Mile 175.4 RBD — Bayou Lafourche Water Intake

John Ruskey

26 Apr 2026 � 1 min read

Possible alternate route for paddlers to the Gulf of Mexico (110 miles)

Every thousand years or so the Mississippi takes a new route to the Gulf of Mexico. In one of its last generations, this was the main channel of the Mississippi. Today Bayou Lafourche remains as a winding tree-lined waterway that used to be connected to the newest generation of the Mississippi River as a distributary. When the levees were built it became disconnected. A pumping station was built here to keep some water flow (up to 10,000 cfs) in the Bayou Lafourche so that it can still function in the communities it passes through, including Napoleonville and Thibodeaux, and not become silted in.

"The Fork," or Bayou LaFourche, was a narrow outlet of the Mississippi that carried excess flows of the great river to the Gulf in flood times. In high water, the little waterway that meandered for 110 miles before it emptied into the Gulf of Mexico was navigable for steamboats but was a mixed blessing for early settlers in the area. While it was sometimes a useful transportation artery, it also allowed their plantations to be inundated all too frequently. John James Audubon was in the Bayou LaFourche country early in January, 1821. He complained that it "rained and blowed hard," but said he did not let the weather prevent him from taking a long walk to the swamp that lay behind the plantations. He was astonished by the number of birds he saw, and was fascinated by some fields of unpicked cotton. "The white bolls made it look like as if a heavy snow had fell and froze on every pond," Audubon wrote in his Journal. In 1903, local interests built a dam across the mouth of the Bayou LaFourche, to keep it from pouring flood waters down on their fields. It was agreed that the dam would be a temporary one, which was to be removed on or before December 13, 1907. An Act of Congress in 1935 belatedly recognized the fact that the dam was still there, and authorized the permanent closure of Bayou LaFourche. (Braggs)

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