down the longest street in the world
Bayou Lafourche was once a mouth of the Mississippi, and the unbroken 100-mile ribbon of settlement down both banks earned it the nickname the longest street in the world. LA 1 and LA 308 run it as a pair, one on each bank, through sugar country and shrimp country to Leeville's sinking tombs and Grand Isle, Louisiana's only inhabited barrier island. This is the road to watch the coast disappearing in real time.
📍 Bayou Lafourche corridor markers run both banks; land-loss interpretation thickens below Golden Meadow.
Down from the river through cane fields and the bayou's old plantation towns, Madewood gleaming on the 308 bank.
The river parishes' Black history told at the bayou's head: free towns, root doctors, and the country's first Black mayor elected here in 1868.
An 1846 Greek Revival pile on the LA 308 bank, one of the bayou's grandest survivors.
The Creole cottage of a chief justice, interpreting the whole bayou's story, including the 1887 Thibodaux massacre of striking cane workers.
Lockport, Larose, Cut Off, Galliano: one continuous waterfront town where shrimp boats park like pickups.
Trawlers tied up along the highway shoulder; the blessing of the fleet still opens shrimp season here.
Leeville's cemetery in the marsh, the elevated toll road over open water, and the island at the end of everything.
Tombs subsiding into open water where a farming town stood a century ago. Coastal land loss, made unmistakably literal.
The state's only inhabited barrier island: birding fallouts in April, the Tarpon Rodeo in July, houses on ever-taller stilts.
More in the Gulf Coast: US 90: The Creole Coast · The Forgotten Coast · Bayou Teche & the Cajun Prairie · River Road & the Felicianas · US 90: The Florida Backbone · US 90: Rice & Rails · Cane River & El Camino Real · Poverty Point & the Delta Parishes