Louisiana's ghost towns were mostly undone by water. Hurricanes erased whole communities on the coast: storms and the shifting delta wore La Balize, the old French pilot station at the mouth of the Mississippi, down to nothing; the hurricane of 1893 killed 779 people at Cheniere Caminada, a fishing village of 1,500 to 1,600 west of Grand Isle; and the hurricane of September 1915 destroyed Ruddock, on the strip of swamp between Lake Maurepas and Lake Pontchartrain, and Frenier on the Pontchartrain shore to its south. Inland, floods and flood control did the same. Bayou Chene, an Atchafalaya Basin settlement of about 500 people in the 1920s, now lies under some 12 feet of silt, and Elliot City was emptied in 1939 to make way for the Morganza Spillway.
Other towns were cut out or bought out. Sawmill towns in the western pine woods, like Bon Ami near DeRidder, were taken apart when the timber ran out. A refinery bought every property in Good Hope in 1983, Dow Chemical bought out Morrisonville beside its Plaquemine plant around 1990, and in the 1960s the federal government razed Fazendeville, a Black village founded after the Civil War, to enlarge the Chalmette battlefield.
Our index has 31 sites, 12 of them in Pointe Coupee Parish, many of them old river towns or settlements now inside the Morganza floodway. Where anything survives it is usually a cemetery, a marker or a name on the map, and several sites can be reached only by boat.
Abandoned 
