. Mary, St. Martin, and St. Landry parishes was created to oversee removal of debris from the bayou and of construction of a road of sorts on the bayou’s southern bank so that ox teams could tow steamboats when the current was too strong for their engines.

That helped a little, but only a little. Decades later, the Mississippi was still cutting away the ground at Plaquemine and debris was still regularly blocking the channel. The situation had become so bad, in fact, that some of Iberville Parish leaders wanted to build a dam to close the bayou altogether. And times had changed enough by then that even some of the people in the Teche country agreed with the idea.

As with everything in Louisiana then and now, there were some politics mixed into the issue also.

“It is somewhat strange that nothing definite, reliable, and certain can be concurred in or understood among the many scientific and learned men of which our state can assuredly boast of possessing, relative to the effects that would result from the closing of this ugly and destructive stream,” the editors of the Plaquemine Gazette and Sentinel wrote in February 1860.

Some learned folks argued that closing the mouth of the bayou would be a disaster for communities such as St. Martinville that relied on steamboat trade. But, the editors said, “equally intelligent and truthful gentlemen” had the opposite view.

“Thus the matter stands – in status quo as it were – nobody knowing what to propose, what to advise, or how to act to put a stop to the destruction which it is at this moment producing and still more ruinous consequences which each year threaten while it remains open, its mouth widening, its bed sinking in great holes, to say nothing of the injurious effects to our wealthy and flourishing town.”

The editors seemed to think that closing the bayou would not change anything very much, since at the time they wrote, boats couldn’t get to the Teche anyway because of “the great quantity of drift collected in Bayou Sorrell and Grand Bayou.” That blockage was causing the water to rise in Bayou Plaquemine, threatening to “ruin plantations that produce from 1,000 to 1,200 [hogsheads] of sugar annually.”

There were straightforward arguments for and against spending the money to maintain the bayou, and there were also some political arguments between boat operators and railroad entrepreneurs.

By 1860, rail had been laid from Algiers, across the Mississippi from New Orleans, to Tigerville on Bayou Black in Terrebonne Parish. Steamers met the trains there and were beginning to make good money carrying freight, mail and passengers along a shorter, less dangerous, and less expensive route into the Teche country. Steamers from the Express Mail Line that met the trains at the railhead were doing so well that in 1857, nearly 50 prominent St. Mary Parish planters – a good number of whom had investments in the express line – petitioned the legislature to close Bayou Plaquemine.

They didn’t get their way and then the Civil War soon made maintenance of Bayou Plaquemine and practically all south Louisiana waterways important for military reasons.

The war also destroyed much of the track and many railroad cars, so the bayous remained more important than they might have otherwise until the 1880s, when a railroad finally stretched from one side of the state to the other.

You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jhbradshaw@bellsouth.net or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.