In Louisiana, the coast and the river basins are hard to reach and hard to tolerate. There are very few miles of beachfront. Most of the rivers are in swampy bottomlands. The marshes, swamps, mosquitoes, snakes, hurricanes, floods, and other, milder forms of amusement have shaped the structures as surely as the elements have shaped the ice fishing huts. This article is about swamp camps, distinguished from the marsh or beachfront camp. These camps are all on the Atchafalaya River, shown in the Google Map below.
Allons au Camp!
vernacular | louisiana swamp camps by david courville
fishing building bayous invention bon temps
fishing the atchafalaya
Here in Louisiana, Spring happens early and quickly. By the beginning of April, the fig trees are leafed out, the peach and pear trees have set fruit, wild berries are ripe, irises are in full bloom, crawfish are cheap and we’re waiting for the flood, the annual flood of the Mississippi River. What we’re really waiting for is the flood’s recession…and the start of Camp season. 8,277 square miles of Louisiana are covered by water. There are 4000 miles of navigable waterway, 7,721 miles of tidal shoreline, 6000 square miles of marsh and a whole lot of swamp in Louisiana. There’s a lot of water here, but it’s not as accessible as you’d think it is. Once you’ve gotten to a place where you want to be in the marshes or the swamps, you can spend only a few hours there before you need to leave. There are 1800 square miles of swamp in the Atchafalaya River
Basin alone, the largest swamp in the United States, where most of the photos in this article were taken. The buildings in the photographs are called Camps. They are the solution to being able to spend longer periods of time on the water. Before the Basin was leveed after the 1927 Mississippi flood, there were communities in it occupied with logging, fishing, crawfishing, moss-gathering, trapping, frogging, crabbing, etc. If there were camps then, they were more than likely work camps. Leveeing raised the flood levels of the Basin to a point where the communities were flooded on a regular basis and the residents moved outside the levees. About that same time, the outboard motor became commonplace, World War II moved a lot of people from the farms into towns and the Basin, now more accessible, was the target of newfound leisure time.
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weather matters: On Site review 21
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