In 1699 French explorers some 230 miles from the mouth of the Mississippi River spotted a cypress pole colored red from the smeared blood of dead animals that marked the hunting grounds between the Houma and Bayougoula tribes. They called the landmark on the 50-foot Istrouma Bluff on the east side of the river “le Baton Rouge.” And except for a brief time when the British called the place New Richmond it has been named for that red stick ever since.
Before the Americans got their hands on Baton Rouge the French, Spanish and British all had their cracks at it, mostly maintaining the bluff as a strategic defensive position. In 1810 Baton Rouge was the only Spanish possession on the Mississippi River and far from the seat of colonial power in Florida. The citizens, mostly French and Americans, rose up and overpowered the small Spanish garrison. They declared a new country called the Republic of West Florida and even had a flag prepared for the occasion - the Bonnie Blue Flag. It boasted a single white star on a blue background that would become the inspiration for the Lone Star of the Republic of Texas. After ninety days the new country was folded into America’s Territory of Orleans just before Louisiana joined the Union in 1812.
By the 1840s the Louisiana legislature was dominated by rural planters who distrusted giving the capital of New Orleans more power than it already had so they engineered a move of the government to the country. Baton Rouge, a hamlet of about 2,000 people at the time, got the nod in 1849 and has remained the capital ever since. Even after Louisiana State University showed up in late 1869 the town remained mostly a sleepy government refuge through the rest of the 19th century.
The discovery of unprecedented oil reserves in the salt domes around the Gulf Coast in the early 1900s began to change all that. The Standard Oil Company of John D. Rockefeller constructed a refinery in Baton Rouge in 1912 and others followed. Louisiana State built a new campus in 1926 and Huey Long transformed the face of BatonRouge when he reached the governor’s chair in 1928.
Today the Port of Baton Rouge is the nation’s ninth busiest port with a 45-foot channel dredged in the Mississippi River to give ocean-going vessels the furthest access north they can reach on the river. The population has climbed over 225,000 and yet the town has been able to retain treasures from its nearly two centuries of history since its incorporation in 1817. Our walking tour will seek them out and we will begin at the legacy of a politician who entwined himself with his state and its people like few others in America ever have...
New Orleans - Central Business District
When Americans first came to New Orleans in the early 1800s they settled in the uptown side of the city across Canal Street from the original city, the French Quarter. It was in this section that they built their homes and business establishments and distinguished their lifestyles from those of the Creoles residing nearby. The name ‘Canal Street” derived from a planned waterway that was to connect the Mississippi River to Lake Pontchartrain but it was never constructed.
Instead Canal Street became the main shopping district of New Orleans. It was long home to grand department stores. The world’s first movie theater, Vitascope Hall, was established on Canal Street in 1896. Canal Street remains the hub of the city’s mass transit system.
Nearby, churches and city government buildings gathered around Lafayette Square, once a grand park for residents and cotton merchants. This is where our walking tour will begin...
The French Quarter spreads up from the Mississippi River across some 70 blocks. This is where the original French Colonial settlement of Nouvelle Orleans was laid out in simple squares in1718 by French Canadian naval officer Jean Baptiste Bienville. Bienville served as governor for financier John Law’s Company of the Indies, which in naming the city for the Regent Duc d’Orleans sought to curry Court favor before failing spectacularly in the “Great Mississippi Bubble.” The French Period legacy endures in the town plan and central square, church of St. Louis, Ursuline Convent and women’s education, ancient regime street names such as Bourbon and Royal, the charity hospital, and a mixed legacy of Creole culture, Mardi Gras, and the important effects of African enslavement combined with a tolerant approach to free persons of color.
In 1762 the indifferent Louis XV transferred Louisiana to his Bourbon cousin Charles III of Spain. Emboldened by a period of Spanish vacillation in taking power, Francophile colonists staged a revolution in 1768, summarily squelched by Alejandro O’Reilly with a firing squad at the Esplanade fort. Spanish rule lasted for four decades, imparting a legacy of semi-fortified streetscapes, common-wall plastered brick houses, and walled courtyards used as gardens and utility spaces with separate servants’ quarters and kitchens. Olive oil cooking and graceful wrought iron balconies, hinges and locks in curvilinear shapes, and strong vestiges of civil law remain from the Spanish presence.
Typical of the eccentricities of the Vieux Carre or “old square” is the fact that its much admired iron-embroidered architecture is not French, but Spanish. Disastrous fires one after another in 1788 and 1794 destroyed all but a handful of the original French buildings.Street names have floated back and forth between French and Spanish and the gold-and-blue signs on the corner buildings indicate the street names that were recognized under earlier regimes. Sited on the highest ground in the area, the French Quarter sustained little damage from the flooding of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
Our walking tour will begin in Jackson Square, a few yards from the Mississippi River and in what some have called the architectural center of America...
This neighborhood was developed by the first Americans to settle in New Orleans, and the fine old homes of the Garden District, bounded by Jackson and Louisiana avenues and St. Charles Avenue and Magazine Street, preserve traces of the era of cotton and sugar empires, when grand antebellum plantations dominated the landscape.
The district owes its luxuriant vegetation to an 1816 flood caused by the overflowing Mississippi River. Although many plantations between Carrollton and the emerging American sector were destroyed, a rich deposit of alluvial silt created a very desirable feature for future development―higher ground. In the early 1830s Jacques Livaudais sold his sugarcane plantation, which was soon subdivided, later incorporated as the city of Lafayette and subsequently annexed to New Orleans, when it became known as the Garden District.
In addition to thriving indigenous and exotic plantings and magnolia trees rivaling oaks in size, the neighborhood covers 27 city blocks and boasts 200 residences in a variety of building styles, including Gothic, Greek Revival and Renaissance. Many homes are embellished with iron lacework, a hallmark of New Orleans architecture. Mark Twain loved to visit the Garden District and called it a place where “the 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.”
Our walking tour will begin at the corner of Washington Avenue and Prytania Street at an old roller skating palace...
Perched atop a bluff on the eastern shore of the Mississippi River, St. Francisville, the second-oldest incorporated town in Louisiana, began life as a burial ground. Spanish Capuchin monks established a church in the 1730s across the river in a floodplain that made burial impossible. The monks rowed across the Mississippi to the drier higher ground to inter their dead. The Cappuchine friars obtained a land grant from the King of Spain and constructed a wooden monastery near the graveyard which they named for the order’s gentle patron, St. Francis. The monastery later burned but the name remained.
When the United States negotiated for the purchase of the Louisiana Territory in 1803 a section of land, including this area, along the Gulf Coast was retained by Spain. By that time the mostly American settlers had no interest in living under Spanish rule and waited restlessly while negotiations for what was called West Florida dragged on between the Spanish and the Jefferson administration.
Finally in 1810 a group of planters marched on the Spanish fort at Baton Rouge, captured the governor and set up their own nation, The Free and Independent Republic of West Florida. St. Francisville became the national capital. West Florida had a constitution based largely on the US Constitution with three branches of government. The first and only governor was Fulwar Skipwith, a former American diplomat who helped negotiate the Louisiana Purchase.
The Republic of West Florida lasted 90 days. On October 27, 1810 the United States annexed the region by proclamation of President James Madison as part of the Louisiana Purchase. At first Skipwith and the West Florida government were opposed to the proclamation but the appearance of the United States Army in St. Francisville changed their minds.
Meanwhile, below the bluffs a rowdier rivertown was growing up. Bayou Sara, named for a creek that offered flatboaters safe anchorage, was developing into the largest port on the Mississippi between Natchez and New Orleans by 1850. But fire, the Civil War, floods, the railroads and the destructive power of the boll weevil conspired to doom Bayou Sara.
St. Francisville meanwhile trundled on as the genteel center of the surrounding plantation country. It was said that two out of every three known millionaires of the antebellum period lived on the Great Road from New Orleans to Natchez and many of them were found in West Feliciana Parish and St. Francisville. Several of the grandest plantations are open to the public today.
Our walking tour will start at the Museum of West Feliciana Historical Society on Ferdinand Street. In downtown St. Francisville, the entire district is listed on the National Register of Historic Places...