Pierre Part, a community in south Louisiana along Pierre Part Bay flowing into Lake Verret, sits on land only 3 feet above sea level, is nearly surrounded by water, and was inaccessible by land until the mid-20th century, leaving it isolated from much of the world. In this landscape of bayous and low ground, where the highest nearby land lies along Bayou Lafourche on natural levees 15 to 20 feet above sea level, residents adapted to a semi-aquatic way of life by using pirogues, boats, and eventually bridges, including a pontoon bridge across Belle River about 4.5 miles south that swings to the riverbank to open the channel to boat traffic. The region’s flood control system came to depend on levees built in the 1930s that created the nearby Atchafalaya Floodway, severed bayous, fragmented waterways, and radically changed the area’s interconnectedness and hydrology by cutting local waterways off from seasonal floods of fresh water and nutrients from the Atchafalaya. The area was once heavily forested with old-growth bald cypress groves, and although most of these hundreds-of-years-old trees were harvested from the late 1800s through the early part of the 19th century, the scars of skidder canals cut through the swamps remain from logging operations that used massive winches to pull trees to central loading points. Spanish moss also became an important seasonal industry in the first half of the 20th century, when local people collected it by hand with boats and long hooked poles, cured it for three to six months, and sold it to moss ginning businesses for use in stuffing furniture, mattresses, and other items; much of the early business of the Pierre Part Store, still operating more than 100 years after its founding, was conducted by trading moss for goods. From the 1880s to 1970s, Pierre Part was ravaged by floods, and after one such flood a small undamaged statue of Mary was found in the ruins of Saint Joseph the Worker Catholic Church; to honor the Blessed Virgin Mary, who is believed to protect this community still vulnerable to flooding and storm surge, a statue was placed on nearby Virgin Island and has stood there ever since.