You are grabbing a snippet in time without context.
Louisiana's Campus Swamp really is a reclaimed Swamp that (pre-university) captured its own water from the surrounding area draining into it. The fact that a university grew up around it is undeniable.
The Swamp was artificially drained in the 1920s and reflooded in the 1940s. The pretext for reflooding the Swamp was the need for a water reservoir during WII. If that was all they needed they could have done this off campus with rice levees.
They flooded the Swamp in the middle of campus because it was a natural basin lower than the surrounding area because historically it had been a natural swamp, and the Cypress Trees were still there to prove it.
The Campus Swamp is a legitimate Swamp.
Anyone calling it a lake has always shown ignorance on the subject, because in the 1940s Swmp was still a four-letter word.![]()
If using an alligator as the UL mascot, it would give a good marketing opportunity to use the UL swamp in promotional videos. It would easily be recognizable as a swamp and referred to as such, no matter what Lafman1 calls it. It would easily carryover to the Cajun field as the swamp. BTW, just a fond memory, I proposed to my wife of 37 years next to the UL swamp one evening. Just so happened 4 fellas was walking by and noticed and started singing a song in four parts. We still talk about that special evening.
Can’t tell you how many times but it seems as though every time our football team plays on one of the main channels they always show the swamp with the gators coming back from a commercial. Wouldn’t it make sense to cut to the alligator mascot after showing the real gators in our swamp? There should be no confusion about this.
In prehistoric times, bison herds wandering through the area stopped in the shade of the cypress grove, pawing and stomping at the ground. Eventually a depression in the ground formed from the bison. The grove, called a trou de taureau in Cajun French, or “bull hole,” began to retain water and form a pond.
UL (est. 1898) grew up around the pond. Initially the university fenced it in to use as a pig pen and feeding area for its instructional farm. In the early 1920s, the pig pen was drained to return the 63 cypress trees into the newly named Cypress Grove. The university used the grove as an open-air theater for Shakespearean productions, music and dance programs. Commencement exercises were held beneath the cypress canopy in 1935 for the first time and several subsequent years when the weather permitted.
In the early 1940s, some agriculture faculty members proposed converting the grove back into a pond, because they were concerned a lack of water could harm the cypress trees. A pump was installed, the pond was refilled, and Cypress Grove became Cypress Lake.
There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)