Originally the main channel of the Mississippi River, False River is now an oxbow lake, a horseshoe-shaped bend left behind when the Mississippi changed course between 1713 and 1722. This change followed the slow natural process by which meander channels extend away from a river’s primary channel, sediment fills the mouth of the oxbow, and a growing sandbar eventually causes a cutoff that shifts the river into a new, shorter main channel. False River’s main outlet is an artificial drainage channel in Oscar built in 1947 as part of a statewide drainage program. First called the False River-Bayou Grosse Tete Spillway Canal, then the Rougon Canal or Lighthouse Canal, and now the False River Outfall Channel, it connects False River to the shared headwaters of Bayou Grosse Tete and Bayou Cholpe. Most of the water flows into Bayou Cholpe through an area once called Greve's Swamp, eventually reaching the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway west of Brusly, and it also drains False River through the lake’s high natural levee where LA Hwy. 1 is today. Before this channel was built, Bayou Cirier, also known as Bayou Sere and named for the wax myrtle trees early Francophone settlers saw there, was False River’s primary outlet, and now it serves only as a distributary when False River rises to higher stages. The structure that now houses the Pointe Coupée Parish Museum originally belonged to the Olivo family, a French pioneer family that arrived in Pointe Coupée during the French colonial period and began settling on False River during the Spanish colonial period. Built in two main phases, the house first took shape around 1800 in notched-log pièce sur pièce construction typical of French Canada but unique in Louisiana, and later gained a larger boussilage section made of mud and animal hair applied between timbers.