Beautiful Crescent: A History of New Orleans (6 page)

The
Marquis de Mezières
from Amiens, France, built his home in 1720 at the present site of the Petite Salon on St. Peter Street.

Claude-Joseph Dubreuil de Villars
and his family arrived in New Biloxi in 1721. He later settled in the Tchoupitoulas, near the location of the present Ochsner Hospital. There, with his family and ten servants, he grew rice and indigo. By 1724, he had an avenue of trees and, by 1725, two indigo factories, which produced ink and dye. He became contractor for the Mississippi Valley. He built the first levee in New Orleans and a canal between the Mississippi River and Bayou Barataria, the location of the present day Harvey Canal.

Antoine-Simon Le Page du Pratz,
(1695-1775), was born in Holland
and came to Dauphin Island
in 1718, after having served with the French army in Germany. In his three-volume work,
Histoire de la Louisiane,
he tells of settling a plantation on Bayou St. John
, then moving on to the Natchez
country, where he spent eight years. He wrote of their lives and customs, leaving the most accurate account we have of these original inhabitants of Louisiana. After sixteen years in America, during which time he served as manager of the Company of the Indies and manager of the King’s Farm, which dealt in slave trade at Algiers Point, he returned to France where his books were published in 1758. They were, and still are, a treasure-trove of early Louisiana history.

Antoine Philippe de Marigny de Mandeville,
born at Fort Louis de la Mobile in 1772, was the stepson of Ignace Broutin, the royal engineer. He built a beautiful summer home in 1788 in Mandeville, a town north of Lake Pontchartrain, which bears his name. His grandson was Bernard de Marigny, a colorful Creole of New Orleans.

Other names of early settlers were Villère, de La Ronde, and Delery.

It is interesting to note that most settlers were less than five feet three inches tall. The average height was five feet. The average age was twenty-one years old. There were few over fifty, and few in their teens.

Before the hurricane of 1721, the city is described by Father Pierre de Charlevoix
in one of the first hundred letters written from New Orleans. He wrote that there were a “hundred barracks,” placed in no particular order, a wooden storehouse, and two or three houses “which would be no ornament to a village of France . . .” He also wrote that he felt the city would be the “future capital of a fine and vast country.”

The city of which he spoke consisted of 470 people living on three streets, which had been laid out by Pauger. The hurricane of 1721 devastated the town and destroyed all the buildings.

In April 1722, the first complete plan for the city of New Orleans was signed by Pierre Leland de La Tour, who dispatched Adrian de Pauger to supervise the construction of the city. The area on which La Tour planned to build was scattered with wooden houses built by immigrants from Illinois. Pauger cleared a strip of land on the river wide enough and deep enough to put the plan into execution. The hurricane of 1721 had taken care of most of the original buildings, which were not in keeping with the engineer’s plans, and would have had to be removed in any case.

Then with the help of some
piquers,
he traced on the ground the streets and quarters which were to form the new town, and notified all who wished building sites to present their petitions to the Council. To each settler who appeared, they gave a plot of 10 fathoms front by 20 deep, and as each square was 50 fathoms front, it gave 12 plots in each, the two middle ones being 10 front by 25 deep. It was ordained that those who obtained these plots would be bound to enclose them with palisades, and leave all around a strip of at least three feet wide, at the foot of which a ditch was to be dug, to serve as a drain for the river water in time of inundation (French 1853, 23-24).

First parish church of St. Louis, designed by de Pauger. Dedicated Christmas Eve, 1717, on the site of the present St. Louis Cathedral. Drawings reconstituted from plans in French National Archives.
(Courtesy Leonard V. Huber Collection)

The streets were laid out in a grid pattern, and they were straight, not conforming to the curve of the river. The exact site of the Vieux Carré today is the place Bienville chose in 1718, and the spot where the St. Louis Cathedral is today was the location of the St. Louis Parish Church. The wooden church was blown down in 1723, but in 1724, construction of a brick church began on the same spot.

Map of the Vieux Carré, May 26, 1724, from de Pauger’s city plans of 1721. Shows additional houses constructed after the September 1, 1723, overflow. Shaded houses erected first. By Adrien de Pauger.

New Orleans, May 15, 1728. From the original map by N. Broutin, deposited in Office of Marine and Colonies, Paris, France.

Map of New Orleans, 1803.

The map shows the plan of the city with its limits and its street names. From left to right, vertically, the streets were Canal, Iberville, Bienville,
Conti, St. Louis, Toulouse, St. Peter, Orleans, St. Ann, du Maine, Cl
ermont (changed to St. Philip), Rue Arsenal (changed to Ursulines), Hospital (changed to Governor Nichols), Barracks, and Esplanade. The original city ended at Iberville Street. (Our present Vieux Carré
Commission had no jurisdiction past Iberville.) The streets Conti, Toulouse, and du Maine are the names of King Louis XIV
’s illegitimate sons.

Reading from top to bottom, horizontally, the streets were Rampart, Bourgogne (changed to Burgundy), Vendome (changed to Dauphine), Bourbon (family of the king), Royal, Condé (an extension of Chartres, later changed to Chartres), and Rue de la Levée (changed to Decatur).

Map of the Vieux Carré

The Place d’Armes fronts the church, jail, and the priest’s house, (now the Cathedral), flanked by the Cabildo and the Presbytère. Barracks were on either side of the square, moved by a later governor to a location beyond the Ursuline Convent on Barracks Street.

New Orleans was a city bounded on three sides by swamps and on the fourth by the river. A levee was built on the river side, and drainage ditches were dug to allow the water from the river to drain around the city to “Back of Town.”

A description of eighteenth century New Orleans, from
History of Regional Growth:

At high tide, the river flows through the streets. The subsoil is swampy. New Orleans becomes famous for its tombs. Buried coffins must have holes so that they do not float to the surface when the land is flooded. Dikes have to be built along the river . . .

Those living in the city dedicated to the Duke of Orleans feel as if they were living on an island in the middle of a mud puddle. (New Orleans Regional Planning Commission 1969, 5).

Alongside the river were high banks covered with great cypress forests, occasionally broken by the home of a concessionaire or an Indian village. Buildings were constructed of thick wood with sloped roofs like Norman houses in Canada. Galleries were later added for cool comfort and the protection of the exterior against decay.

The French in Louisiana, gregarious by nature and possessing a remarkable ability to adapt, settled in groups instead of seeking solitude, as much for social ability as for safety. They were predominantly traders, not farmers. Unlike the American frontiersmen, they built large and comfortable substantial houses of hewn timber or brick. They were survivors, and they were here to stay. Their attitude is reflected in the types of homes they built.

The Code Noir of 1724

In 1719, the Company of the West brought an influx of slaves into Louisiana. By 1724, there were so many slaves and free people of color in the colony that the French government enacted a set of laws called the
Code Noir,
or Black Code, whose purpose it was to protect the slaves and the free blacks and to define and limit their activities. It governed the treatment of slaves by their masters. Slave owners were ordered to have their slaves baptized Catholics. They were not to work their slaves on Sundays or holidays, except for marketing.

The Code was not as cruel as it is often made to appear. It provided more lenient treatment of slaves than could be found almost anywhere else in the south. It was the basis of Louisiana slave laws until the late 1820s, when the state adopted parts of the much more severe slave codes of the southeastern states (Taylor 1984, 12).

New Orleans, the Capital of Louisiana

Bienville had tried as early as 1719 to have the Louisiana seat of government moved to New Orleans, but the Superior Council argued that it should be transferred back from Mobile to Biloxi. The Council won. Biloxi, however, had just burned down and was abandoned for the other side of the bay. In 1722, three commissioners arrived in the colony, charged with the administration of the Company’s affairs after John Law’s failure. In 1723, the commissioners allowed Bienville to make New Orleans the capital of Louisiana.

The Ursuline Nuns Arrive

It was Bienville who had laid the groundwork for the coming of the Ursuline nuns, although he was “between terms” and not in the
colony when they finally arrived. A school for boys had already been started by a Capuchin monk, Father Cecil
, where the Place d’Armes
Motel stands today on St. Ann Street across from the Presbytère
. Bienville tried to get the
Soeurs Grises
(Gray Sisters) from his native Canada to come to New Orleans to teach the girls, but he failed. He consulted Father Nicholas Ignace de Beaubois, Superior of the Jesuits
(however few there may have been) in Louisiana at the time, who advised him to try to procure the services of the Ursuline nuns. Bienville did so, and twelve nuns arrived on August 7, 1727. Their Superior was Mother Tranchepain, and among them was the talented Marie-Madeleine Hachard
, to whom we owe a charming description of the journey and the city in 1727. Their first convent was built in 1730.