Cypress Lake: The Swamp at the Center of Campus

In the geographic center of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette sits a natural cypress swamp that the university has never drained, never filled, and never paved over.

Cypress Lake is a remnant of the wetland ecosystem that covered much of this landscape before the city arrived. The cypress trees stand in the water, their knobbed knees rising from the shallows. Alligators sun themselves on the banks. Native irises bloom in spring. Turtles navigate between the roots. Birds work the surface.

The university was founded in eighteen ninety-eight as the Southwestern Louisiana Industrial Institute, an agricultural and industrial school meant to serve the working people of the region. It went through several name changes before becoming the University of Louisiana at Lafayette in nineteen ninety-nine. It now enrolls more than fifteen thousand students and holds the designation of R-one, meaning very high research activity, placing it among the most productive research universities in the country.

The campus has the swamp anyway. University officials have characterized Cypress Lake as the only natural alligator habitat located at the center of a university campus in the United States. That may be difficult to verify precisely. What is not difficult to verify is that the swamp is there, that the alligators are real, and that students have been known to study near the water on warm afternoons, keeping a respectful distance from the largest residents.

The university built its identity around a landscape it chose not to destroy. The swamp stayed.