The Great Days of the Garden District
The foregoing is meant to provide a setting for the information to follow. The scene described is not based on an actual occurrence, although it is entirely probable, and factually correct as to dates, places and people except for the Laytons. “Any resemblance is entirely coincidental,” as the usual disclaimer says. The merger of Lafayette City and New Orleans did take place under the circumstances described, although no such public event was recorded in the newspapers. This mise en scène has been contrived merely to serve as a vehicle for revealing the surroundings and events of the period, since the essence, the individuality, the physical characteristics of old Lafayette City are so important to the full understanding and appreciation of the present Garden District and its great houses.
It is equally important to go back one more step to learn how Lafayette City came to be; and it is highly interesting to anyone with the slightest historical inquisitiveness. For the area which was Lafayette City, some four miles removed from what is considered the “historical section” of New Orleans, the Vieux Carré, is still closely interwoven with the original colony’s basic story line.
Louisiana was first seen through European eyes by the Spanish conquistadores of De Soto’s expedition in 1540. The Spanish did nothing to make use of the vast territory they first claimed. Almost 150 years passed before the white man again cast an interested glance in this direction. This was the period of French exploration in the 1650’s, when Canadians began to look south from the Great Lakes and wonder if all were true that the Indians told them about the great river to the south which led to the sea through a land of wealth and plenty. This increased curiosity resulted in the famous La Salle expeditions and the claiming of the entire central area of the United States for France in 1684. Still, no colonial interest was aroused. It took the threat of war and the encroachment of English colonies from the East and Spanish from the West to make the French take Louisiana seriously as a possible source of wealth for the throne.
To secure the colony from attack, forts were built in Canada and on the Great Lakes. The distinguished French-Canadian naval officer, Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville, hero of Hudson’s Bay and other battles with the English, was sent to install a colony on the Gulf Coast and to build bastions to guard the great river.
The first Colony in Louisiana was founded at Ocean Springs, Miss., near Biloxi, in 1699, by Iberville. It wasn’t until 1718 that another Le Moyne, the Sieur de Bienville, succeeded his brother and persuaded the French authorities to move the capital of the colony to a site on the Mississippi River. Not until 1722 did the capital finally move to New Orleans, to the area we now know as the Vieux Carré, the old quarter.
After the founding of the city of La Nouvelle Orléans, a fine example of foresight was shown by Jean Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, governor of the colony. He wisely realized that the land surrounding the young city would become valuable, and according to the custom, he asked for a grant of land from the Company of the Indies, the agency which operated the colony for the King. He asked for “the concession of a tract situated above and at the limits of New Orleans, facing the Mississippi River, and in depth running West quarter North West to the Mississippi, in the bend above the Chapitoulas....” This would include an area roughly from Bienville street in the Vieux Carré, up the river beyond Carrollton to Nine Mile Point, and back from the river to the undrained swamps where Claiborne Avenue is today.
Hardly had he been given possession of his land than Bienville received a further ruling that a governor could not receive concessions of property except for “vegetable gardens”. Bienville, therefore, caused the first section of his land from just above Bienville Street, to the lower limit of what was later Lafayette City to be known as his “vegetable garden”. On the rest he settled German families in small farms or plantations.
Some of these immigrant farmers were successful, but most succumbed to the floods and the fevers. Others departed for healthier sections of Louisiana. In 1728 the ax fell again on Bienville’s right to hold property, and it was not until 1737, according to the best evidence, that he succeeded in having his original claim, or what was left of it, sustained. By that time, many parts of his original plantation had been sold to new owners, some even having been sold by Bienville himself. These tracts became proud plantations with lovely homes fronting the river and extensive indigo, and later, sugar cane, fields running far to the rear.
Five of these baronies were those of d’Hauterive, Broutin, Darby, Carrière, and Livaudais, roughly situated between what was known as Felicity Road and almost to Grand Route Wiltz (Louisiana Avenue).
These five plantations, called Faubourgs by the old French people, gradually became consolidated into three small communities fronting on the river, with residences built on lots into which the earlier farm lands had been divided. The communities were called Nuns, Lafayette and Livaudais. Then in 1833 these three communities joined forces to become the city of Lafayette and were so incorporated by an act of the state legislature.
Eleven years later, Lafayette annexed a small settlement on its upper boundary, the Faubourg de Lassaiz, which extended the city to what is now Toledano Street. Further expansion was blocked still later when the citizens of the next upper community, Faubourg Plaisance, voted very definitely not to unite with Lafayette City.
Although the municipal personality called Lafayette City has disappeared, the way of life it launched within the framework of greater New Orleans will remain as long as there is a New Orleans. There was the gay, industrious, hard-working, but pleasure-loving commercial part of old Lafayette; and the spacious, gracious section of the great homes, the ante-bellum and post-bellum houses of the area known as the Garden District.
Why did the uppermost plantation of those which formed Lafayette City become so desirable as a district of imposing and elaborate residences?
In the year 1816, the river crevassed at the Macarty plantation, several miles upriver from the Livaudais property, and its waters inundated most of the large holdings down to New Orleans. Among them was the great plantation of Jacques François Esnould Dugué de Livaudais, whose father and grandfather had been large landowners.
François de Livaudais had married just about the best catch any man could aspire to: Célèste, the daughter of Philippe de Marigny, the wealthiest man in Louisiana and perhaps one of the wealthiest men in all America. The marriage represented the union of two vast fortunes, and the couple began construction of the castellated, lavish plantation home on their country domain.
Perhaps the floodwaters dampened their ardor for a castle on the Mississippi to rival those of their ancestors in France. Perhaps it was something else. In 1825 the Livaudais were separated. In the settlement, Madame Livaudais received the plantation among other properties and funds. She moved to Paris, where as La Marquise de Livaudais she cut a wide swath, being among King Louis Philippe’s inner circle. Through her New Orleans attorneys she sold her plantation to a group of real estate entrepreneurs for $500,000. They engaged the eminent surveyor, Benjamin Buisson, formerly an engineer of Napoleon’s army, to lay out the plantation into streets and lots.
Thus from just below First Street to just above Ninth Street (now Harmony) and from the river back to St. George Street (now La Salle) this expanse of property, the original Faubourg Livaudais, was divided into squares and placed on the market, with one exception. Madame Livaudais retained the tract with her house on it, including her garden.
This is why the blocks between Washington Avenue and Sixth Street from the river to La Salle Street are wider than the other blocks. They follow the width of Mme. Livaudais’ house and grounds.
The house itself was never completed. For brief periods, members of the Livaudais family appear to have lived in the habitable portions. It was once used as a public ballroom, though which sections of it were adaptable for that purpose have never been specified. Itinerant wayfarers settled within its shambles as years passed. In 1861 it was briefly converted into a plaster factory when that commodity became scarce because of the Federal blockade. Two destitute, frail old crones next made it their home. These female hermits, it was said, refused all offerings of food or money. Little wonder that the ruin became “The Haunted House of Lafayette”, until it was finally torn down in 1863.
The Livaudais plantation became a valuable part of Lafayette City at its incorporation with the Faubourgs of Nuns and Lafayette in 1833. It supplied, besides more river frontage, fine residential sites, covered with the rich silt from the Macarty crevasse. It would indeed grow anything, but particularly, flowers in profusion.
The fragrance and the variety of floral abundance evoked the paeans of poet and author. It was natural that some of the wealthy “American” families and later even a few Creoles should seek these new sites for their great homes. An omnibus from New Orleans ran regularly out Tchoupitoulas. The New Orleans and Carrollton Railroad, chartered by the same session of the legislature which incorporated Lafayette, began regular service from the heart of the growing business and financial section in New Orleans proper up Nayades Street (now St. Charles Avenue) right through this verdant section on its way upriver to the town of Carrollton.
In 1834 a spur route turned off Nayades and came out Jackson Street to the river, along Lafayette City’s most elegant thoroughfare. The wealthy citizens of New Orleans and the successful merchants of Lafayette City began to spread out in the section which quickly became known as the Garden District. Although many fine homes were built on the outer fringes of the quadrangle formed by Jackson and Louisiana Avenues and Magazine Street and St. Charles Avenue, it is generally agreed today that the Garden District lies within these boundaries. However, in the 1850’s the term was not so strictly applied and Josephine and Apollo (Carondelet) Streets were included.
The operator of this mule car branch railroad which first served Lafayette City crosstown was the New Orleans and Carrollton Railroad Company. In July, 1834, it was franchised to construct a “single railway commencing from the intersection of Jackson and Nayades Streets into said city running through Jackson to the site of the projected market house, thence branching around said market house and running to the river Mississippi.” The rate of travel could not, by law, exceed four miles per hour.
Historically, the Lafayette river front had long been the scene of commerce. The succession of Spanish governors, who took over the colony after 1763, failed to enforce the strict embargo against any but Spanish vessels trading with New Orleans merchants. The British, under the pretext of sailing their commercial vessels up the Mississippi past New Orleans to their own colonies at Manchac, Baton Rouge and Natchez, would tie up above New Orleans in the future Lafayette area, and carry on a heavy trade in merchandise and slaves with the businessmen and planters in and around the city. Directly across the river from the site of Lafayette, in what is now Gretna, the audacious British maintained two floating warehouses and even “built a warehouse on land to facilitate the passage of the floating warehouses of their vessels” according to a contemporary report.
We can visualize the busy river front at this point on the east bank, with merchants plying back and forth in skiffs, and larger batteaux bringing loads of the high quality English goods, including cloth, cutlery, farming utensils—and slaves. New Orleans businessmen who dared not indulge in this illicit trade protested to the Spanish authorities who continued to wink at the British until the American revolution made anti-British sympathies fashionable. Then Bernardo Galvez, the Spanish governor, on April 17, 1777, seized the English boats and warehouses, and the illegal trade stopped. But it is safe to assume that the commercial identity of what became Lafayette’s riverfront persisted, perhaps even its later competition with New Orleans having begun in that early illicit trade.
The good business prospects in Lafayette caused men to say that the city might possibly “capture” New Orleans some day. The Texas cattle trails ended their long treks over the prairies at Gretna. Cattle boats brought the Stock across the river to the slaughter houses with special landings for the pounding, snorting beasts, skittering down the gangplanks into the pens, as if entirely cognizant that the end of the trail had come now for certain.
If one could stand the smell, it was a curious and exciting vista watching the steamboats unload cattle at Lafayette. Satellite industries lined the river front, the tallow renderers, the soap-boilers, the hide merchants, the tanners, the disposers of unused parts, and the bone grinders, whose odoriferous products made tasty vegetables and sweet sugar cane grow, paradoxical as that seemed.
King Cotton considered the wharves at Lafayette one of his royal ports. The puffing, graceful white swans of the Mississippi began to nudge the rows of flatboats from the river front. In the Forties the city council decreed exclusive facilities between First and Second Streets for steamboats, with inclined landing areas. The city supplied heavy, thick planks, bound on each end with iron bands and proudly branded “L”, for the use of the steamboats calling at its wharves. By 1850 twenty piers had been constructed to accommodate the packets.
The “breadbasket” of the upper valley dumped its cargoes at Lafayette wharves also. The first grain elevator on the lower river was built at the foot of Harmony Street. Flour was an important commodity, with busy factors waiting to trade as the clumsy broadhorns, floating on the current, edged into their moorings. So crowded were the flatboat moorings—above Second Street—that flatboat captains received a $10 fine for not immediately removing the large steering oars on each side. Twenty-four hours was the time limit for unloading.
At first, 80-foot sections of the river front had been set aside for the flatboats, once delivered of their cargoes, to be broken up. But this became a nuisance, and by 1845, it was forbidden along the entire Lafayette river front.
There was always a ready market for the timbers from broken up flatboats, or “gunwales”, as the long, heavy fore-and-aft planks were called. Many of the early houses were built of these excellent, weathered timbers from the virgin forests of the upper valley. Most of the streets of Lafayette, until after the mid-nineteenth century, were “paved” with them, as were the sidewalks, or “banquettes”. The long boards would not disappear so quickly into the mud, as would rocks and bricks. Numerous cottages remaining in various sections of New Orleans near the river are built of these sturdy, enduring timbers.
Lafayette City was a complete entity in every respect, with the exception of a bank. There was a branch of the Carrollton Bank to serve its citizens, at the corner of Jackson and Levee, but it was not their own. No doubt a Bank of Lafayette was high on the list of these enterprising citizens, when annexation took place.
James H. Caldwell, the theatrical impresario, entrepreneur, the man most responsible for the development of the “American” section, the former Faubourg Ste. Marie, left his enterprising mark on Lafayette. In 1847, the City Council granted him the sole right of vending gas lighting under the name of the Lafayette Gas Light Company. He could lay pipes and conduits at the company’s expense in the city streets. For the privilege, the company had to supply gas to public lamps throughout the city as well as in public buildings at special rates. The first home reported to have gas illumination was that of Mr. E. S. Miles on Nayades (St. Charles) between Sixth and Seventh.
Lafayette was the scene of a celebrated legal case involving large and valuable sections of the city, second in local court annals only to the Gaines litigation. The original name of the faubourg which later became known as Lafayette was Faubourg Panis, after its owner, the Widow Panis. She first had this property subdivided into lots and streets. Her daughter Mme. Rousseau, a widow, inherited the faubourg. In 1818 she sold the remaining property for $100,000 to John Poultney, who died before he could pay for it. His creditors, who had advanced him part of the money to make the purchase, paid the notes and proceeded to sell lots in honest belief of clear title. Poultney’s wife, on behalf of herself and her minor children, had renounced their rights to the property. The name of the faubourg was changed at that time to Lafayette, in honor of the French patriot who had visited New Orleans.
Later the Poultney heirs claimed that their tender age and legal incapacity prevented them from accepting the property at the time of the succession. The suit was instigated in 1832 and rambled through the courts until 1855 when the United States Supreme Court upheld the Louisiana tribunal against the plaintiffs. Interestingly, one of the disappointed claimants was the then Major G. T. Beauregard, engineer in charge of construction of the New Orleans Customhouse. Mrs. John Poultney had been Emilie Toutant-Beauregard.
The city was not without its theatrical attractions. The only actual theater built for stage presentations was the Lafayette on Rousseau between Philip and Soraparu Streets. It was in the center of the block, on the lake side, directly across from Terpsichore Hall, the favorite salle à danser. The theater opened in late December, 1848, and according to the Statesman, “has already increased property values near it.” It had 100 feet of depth, was 55 feet wide, 40 feet high, and its stage was 35 feet deep, said the newspaper account. Sol Smith, one of the pioneer actors who penetrated the “frontier” communities from the East, along with Noah Ludlow and his troupe, played the Lafayette and left this comment, dated February, 1849:
“A theater in Lafayette, a suburb of New Orleans, was opened under the management of Mr. Oliver this season. The prevalence of the cholera blighted any prospects there might have been of success. This company was composed principally of new beginners and their salaries were paid in various commodities, such as the manager stipulated to receive of the citizens for tickets. It was a stipulation in each article of agreement (so the manager told me) that every actor should take a portion of his salary in coffins, should he need any!—that is to say, if he should die during the season, he should be buried on account; the style of coffin, number of carriages, and so forth, to be regulated by the amount due at the time of his demise.
“I had a fellow feeling for this manager, and when he asked me to act one night for him, assuring me that I could fill the house at double prices, I could not refuse him, though I doubted very much whether my acting would add anything to his receipts. Manager Oliver was right, however, and I had the pleasure of playing the Mock Duke in the Honey Moon to one of the most crowded audiences I have ever acted to. Of course, under the circumstances, I would take no pay for my night’s services, though the grateful manager offered me a clear half of the receipts.
“The season failed totally, the manager left for parts unknown and next season, after a vain attempt by one Hickey to resuscitate the drama by presenting some horrible representations (or misrepresentations rather) of Yankee character, the theater took fire one day and was burned to the ground. Lafayette is too near New Orleans to give an efficient support to the theater.”
The earliest homes in Lafayette naturally were built on streets closest to the river. As early as 1842, the crusty editor of the Daily Picayune in New Orleans was rhapsodic over the beautiful cottages in Lafayette City with their handsome architecture and lovely gardens. The Lafayette Spectator, by 1850, was equally enthusiastic. “The City of Lafayette”, wrote John McMillin, “at no previous time could boast of so many valuable buildings in progress as at present. Styles, finishes and materials being so vastly improved.” The cottages were becoming mansions at this point, getting away from the flatboat gunwales.
“Such is the demand for lots,” continued McMillin, “in the back part of the city that they are selling for nearly double the price of those three or four squares from the river. Lots on or near the railroad (St. Charles Avenue) sell for $1,800. Those on Jersey (Annunciation), $800 or $900. Cheapest lots are on Jersey and Laurel Streets.
“To become independent here,” he advised, “it is necessary to purchase a few lots only, at a low rate and keep them a few years when the fortunate owner finds himself well off in the world. We believe for the next five years real estate will increase 20% per year.”
In 1852, Lafayette City counted a population of 12,651 with 1,539 slaves added. This was short of the anticipated total because the city had just come through a particularly devastating yellow fever epidemic in which some 2,000 souls had been lost. One journalist felt that the census takers had not been thorough in their tally.
The city burial grounds, the Lafayette Cemetery on Washington between Coliseum and Prytania, laid out in 1833, was hard put to find space for the bodies. Apparently most of the deceased were part of the huge drifting population, newly arrived immigrants, the flatboatmen and others, for only 389 citizens of Lafayette could be accounted for by the census taker among those buried in the cemetery.
The prospects of the Garden District of Lafayette were also favorably mentioned by the editor of the Spectator, a Whig newspaper published there during the mid-century era:
“It is already the seat of fashionable residences. The property in the rear of the district has been greatly sought by merchants and bankers and professional men. Little or none has been held for speculation. It will maintain its value.”
The appearance of the Greek Revival mansions now rising from the vicinity of Nayades and in toward Magazine supported the claim that at this time, New Orleans had more per capita wealth than New York.
It appears from the best sources that the first house of consequence to be built in what is now the Garden District proper was that of Thomas Toby in 1838. He came from Philadelphia, and his father’s ships brought some of the materials for the house from his native city. This house is still standing at Prytania and First Streets. Others who built in the same general neighborhood in the following decade were F. B., T. B., and Charles Conrad, P. N. Wood, Judge R. F. Ogden, Captain Thomas Ivey, and Charles Briggs. The Fifties saw the greatest activity of construction of the great houses of the Garden District.
This section, peopled as it was chiefly by those who conducted their businesses in New Orleans, but who enjoyed the shaded gardens for their residences, rapidly developed a life apart from the teeming waterfront of Lafayette City. Inevitably a rivalry began. The catalyst was the constant annoyance of pounding hooves and the odors of the slaughterhouses and tanneries. Eventually, the early residents of the Garden District were instrumental in getting the Lafayette City Council to pass restrictive measures which removed the cattle landing. The important commerce of this trade moved upriver to the neighboring town of Jefferson, which caused the fiery editor of the Spectator, the outspoken champion of the city’s growth, to howl from his columns that the city had lost a million and a half dollars in trade a year by this act.
He belabored particularly the aldermen from the “rear of the city” who “turned up the whites of their eyes and stopped their delicate noses as they passed by with their white gloves on and exclaimed, ‘What a nuisance!’”
Despite these earmarks of a brewing donnybrook, one couldn’t exactly blame the owners of the fine gardens for objecting to “the great numbers of horses and mules running at large, particularly at night, occupying the sidewalks to the danger of the passers-by and racing up and down streets, disturbing the rest of the families.” Not only horses and mules, but goats, too! “If a gate is left open for a minute, choice rose bushes suffer and the rare plants of the most careful training are ruined. Our feed stores are compelled to keep an extra clerk to protect the corn sacks and bales of hay from these bold plunderers.” At least there was a law passed in 1841 which prohibited the keeping of bears in Lafayette City.
In the early days of Lafayette and the Garden District, “the war” referred only to the very real and fresh memories of Jackson’s battle with the British at Chalmette hardly twenty years previously. In the Forties, it referred to the War with Mexico, in which many Lafayette citizens took part. Troops were encamped and trained on some of the vacant lots. The Rev. Jerome Twichell held Presbyterian services for them, and a government warehouse near the river on Washington dispensed supplies to troops coming down the Mississippi for Mexican service.
Then, in 1861, “the war” took on a present and terrifying meaning. Although no actual fighting was reported in or around the Garden District, the coming and going of troops, the warships passing on the river, the shortages because of the blockade, the restrictions of the occupation, the loss of sons, brothers, husbands and fathers, the surrender of proud homes for quartering of Union officers—these and other tangible evidences left deep scars.
Perhaps the Garden District’s most distinguished and colorful figure to wear the gray uniform was Bishop Leonidas Polk, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Louisiana and rector of Trinity Church. A West Point graduate, he answered the call to the priesthood in 1831. When war came, after repeated urgings from his former West Point classmate, Jefferson Davis, he “buckled the sword over the gown”, as he phrased it, and accepted a commission as major general. In June, 1864, while he was reconnoitering near Etowah, Ga., this gallant figure was stilled by a cannon ball, leaving memories at Trinity which persist to this day.
After the war two other prominent figures in the Confederacy were closely associated with the Garden District. Jefferson Davis often visited his friend Judge Charles Fenner and died in the Fenner house on the corner of First and Camp Streets. General John B. Hood, “The Gallant Hood”, had his family home on the corner of Third and Camp.
Calvary Episcopal Church’s resolute minister, the Rev. John Fulton, was one of the three Episcopal ministers who defied General Benjamin “Silver Spoons” Butler. In morning prayer this trio omitted the prayer for the President of the United States and all in civil authority. They instead invited their congregations to join in silent prayer. This enraged Butler, and after several verbal altercations with them, he exiled the group to a New York prison.
Butler quartered officers in several Garden District houses, including that of General Wirt Adams on Chestnut and Josephine, now owned by Trinity Church and called Copeland House. For his own use Butler cast his covetous eye on the fabulous Washington Avenue “Italian villa” built by James Robb and later owned and occupied by John Burnside, wealthy merchant and planter. It is told that Butler and his retinue approached the front door, to be met by Burnside. The Union general not only was refused use of the house but was not even admitted. And the refusal stuck. The reason: Burnside was a British citizen. So Butler took the lovely home of Confederate (late U.S.A.) General David E. Twiggs, on Camp near Calliope Street, which still stands today as St. Theresa’s school.
The homes of the elite attracted their share of celebrities to the hospitable, high-ceilinged drawing rooms and parlors, and to the dining tables so immaculately set and served with viands to please a nabob. Culture, travel and education were hallmarks of most of the inhabitants of the great houses. Delightful, spirited discussions on a wide variety of subjects kept visiting authors, poets, artists and correspondents for the eastern magazines enthralled.
Strangely, these distinguished writers and authors went back to their offices in the East and proceeded to turn out bales of copy about New Orleans but with only side references to the Garden District. Passing mention was made of the luxury and beauty of the homes of this area, but the French Quarter was the subject of all the sketches and engraved illustrations. Rare is the surviving sketch, tintype or glass plate photo of amateur or professional.
Yet the district captivated the earliest of many visitors who put their sentiments down for posterity. The Rev. Theodore Clapp, beloved parson of the mid-nineteenth century, wrote of his arrival in 1822, before Lafayette was so named:
“On a beautiful morning near the close of February we were landed at Lafayette where the boat stopped to discharge a part of her cargo, about three miles above New Orleans. The passengers, impatient of delay, concluded to walk to the city. Leaving the levee, we took a circuitous route through unenclosed fields, which a few years before had belonged to a large sugar plantation. They were adorned with a carpet of green grass, where herds and flocks grazed in common. Here and there we passed a farm house in the midst of gardens, luxuriant shrubbery and orange groves.... The air was cool, inspiring and scented with the flowers of early spring. The music of the thrush and various other species of singing birds, saluted our ears with their sweetest notes. All things, so far as our eyes could reach, seemed like a paradise. These suburbs, then so radiant with rural charms, are now the site of a large portion of the buildings belonging to New Orleans.”
Walt Whitman, a writer for the New Orleans Crescent in 1848, living on Washington Street near the river and travelling to and from his desk in New Orleans by omnibus, must have been impressed by the large live oak trees in Lafayette City. In a later edition of “Leaves of Grass”, he refers to the live oak as “rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of myself.”
Commenting on the ways one kept cool in summer, Julian Ralph, in Dixie, or Southern Scenes and Sketches, related:
“... when I rode through the Garden District—the new part of the town—my lady friends pointed to the galleries and said: ‘You should see them in the summer, before the people leave or after they come back. The entire population is out-of-doors in the air, and the galleries are loaded with women in soft colors, mainly white. They have white dresses by the dozen. They go about without their hats, in carriages and in street cars, visiting up and down the streets. In-doors, one must spend one’s whole time and energy in vibrating a fan.’”
Writing of the Garden District, Mark Twain said: “All the dwellings are of wood... and all have a comfortable look. Those in the wealthy quarter are spacious; painted snowy white, usually, and generally have wide verandas, or double-verandas, supported by ornamental columns. These mansions stand in the center of large grounds and rise, garlanded with roses, out of the midst of swelling masses of shining green foliage and many-colored blossoms. No houses could well be in better harmony with their surroundings, or more pleasing to the eye, or more home-like and comfortable-looking....”
George Washington Cable, who is credited with introducing the French Quarter’s charms to the world, was born on Annunciation Square, just below Lafayette City and later grew up and spent many years in various homes in the Garden District. Cable was internationally celebrated in his day for his Creole stories. His house on Eighth Street, between Chestnut and Coliseum, still standing today, was a mecca for visiting authors. Public education had its start in Lafayette City shortly before it was started in New Orleans. However, Cable gives a delightful glimpse of the wild carefree youngsters of Lafayette in the 1830’s before the free educational institutions were established:
“... The mass of educable youth—the children who played ‘oats, peas, beans’ with French, German and Irish accents, about the countless sidewalk doorsteps of a city of one and two-story cottages (it was almost such); the girls who carried their little brothers and sisters on one elbow and hip and stared in at weddings and funerals; the boys whose kite-flying and games were full of terms and outcries in mongrel French, and who abandoned everything at the wild clangor of bells and ran to fires where volunteer firemen dropped the hose and wounded and killed each other in pitched battles; the ill-kept lads who risked their lives daily five months of the year swimming in the yellow whirlpools of the Mississippi among the wharves and flat-boats, who, naked and dripping, dodged the dignified police that stalked them among the cotton bales, who robbed mocking-birds’ nests and orange and fig trees, and trapped nonpareils and cardinals, orchard-orioles and indigo-birds in the gardens of Lafayette and the suburban fields—these had not been reached and had not been sought by the educator.”
Visualize Twain, Cable and Charles Dudley Warner of Harper’s Magazine at Cable’s Eighth Street home. Add Lafcadio Hearn and Joel Chandler Harris for very good measure. You have the principals of a scene which actually took place, well documented by Cable’s children who were also present as youngsters, and described delightfully by Mark Twain in Life on the Mississippi. Briefly, Twain, Warner and Hearn had come to join the host in welcoming the famous “Uncle Remus”. A literary evening ensued, but to the dismay of the children, not only was “Uncle Remus” white, but he didn’t talk the dialect of which he was the undisputed master. Harris was so very shy that Twain read the “Tar Baby” for him to assuage the feelings of the disappointed youngsters. Then the authors read from their own works; Cable played his guitar and sang his celebrated Creole songs. Twain’s amusing passage describing the scene has an equally humorous sketch showing himself reading while the others are sound asleep.
Great sports figures knew the Garden District. The Southern Athletic Club, at Washington Avenue and Prytania Street, now Behrman Gymnasium, was a center of athletic endeavor for the elite of the area, and its volunteer military units had headquarters there. Among the sports luminaries who used its facilities was the great Jake Kilrain. He trained there in 1889 for his bout with John L. Sullivan at Richburg, Miss. In 1892 “Gentleman Jim” Corbett trained there for his celebrated fight with Sullivan at the Olympic Club, and to the Southern he returned triumphant for a victory celebration. The S.A.C. had New Orleans’ first Turkish bath. In 1878, the Lawn Tennis Club had the city’s first tennis court at Jackson Avenue and Prytania.
The most discussed showplace in an area of palatial homes was the Renaissance-inspired house of James Robb on Washington Street, now Avenue. His dream house deserved all the adjectives lavished upon it. The one-story brick and plaster mansion was surrounded by gardens rivalling those of Europe’s royal estates. He brought over a German gardener to design and maintain them. Statuary by European and American masters embellished the grounds.
Some contemporary observers found the severe classical exterior a bit plain, but inside there was a lavishness of detail which made even these carpers wax enthusiastic. The house contained frescoes by the celebrated Dominique Canova, priceless European pictures, furniture, rugs and objects. The most famous art work was probably Hiram Powers’s Greek Slave, the daring marble beauty which had shocked New York. Robb allowed it to be exhibited in several cities before bringing it to his home. Everywhere it aroused controversy. Today it is in Washington’s Corcoran Gallery of Art.
Robb, millionaire businessman, president of the first trunk line railroad to New Orleans, the New Orleans, Jackson and Great Northern (later part of the Illinois Central) lost his fortune and in 1860 the great house which had been dubbed “Robb’s Folly” was acquired by another millionaire, John Burnside. Under his ownership the beauties of the dwelling were preserved. The noted octagonal room, decorated in the Pompeian fashion, with its arrangement of mirrors which reflected the scene ad infinitum, continued to excite admiration.
In 1890, Mrs. Josephine Newcomb purchased the three-acre square and its buildings for the girls’ college which she had endowed some years before. In converting it into a school, great care was taken to preserve the architectural beauty. When Newcomb College moved to its present campus in 1918, the old campus was acquired by the Baptist Bible Institute, later the Baptist Theological Seminary. They used the site until 1955, when they, too, moved to larger quarters. The Baptists extended Conery Street through the square, divided the property into lots, and sold them. Fine new homes have arisen there.
The people of Lafayette were notably deep in their religious faiths and in love for their fellow men. This is shown by their early church organizations, by their solicitation for the welfare of the indigent and the orphans of the immigrants devastated by cholera and yellow fever epidemics, and by their inauguration of public education, lyceum programs and a library.
It is interesting to note that, with the background of Germans and Irish, it was a Protestant church which first was erected for a Lafayette City congregation. In a building on St. Mary Street, near Fulton (now St. Thomas), as early as 1831 the Methodists were meeting. Some 10 years later the same denomination built a new church on Magazine Street out of flatboat gunwales, and this was known for years as the “Flatboat Church”. Later it became identified with a young pastor, Elijah Steele, who had died of yellow fever. As Steele’s Chapel it united with the St. Mary Street Church and the Andrew Chapel, which had been built on Dryades and Felicity in 1835, to form the Felicity Methodist Church.
Although a parish was chartered for Lafayette Roman Catholics in 1836, they had no church and no priest until 1843. That year Father Peter Chakert, of the Redemptorist order, gathered the faithful in Kaiser’s Hall on Chippewa and Josephine Streets for masses on Sunday morning after the past evening’s dance had ceased. The following year saw the start of their first church on Josephine Street, St. Mary’s Assumption. This lovely little wooden chapel, with its bell which was cast at Des Allemands, was later replaced by the present structure. However, the first building is still standing, moved to St. Joseph’s cemetery on Washington Avenue, where it serves, all white and clean, as a mortuary chapel, 117 years old.
St. Mary’s Assumption first served all the Roman Catholics of Lafayette with sermons alternating in German, French and English. In 1850 St. Alphonsus Church was completed across the Street, chiefly for the Irish, and nine years later, this remarkable tri-lingual parish opened a church for the French people on Jackson Avenue. This was taken down in 1925, but is perpetuated in the Chapel of Our Mother of Perpetual Help at Third and Prytania, the old Lonsdale-McStea house.
A SKETCH OF THE PLAN OF THE FAUBOURG LIVAUDAIS,
Drawn at the request of Messrs. L. PEIRCE, W. H. CHASE, M. MORGAN and S. J. PETERS,
By B. BUISSON, Surveyor for the Parish of Jefferson—March, 1832.
PRINTED BY BENJAMIN LEVY, CHARTRES-STREET.
The year 1840 saw the Presbyterians organized in Lafayette City under the popular Rev. Jerome Twichell. Their church, completed in 1843, on Fulton between Josephine and Adele, was also occasionally used by the Society of Friends. Henry Clay attended services once in the church soon after it was opened. The Prytania Presbyterian Church, where George W. Cable worshipped and sang in the choir, was founded in 1846.
Episcopal services began in a room on the corner of Washington and Laurel streets in 1847. Later that year, construction started for the Church of the Holy Trinity at the corner of Live Oak (now Constance) and Second streets. In 1851, the Rev. Alexander F. Dobb, a dynamic churchman, began working for the construction of a handsome new edifice at Jackson and Coliseum Streets. Trinity Church, as its name was shortened, was occupied in 1853. Unfortunately, Mr. Dobb and his wife died in the tragic yellow fever epidemic of that year and never saw the completed church.
Congregation Gates of Prayer, the Jewish synagogue, originally worshipped in a building near the corner of Sixth and Tchoupitoulas Streets, but in 1854 it moved to a building, still standing though no longer used for that purpose, on Jackson Avenue.
Missions for the German Protestants were provided by the Evangelical, Methodist, Presbyterian and Episcopal churches in various locations.
Lafayette City is no more. Its heritage is two-fold: the sturdy Irish-German stock of its riverfront section; and the great houses and cultural heritage of the Garden District, its fine residential section. Of the former, volumes could be written; of the latter, the following pages will attempt to touch the high spots. If this small book encourages the reader to visit the scenes described, if it provides a setting for the better appreciation of the great houses, the many hours of patient research and writing will be well rewarded.