Beautiful Crescent: A History of New Orleans Read online

  The oleander was brought from Cuba by the Spanish after the fires of 1788 and 1794 had devastated plant life in New Orleans. It was adopted as the city flower in June 1923. The seal, adopted in 1805 and redesigned in 1852, shows a pair of Indians, the region’s first inhabitants; recumbent Father Mississippi; and an alligator from the swamplands. The flag was accepted by Mayor Martin Behrman on February 9, 1918.

  PELICAN PUBLISHING COMPANY

  Gretna 2013

  Copyright © 1982, 1984, 1988, 1989, 1991, 1992, 1994, 2013

  By Kathy Chappetta Spiess and Karen Chappetta

  All rights reserved

  First edition, 1982

  Second edition, 1984

  Third edition, 1988

  Fourth edition, 1989

  Fifth edition, 1991

  Sixth edition, 1992

  Seventh edition, 1994

  First Pelican edition, 2013

  * * *

  The word “Pelican” and the depiction of a pelican are

  trademarks of Pelican Publishing Company, Inc., and are

  registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

  * * *

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Garvey, Joan B., 1929-

  Beautiful crescent : a history of New Orleans / by Joan B. Garvey and Mary Lou Widmer ; foreword by Jane Molony. — 1st Pelican ed. / edited and updated by Kathy Chappetta Spiess and Karen Chappetta.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-1-4556-1742-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4556-1743-2 (e-book) 1. New Orleans (La.)—History. I. Widmer, Mary Lou, 1926- II. Spiess, Kathy Chappetta. III. Chappetta, Karen. IV. Title.

  F379.N557G37 2012

  763'35—dc23

  2012023226

  Printed in the United States of America

  Published by Pelican Publishing Company, Inc.

  1000 Burmaster Street, Gretna, Louisiana 70053

  To Mom and Dad, we miss you both.

  And to our brother and sisters.

  Contents

  Foreword

  Preface

  Beautiful Crescent

  Chapter I The Part the River Played

  Chapter II Discovery and Exploration

  Chapter III The French Period

  Chapter IV The Spanish Period

  Chapter V On Becoming American: 1803-15

  Chapter VI Progress in a Period of Peace: 1820-60

  Chapter VII Customs, Carnival, and Cemeteries

  Chapter VIII New Orleans, an Occupied City: 1862-76

  Chapter IX Rebirth and Resurgence: 1865-1930

  Chapter X Growth in a Modern City: After 1930

  Chapter XI New Orleans Today

  Reference Sections

  Appendix A Directions in New Orleans

  Appendix B A Short History of Hurricanes in New Orleans

  Appendix C Statues and Monuments in New Orleans

  Appendix D Noted Personalities

  Appendix E Governors of Louisiana

  Appendix F Mayors of New Orleans

  Chronology

  Glossary

  Selected Bibliography

  About the Authors

  Foreword

  Beautiful Crescent is a good short, basic history of New Orleans—and more. We use it as a textbook in training Friends of the Cabildo volunteers. It’s a foundation, a springboard, an appetizer—just enough factual political history, just enough “people” history to tantalize and whet our appetites to delve into the books in the Bibliography. The wonderful lists of governors, mayors, noted personalities, and the chronology make Beautiful Crescent an indispensable tool for tour guides—and indeed fun for everyone else who loves New Orleans.

  Jane Molony

  Training Committee

  Friends of the Cabildo

  Preface

  History is a story, and as a story, differs with the story-teller. The story-teller’s point of view becomes the attitude with which the history is related. For this reason, the following chronology is a history of New Orleans, not the history of New Orleans.

  We maintain that there is no definitive history, only stories told with more or less documentation. Opinions cannot be documented, nor importance decided, except through a personal approach. Our approach is a “people approach.” We have tried to view the city through the people who came here, some to stay, some to make their mark and then move on. We hope to share with you our view of the development of New Orleans in this narrative.

  Joan B. Garvey

  Mary Lou Widmer

  Authors

  It is truly a pleasure to be associated with Beautiful Crescent: A History of New Orleans. In 2009, we met with Mary Lou Widmer, one of the authors of this book. After many discussions and negotiations, we obtained the rights and the responsibility of keeping this magnificent book on New Orleans history alive.

  We’d always considered ourselves knowledgeable about New Orleans and her history. Yet it wasn’t until we began the process of updating this book line by line that we realized how little we really knew about the city of New Orleans.

  In addition, while reading and researching the distant and recent pasts, it became apparent that the attitudes, customs, and general doggedness of New Orleanians to celebrate life and to overcome adversity and disaster and get on with the business of life are engraved in our civic psyche. Long ago, newcomers to the Louisiana colony said with regard to the laissez-faire attitude of the people here, “it was caused by the humidity.” Whether it is in the humidity or in the water, after reading this book and understanding the motives of Bienville, Iberville, and everyone else who formed a community in New Orleans, it is no wonder we have been able to rise above disaster and celebrate the city that we all love.

  All New Orleanians and visitors to the area would benefit from becoming familiar with the history of New Orleans, and we don’t believe there is any book with which it is better to do that than through the pages of Beautiful Crescent.

  Kathy Chappetta Spiess

  Karen Chappetta

  Editors and Updaters

  CHAPTER I

  The Part the River Played

  Before there could be a city, there had to be a place for a city, but for millions of years, there was no land where New Orleans stands today. The entire state of Louisiana was part of a huge body of water, an extension of the sea into the continent. The Mississippi River did not exist until one million years ago (a brief period in geologic terms), when it began to meander southward unobtrusively.

  During the Ice Age, twenty-five thousand years ago, sheets of ice covered the North American continent but did not come within four hundred miles of the site of New Orleans. The Ice Age wiped out a number of other drainage systems in the Midwest and rerouted drainage toward the Mississippi, enlarging the river considerably. Embedded in the ice were tons of debris, and during the period, there were violent windstorms that deposited silt in the Mississippi Basin. Then, when the ice melted, the water flowed rapidly, taking its debris with it and causing the Mississippi to extend its delta, filling in its southern end.

  As the delta filled, the sea retreated, leaving Lake Pontchartrain behind, a child of the Gulf, separated from its parent about five thousand years ago. Between the lake and the river, a stretch of swampland emerged, which would in time become the site of the city of New Orleans.

  Of all the geologic factors that shaped the site of the city, the river played the leading role. Its serpentine course and erratic behavior in the last several thousand years determined the exact location and dimensions of the
city, the arteries of transportation and communication, and even, in time, the patterns of colonization and styles of architecture. The colonists who would later settle on the crescent of marshland would be forced to develop a lifestyle that could be supported by their water-locked environment. It is the story of these people that will be told here.

  The process of shaping and molding is not complete, even today. The city is still sinking at a rate of approximately three inches per century. There are places in the delta where sugarcane fields, planted in the eighteenth century, are now under water. Yet, there would not have been a city at all, a site for a city, or a delta, except for the Ice Age and its aftermath.

  The bedrock, or sand strata, that lies on the floor of the saucer beneath New Orleans is of pre-glacial material, dating back to the Pleistocene era of one million or so years ago. It consists of clay, silt, and silty sand. North of Lake Pontchartrain, this Pleistocene material is at the surface, forming a bluff paralleling the lakeshore. The Pleistocene has eroded into low hills covered by beautiful pines, an area without “foundation” problems or flooding. This marvelous Pleistocene land (now the sites of Mandeville, Madisonville, and Covington) is the result of faults in the earth’s crust, which have allowed the material to crop out. From the north shore of the lake, the material drops below the surface of the water, dipping gently southward, until it rests some seventy feet beneath the city of New Orleans. Because of the range of stability, no New Orleanian would think of erecting a building of any height or weight without first sinking pilings to gain solid footing on the bedrock.

  Except for levees, there are no natural land surfaces in the city that are higher than fifteen feet above sea level. Canal Street meets the river at an elevation of fourteen feet above sea level; Jackson Square, only six blocks downriver, is only ten feet above sea level. The Tulane University area is a mere four feet above sea level, while the intersection of Broad and Washington Streets (originally part of the backswamp, now Mid-City) is two feet below sea level. All of these facts, part of the geologic picture of the city’s relationship with the river, help us to understand many things about the life of the natives of the city.

  The earliest known waterways through the city of New Orleans are two abandoned distributaries of the Mississippi: Bayou Metairie and its eastern sector, Bayou Gentilly. Between 600 BC and AD 1000, Bayou Metairie wandered away from the Mississippi about twenty miles above the French Quarter, near today’s Kenner, and strayed eastward toward the Gulf of Mexico, running more or less parallel to the river. The eastern portion of this distributary is shown on some old maps as Bayou Sauvage, on others as Bayou Gentilly. In time, the river abandoned these wanderers, leaving them to meander lazily through the marshes of the backswamp.

  The course of these two connected waterways was, roughly, along Metairie Road and City Park Avenue to Dumaine Street, across Bayou St. John, then left to Grand Route St. John, then right to Gentilly Boulevard, which becomes Old Gentilly Highway.

  The Metairie and Gentilly Bayous were never important to the early settlers as a water route, but became important because alongside developed a levee of well-drained soil, which provided a flood-free land route into the city from the west by Metairie Road and from the east by Gentilly Road (Chef Menteur Highway). There is another land route into the city from the west, along the riverfront from Baton Rouge, called River Road. From the east, however, Gentilly “Ridge” is the main road, for it carries both national highways (US 90) and the main line of the Louisville and Nashville Railroad. During the Civil War, the federals used maps showing these highways as routes of entry into the city.

  Over the centuries, the river built delta land by depositing material where it empties into the sea, forming sandbars, which in time became islands. The islands split the river into two or more distributary channels. This is how the Metairie and Gentilly Bayous were formed. The same thing is happening today about twenty miles below Venice, Louisiana, where the river divides into three major distributaries: Pass L’Outre, South Pass, and Southwest Pass. Southwest Pass is deepest and carries the largest volume of traffic.

  Another method the river has of making delta land, which is more important to the development of a city, is by abandoning its lower course for hundreds of miles and lunging out to the sea by an altogether different route. The river does this regularly every several hundred years, leaving behind great gashes across its delta. The Mississippi as we know it today took up the diversion near New Orleans sometime between AD 1500 and 1600.

  We are forced to wonder under what conditions a river jumps its banks. An understanding of how levees form might help to clarify. During a flood, the fast-moving waters of the river pick up heavy material and, spilling over its banks, deposit the material, systematically raising the banks (or natural levees) with the flood. Artificial levees, which are built on top of these natural levees, may be thirty feet high and faced with concrete. They are among the most prominent landforms in New Orleans. The natural levee may be only ten to fifteen feet above sea level but a mile or two wide, sloping downward from the river so gently that the decline would not be noticeable in a moving vehicle.

  Natural levees end where they merge with the backswamp (lowland). Natural levees provide the only well-drained land in southeast Louisiana, which is the reason why most settlements, urban or rural, were located on natural levees (of either the Mississippi or smaller streams). For one reason, in colonial times, the settlers had only the Mississippi for transportation. For another, it was the only place to build roads and buildings that were fairly safe from floods.

  So, for the first two hundred years, the city was laid out along the natural levees of the Mississippi River and Bayous Metairie and Gentilly (Sauvage). The city came to an abrupt end when it reached the backswamp.

  Prior to 1700, Bayou Metairie was called Bayou Chapitoulas (or Tchoupitoulas) after an Indian tribe of that name, who lived near the stream’s confluence with the Mississippi River. It was renamed Metairie (meaning farm) by the French settlers who established plantations there. Traces of the original bayou may still be found in Metairie Cemetery. Bayou Gentilly, originally called Bayou Sauvage, was so named by the French because the French word sauvage meant savage, wild, or untamed and was used to describe the Indians. Bayou Sauvage therefore meant Bayou of the Indians or Indian Bayou. It was renamed Bayou Gentilly around 1718 to commemorate the Paris home of the Dreux brothers, early settlers along the waterway.

  The upriver end of town is surrounded on three sides by the river, which sweeps a giant semi-circle around that part of the city. The remainder of the upriver area is closed off by the lower, natural levees of the abandoned Metairie distributary. Thus, a “bowl” is created, which is, of course, below sea level. (This area is now Mid-City.) In the last century, a pump was invented to drain the water from Mid-City and make it habitable, but in prehistoric times, when the “bowl” filled, it spilled over into the lowest place in the Metairie levees. Over the centuries, a channel formed there, small but immensely important to early New Orleans commerce. The channel was later called Bayou St. John, and it flowed northward into Lake Pontchartrain.

  Long before the white man came to Louisiana, the Indians traveled from the Gulf of Mexico, through the Mississippi Sound, Rigolets Pass, Lake Borgne, and Lake Pontchartrain into Bayou St. John, which the Choctaws called Bayouk Choupic or Shupik (Bayou Mudfish). Five and a half miles after entering the bayou, they got out of their bark canoes and carried them over a time-worn trail to the Michisipy (Great River). The Choctaws called Bayou St. John “Choupithatcha” or “Soupitcatcha,” combination of the Choctaw “supik” (mudfish) and “hacha” (river).

  The old Indian portage, which became a boundary of the city of New Orleans, can still be followed today. Beginning at Governor Nicholls and Decatur Streets near the Mississippi River, one would follow Governor Nicholls through the French Quarter toward the lake. At North Claiborne, Governor Nicholls becomes Bayou Road, and the street angles northeasterly, crossin
g Esplanade Avenue at North Miro. A few blocks farther, Bayou Road intersects with Grand Route St. John. A sharp turn to the left and an additional three-quarters of a mile brings the traveler to the shores of Bayou St. John. The route of the portage, called Bayou Road in French times, has varied through the years.

  Map showing drainage system of Mississippi River.

  The Mississippi River, beginning in Lake Itasca, Minnesota, and ending in the Gulf of Mexico, is 2,340 miles long. It runs as deep as 217 feet, and at the foot of Canal Street is 2,200 feet wide. It is the third largest river in the world after the Amazon and the Congo. It drains forty percent of the forty-eight continental states and has a basin covering 1.25 million square miles, including parts of thirty-one states and two Canadian provinces.

  With a river of such enormity, any big flood could cause the water to break through its natural levee and spill over into the backswamp. Such a breakthrough is called a crevasse, a natural disaster feared by early settlers because it could pick up miles of farmland and wash it away completely. In addition, a crevasse made wide splits in the river’s road, paralyzing transportation and communications. A crevasse at the Sauvé Plantation in 1849 caused an uncontrolled flood into Mid-City. The greatest danger of such a crevasse is that once the river jumps its banks, there might be no way of getting it back. The possibility exists that it might have permanently changed its course. The Sauvé Crevasse was brought under control, however, and the danger was averted.

  There is geologic evidence that the Mississippi River has changed its course many times in the past five thousand years, leaving old channels, each with its own delta. The oldest visible course is now occupied by Bayou Teche. A more recent ancestor of the Mississippi is Bayou Lafourche, which was apparently the last course it took before the one it now follows. Another early route is the St. Bernard Delta east of New Orleans.