The River at Baton Rouge

The Mississippi River at Baton Rouge is not the river of Mark Twain's boyhood, wide and slow and given to summer reverie. Here the river is working. The navigation channel runs forty-five feet deep, maintained by the Army Corps of Engineers at enormous continuous expense. Ocean-going Panamax cargo ships can make it this far upstream from the Gulf of Mexico, but not much farther. Baton Rouge sits at the effective head of the deepwater port system on the Mississippi, which is one of the reasons a city formed here at all.

The Port of Greater Baton Rouge handles roughly seventy-three million short tons of cargo per year, ranking it among the ten largest ports in the United States by tonnage, despite being hundreds of miles inland. What moves through here is agricultural: grain from the Midwest, sugar from Louisiana's cane fields, soybeans from the upper plains, bound for export. And petroleum products, and coal, and steel pipe, and lumber. The port's jurisdiction covers eighty-five miles of river.

From the bluffs where the Old State Capitol stands, you can watch the river traffic: container ships, grain barges, tankers carrying refined products downstream, empty hopper barges being pushed upstream by towboats. The river runs brown and fast here, carrying sediment from thirty-one states.

The French understood this location. The bluff gave defensive advantage. The river gave access to the continent. Every civilization that has built on this particular bend has understood the same thing: whoever controls this point controls the movement of goods between the Gulf and the interior. Fort, colonial outpost, steamboat city, petrochemical port. The river is the reason for all of it.