Lake Palourde, just east of Morgan City, covers 11,520 acres and is one of a number of large lakes that once existed within the historic Atchafalaya River Basin's 3-million-acre landscape. The word palourde is French for “clam,” an important food source for early settlers to the area. Construction of the East Atchafalaya Basin Levee in the 1930s cut off Lake Palourde from the Atchafalaya River and the bayous and waterways that remained inside the newly created Atchafalaya Basin Floodway. Severed from the river’s significant flow and sediment deposits, the lake did not fill in with delta landforms like others within the floodway and eventually began suffering from erosion along LA Hwy. 70, where it had been cut off by the levee. To stabilize the shoreline in the early 2000s, fill material was pumped through three miles of temporary pipeline from annual dredging operations in the Atchafalaya River. Today Lake Palourde remains a popular location for fishing and recreational boating, and it connects to Lake Verret and Grassy Lake, two bodies of water also outside the floodway levees, and drains into Avoca Island Cutoff, flowing toward the river and other bayous and lakes to the south; when the Atchafalaya is at flood stage, the lake’s water level is elevated as the river backs up through these connecting waterways. In contrast to Lake Palourde’s open water story, the historical isolated basin community of Bayou Chene, settled in the 1830s about 40 miles north of here on a bayou called chêne, included a church, a school, a merchandise store, and a post office, and by the 1920s approximately 500 people who worked as lumberjacks, fishermen, trappers, moss pickers, and farmers lived there. Occasional flooding threatened Bayou Chene, but the Mississippi River Flood of 1927 destroyed much of the community, and despite efforts to rebuild, construction of Basin levees and dredging of river channels led to repeat flooding that ultimately caused most residents to leave by the 1950s; today the community lies buried under several feet of silt, while former residents and descendants still gather annually for a reunion to reconnect and reminisce.