Henderson, Gateway to the Atchafalaya
Near Lafayette, Louisiana
Henderson is a town born from flood and levee. The Great Flood of nineteen twenty-seven inundated the communities that once lived inside the Atchafalaya Basin, and the families who survived it rebuilt along the new government levee rather than go back into the swamp. That cluster of homes became Henderson.
The basin behind it is the largest river-swamp in the United States: roughly a million acres of cypress trees, floating prairies, and backwater lakes that stretch about twenty miles wide across south Louisiana. The Atchafalaya River has carried Mississippi overflow for centuries, and the Acadian settlers who arrived after seventeen sixty-four learned to fish, trap, and crawfish these waters. Today Henderson is the main launch point for swamp tours into what remains of that ancient, shifting world.
