States: Louisiana · Mississippi
Start near: New Orleans (starts here) · Baton Rouge (about 1 h 55 min to New Orleans)
The Mississippi's levee roads to Natchez
River Road & the Felicianas is a ~200-mile back-roads route from New Orleans to Natchez on LA 18, LA 44 and US 61, driven in 1–2 days, that stays off I-10 through the Gulf Coast.
The levee roads between New Orleans and Baton Rouge hold America's hardest history in its grandest architecture — told honestly now at Whitney, from the perspective of the enslaved. The same corridor is petrochemical country today; the contrast is part of the story. North of Baton Rouge the road climbs into the Felicianas — English Louisiana, Audubon's birds, a famously haunted inn — and ends on the bluff at Natchez, where three routes of this atlas tie their knot.
📍 Louisiana's River Road markers line both banks; the Felicianas add a thick layer of their own.
Destrehan to the west-bank plantations: Whitney (essential), Evergreen's double row of cabins, Oak Alley's postcard oaks. This shore also rose in 1811 in the largest slave revolt in American history.
The oldest documented plantation house in the lower Mississippi valley (1787) — and a tribunal site after the 1811 German Coast uprising, when hundreds of enslaved people marched on New Orleans. The history is told straight here now.
The one museum on the river told entirely from the enslaved person's perspective (opened 2014) — memorials, first-person narratives, the Wall of Honor. The essential stop on this road; book the timed tour.
Twenty-two cypress slave cabins in an unbroken double row — the most intact plantation landscape in the South, still a working farm. Tarantino shot Django Unchained here, uneasily.
The quarter-mile allée of 28 live oaks, planted a century before the 1839 house. The postcard of the Old South — read its slavery exhibit so you see the whole picture.
Donaldsonville's proud history, Houmas House's gardens, then Baton Rouge: Twain's despised 'sham castle' capitol and Huey Long's skyscraper one, with his bullet scars in the marble.
In 1868 Pierre Caliste Landry became mayor here — the first Black mayor of any American town. The River Road African American Museum carries the story forward.
The 'Sugar Palace' and its gardens — Bette Davis filmed Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte here. Stay for dinner in the old kitchen if the budget allows.
The crenellated Old Capitol — Mark Twain called it a 'little sham castle' and blamed Sir Walter Scott for the South's worst ideas — and Huey Long's 34-story tower, where the Kingfish was shot in 1935 and lies buried out front under his own statue. Free observation deck.
US 61 climbs into loess hills: Port Hudson's siege lines, St. Francisville's moss-draped lanes, the Myrtles' ghosts, and the last run up to the Natchez bluff.
The longest true siege in American history (48 days, 1863) — and among the first major assaults by Black regiments, the Louisiana Native Guards, whose valor here helped change the Union army.
Promoted as 'one of America's most haunted homes' — the Chloe legend, a mirror that allegedly holds spirits, and a B&B if you're brave. The town around it is the prettiest in Louisiana, ghosts or no.
English Louisiana: Grace Church's mossy churchyard, Rosedown's gardens, and Oakley House, where the young Audubon painted dozens of his birds as a live-in tutor.
At the gate of the prison that occupies a former plantation — unsparing history, and the famous (and controversial) October inmate rodeo. LA 66 dead-ends here: 'the end of the road' in every sense.
Jefferson Davis's boyhood home, kept small and plain — a footnote that explains a lot of what follows upriver.
A 1940 roadside restaurant built as a 28-foot hoop-skirted woman; you eat lunch inside the skirt. A complicated icon — repainted, reconsidered, still serving legendary banana caramel pie.
River Road & the Felicianas is about 200 miles and takes 1–2 days at a back-roads pace.
It runs from New Orleans to Natchez.
It follows LA 18, LA 44 and US 61.
It avoids I-10, using LA 18, LA 44 and US 61 instead.
13 stops are mapped, including Destrehan Plantation, Whitney Plantation, Evergreen Plantation, Oak Alley and Donaldsonville.
The Natchez Trace, End to End (5 days), The Red Dirt Roadhouse Run (6 days), The Deep South Grand Circle (14 days), The Whole Hog (28 days), Memphis to New Orleans on US 61 (4 days) and The Great River Road, Southern Act (6 days).
The atlas’s seasonal note for this route: “Azalea peak is March; the Angola rodeo is October Sundays.”
The Natchez Trace, End to End (5 days) · The Red Dirt Roadhouse Run (6 days) · The Deep South Grand Circle (14 days) · The Whole Hog (28 days) · Memphis to New Orleans on US 61 (4 days) · The Great River Road, Southern Act (6 days)
Connects with: Cane River & El Camino Real · Natchez Trace Parkway · The Blues Highway
More in the Gulf Coast: US 90: The Creole Coast · The Forgotten Coast · Bayou Teche & the Cajun Prairie · US 90: The Florida Backbone · US 90: Rice & Rails · LA 1: End of the Road · Cane River & El Camino Real · Poverty Point & the Delta Parishes · Alabama's Coastal Connection