History

Metairie Bayou

The East Bank of Jefferson Parish is the most populated suburb in Louisiana. Looking at the bustling development that now lies between the Mississippi and Lake Ponchartrain, one might find it easy to forget that this area was a wilderness in the not so distant past. One of the dominant features which European settlers found here was a sluggish bayou, which they subsequently leveed off from the river to create a more usable habitat.

What is a Bayou?

The Mississippi River begins as an outflow of Lake Itasca in Minnisota. Over its 2,348 mile course to the Gulf of Mexico, the river is fed by many tributaries and picks up countless tons of sand, silt and loam. As the river approaches the Gulf of Mexico it widens and its waters slow. The slower moving water deposits its burden as sediment, building land and sometimes altering the course of the river. The entire area we now know as Jefferson Parish was in this way built up from the Gulf of Mexico by the Mississippi. Hodding Carter wrote the following lines in Man and the River, The Mississippi.

Vital is the river, known to the Indians as the Father of Waters. Strong is the Mississippi, likened to an army intent on invasion of the land. But a landbearer is the Mississippi, in a guise often forgot...

As it moved to meet the Gulf, the Mississippi from time to time split off into distributaries. A bayou is a broad, generally slow moving distributary. As time passed and sedimentation continued to change the topography of the land, the river would bypass some of its distributaries. Once bypassed altogether, a distributary no longer flows and becomes known as an oxbow lake. Some people think of a bayou as a still body of water, but by definition a bayou must have a current.

Bayou Metairie

Bayou Metairie was created around 2500 B.C. when the Mississippi crossed its banks between what is now Kenner and Little Farms and flowed into the low land between the river and Lake Ponchartrain. This flow created a distributary that European settlers named Bayou Metairie. Silt from the encroaching river built up a ridge on both sides of this distributary. Adjacent areas of swamp and marsh between Bayou Metairie and Lake Pochartrain also recieved sediment.

The ridges formed by the bayou were significant in the later utilization of the land by both native Americans and European settlers. These natural levees began at what is now the outskirts of Kenner, and continued until they reached Chef Mentuer Pass. In the vicinity of Kenner these ridges were about a mile wide and seven feet high. They narrowed and finally disappeared as they approached the the Chef Mentuer. The Europeans referred to the rise around Metairie Bayou as Metairie Ridge. In days gone by, Metairie Ridge was covered with magnificent oak trees and towering magnolias. The ridge was bordered on either side by a swamp of cypress, tupelo and palmetto.

Not long after their arrival, European settlers leveed off Bayou Metairie from the river and reclaimed the area between the Mississippi and Lake Ponchartain. They harvested and cleared the oak and magolia forests on Metairie Ridge. Lumber provided an important part of the local economy during early colonial days. Unfortunately, lumbering entirely decimated the population of primeival trees which early writers of the period described as magnificent.

The East Bank today bears little likeness to its wild past. If you'd like an idea of what our area was like before Europeans arrived, a reasonable approximation might be the watery lands that can be viewed from I-10 heading west from Jefferson Parish.

References

Bezou, Henry C. Metarie, A Tongue of Land to Pasture. Pelican Publishing Co.,
Gretna, 1979.

Carter, Hodding. Man and the River, the Mississippi. Rand McNally and Co.,
Chicago-New York-San Fransisco, 1970.

Swanson, Betsy. Historic Jefferson Parish, From Shore to Shore. Pelican Publishing Co.,
Gretna 1975

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