PLAQUEMINE - The crown jewel of Plaquemine is now under construction.

The Friends of the Plaquemine Lock kicked off a $1 million restoration project for the Gary J. Hebert Lock House. The project has been roughly two years in the making.

The refurbishment will include extensive repairs to the air conditioning system, as well as new restrooms and plumbing.

After the project is complete, a new creative and interactive exhibit for visitors and tourists will be up and running.

The Friends of the Lock is a group of community volunteers who helped make restoration possible.

"It's important to us. It's important to me a lot of other people too. To preserve this history in the way that it's been preserved shows how valuable this was for the economy of America, really cause it helped settle the Atchafalaya and the Acadian parts of Louisiana and the western part of the state," former Lock employee James Fry Hymel said.

The lock, a device used for raising and lowering boats between stretches of water of different levels on waterways, was designed by Col. George W. Goethals, who was later the chief engineer of the design and construction of the Panama Canal. At the time of its completion in 1909, it had the highest freshwater lift of any lock in the world at 51 feet.

According to the City of Plaquemine, the lock house is a unique structure in itself, with a Dutch-influenced style that features gleaming white tile and massive circular windows.

It was renamed the Gary J. Hebert Memorial Lock House in honor of the late Plaquemine publisher and editor who fought a four-year battle in the 1970s to save the structure and a portion of Bayou Plaquemine from officials who wanted to demolish the building and fill in the bayou to make way for a four-lane highway. He was responsible for having the area put on the National Register of Historic Places, protecting it from demolition, the city said.