LALouisiana Fun Facts

Louisiana runs on a different legal operating system from the other 49 states. Its law descends from Roman and French civil codes instead of English common law, which is why it has parishes rather than counties, forced heirs rather than free disinheritance, and a bar exam that out of state lawyers dread. Almost every oddity people notice about Louisiana traces back to that one split.

Facts most people get wrong

• Cajun and Creole are not the same thing. Cajuns descend from Acadians whom the British expelled from Nova Scotia starting in 1755, and they settled the rural prairies and bayous of the southwest. Creole originally meant born in the colony, and New Orleans Creole culture is urban, with French, Spanish, African and Caribbean roots.
• The French Quarter is architecturally Spanish. Fires in 1788 and 1794 burned most of the original French town. Spain rebuilt it, which is where the courtyards, stucco walls and wrought iron galleries that tourists call French actually come from.
• Spain governed Louisiana for nearly 40 years. France handed the colony over in 1762, took it back in 1800, and sold it to the United States in 1803. Much of the period people picture as French rule was Spanish.
• New Orleans is not entirely below sea level. Roughly half the city sits at or above it, including the French Quarter and the natural levee ridge along the river. The deepest neighborhoods are the drained backswamp developed in the 20th century.
• Mardi Gras did not begin in New Orleans. The first organized American celebration is credited to Mobile, Alabama. Louisiana's contribution was the krewe and the night parade, starting with the Mistick Krewe of Comus in 1857.
• Baton Rouge is the capital, not New Orleans. It has held the job since 1846, apart from a Civil War interruption that moved government back to New Orleans until 1882.

Records and firsts

• Louisiana is the only state divided into parishes, 64 of them, a survival of the Catholic districts that organized the colony under France and Spain before the territory was reorganized in 1807.
• The Lake Pontchartrain Causeway runs 23.83 miles and is recognized as the longest continuous bridge over water in the world. The first span opened in 1956, the second in 1969.
• The Louisiana State Capitol in Baton Rouge stands 450 feet across 34 floors, the tallest state capitol in the country. Huey Long pushed it from groundbreaking to opening in 14 months, finishing in 1932.
• Tabasco has been made from peppers grown on Avery Island since 1868, in the same family for five generations.
• Louisiana produces nearly all of the crawfish farmed in the United States, much of it from ponds that grow rice in the other half of the year.
• The first jazz record was cut in 1917 by the Original Dixieland Jass Band, five white New Orleans musicians recording in a New York studio, years after Black musicians in the city had built the music.
• The state counts about 7,700 miles of tidal shoreline, third among all states behind Alaska and Florida.

Geography that surprises

• The boot has lost its toe. Louisiana has given up roughly 2,000 square miles of coastal land since the 1930s, so the printed outline on classroom maps no longer matches a satellite image.
• The Mississippi would have abandoned its channel decades ago. Since 1963 the Old River Control Structure has forced it to stay put rather than switch to the shorter, steeper Atchafalaya route to the Gulf.
• Driskill Mountain tops out at 535 feet, one of the three lowest state high points in the country, above only Florida and Delaware.
• The Florida Parishes east of the Mississippi were never part of the Louisiana Purchase. They belonged to Spanish West Florida until American settlers seized Baton Rouge in 1810.
• The river loops so tightly through New Orleans that compass directions stop working. Algiers Point, on the West Bank, sits east of the French Quarter, which is why locals navigate by lakeside, riverside, uptown and downtown instead.

Where the name comes from

Rene-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, reached the mouth of the Mississippi in April 1682, claimed the entire drainage basin for France, and named it La Louisiane for Louis XIV. That claim covered roughly a third of the future United States on the strength of one canoe expedition, and the state that kept the name is a small corner of it. Baton Rouge, the capital, is French for red stick, from a boundary marker that Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville recorded in 1699 dividing two tribal hunting grounds. The state nickname comes from the brown pelican on the seal, a bird that was wiped out of Louisiana by pesticides in the 1960s and reintroduced from Florida stock.

Quick stats

• Population: 1 to 5 million
• Area rank: #31 of 50
• Admitted: 1812
• Capital: Baton Rouge
• Largest city: New Orleans
• Time zone: Central

Bordering states

Explore further