Center for Traditional Louisiana Boat Building Is Getting a New Home
Center for Traditional Louisiana Boat Building Is Getting a New Home
Thibodaux, Louisiana (May 12, 2025) – This past Saturday, a friendly flotilla of various Cajun-style boats traveled up Bayou Lafourche, the body of water that runs through almost the entirety of Lafourche Parish, Louisiana, and that serves as a true lifeline for the community. Along the 20-mile route, locals and visitors came out to cheer on the vessels, which were making the journey to launch a fundraising campaign aimed at building a new home of the Center for Traditional Louisiana Boat Building. The facility is moving from its museum headquarters in Lockport (located “down the Bayou”) to the campus of Nicholls State University in Thibodaux (“up the Bayou”).
This part of southeastern Louisiana, affectionately nicknamed “Louisiana’s Cajun Bayou,” offers visitors an authentic glimpse into the Cajun culture for which the state is so famous. Here, residents have lived, worked and played on the bayou for generations. For many, their boat was more important than their car or even their house.
The Center for Traditional Louisiana Boat Building honors the region’s rich tradition of building hand-crafted boats that are as functional as they are beautiful. It opened in 1979, when a pair of residents wanted to find a way to preserve this unique aspect of Cajun culture. After settling in Louisiana in the 1700s, transplanted Acadians (“Cajuns”) made the bayous of Louisiana their super-highways, using them for transportation and commerce. They also used them as their personal pantries, as they fished, hunted and trapped all along the waterways. They needed specialized boats for all those things.
The event at Nicholls this past weekend served as a homecoming of sorts, because the center began on the university’s campus 46 years ago and existed in a maintenance barn there until 2007. Talented boat builders came from far and wide to hand-craft skiffs, luggers and pirogues, a special canoe-like vessel that’s synonymous with life on Bayou Lafourche.
In 2007, the center moved to Lockport to occupy a former car dealership. That facility offered plenty of room for the museum to expand its collection, and people donated boats, tools and a variety of Cajun artifacts. The center also grew its public programs. In Lockport, visitors had hands-on opportunities to learn the art and science of crafting boats as they did their part to preserve the traditions and culture of Louisiana’s Cajun Bayou.
In 2021, damage from Hurricane Ida forced the Lockport facility to close its doors, and the center has been searching for a new permanent home since.
The board members of the Center for Traditional Louisiana Boat Building are now working with the administration of Nicholls to build a new state-of-the-art facility at the university, right beside Bayou Lafourche. In the future, visitors will be able to learn more about Cajun boat-building through a museum, plus they can make use of a rental facility that will allow them to take a handcrafted boat onto Bayou Lafourche so they can appreciate the beauty of the region from the same vantage point of Cajun ancestors. Perhaps best of all, a fully operational workshop will teach the hands-on skills and techniques that have been passed down by generations of Cajun craftsmen, providing them with an “only-on-the-Bayou” experience of creating their very own boat.
Updates about the center and its programs will follow. Tax-deductible donations to the fundraising effort can be made by visiting www.traditionallouisianaboatbuilding.org.