Before the French had a name for the lake, the Tchefuncte people were already here. From roughly 500 BC, they worked the brackish margin where bayous drain toward what would become Lake Pontchartrain — a 630-square-mile estuary, not quite a lake, formed between 4,000 and 2,600 years ago as the Mississippi Delta built its shores with sediment. What the Tchefuncte left behind was not monumental: shell middens, fired clay, the earliest ceramics documented in coastal Louisiana. The type site that gave their culture its archaeological name sits near Abita Springs. Pottery Hill in Mandeville — named for British-era kilns that came much later — rests on those same Ice Age deposits, one of the oldest continuously inhabited spots on the North Shore. At Fontainebleau, Bernard de Marigny built his sugar plantation in 1829 on ground the Tchefuncte had occupied from 600 BC. The ruins of his mill are still there. So is the ground beneath them.
