In the Colonial Era, the area that eventually became the Melpomene neighborhood and later utilized for the Guste Homes was located in a low-lying backswamp zone at the rear of the Livaudais plantation tract, straddling land that became the Faubourgs Annunciation and de la Course in the first half of the nineteenth century. While developers first surveyed these tracts for subdivision in 1836, there seems to have been little development within them until after the completion of the New Orleans, Jackson, and Great Northern Railroad in 1853, with its rail yard near the project area at Calliope Street between Magnolia and Claiborne Streets. Areas along what was then the undeveloped edge of the city attracted working class immigrants and socially marginalized people, like Elizabeth Boyd, a free woman of color living on Howard/LaSalle Street in City Square 358 in 1860.

During the 2013 excavation of the Melpomene neighborhood, archaeologists did not find any material evidence of the indigenous peoples who lived in southeast Louisiana prior to colonial settlement. In urban settings, the density of later occupation typically obliterates such earlier deposits, even when archaeologists are able to specifically target where they might be located. Some of the architectural remains documented likely date to the first nineteenth century structures built on urban lots, but otherwise little evidence remained archaeologically of this earlier era of historic-period pre-Civil War development, as was the case at the address associated with Elizabeth Boyd.

The Melpomene neighborhood became much more densely developed after the Civil War. After Emancipation, freedmen and women moved to the city to escape the violent exploitation of plantation life, joining poor immigrants on the urban fringe. During Reconstruction (1867-1877) in Louisiana, federal occupation created new hopes for citizenship and political rights for the state’s Black residents. Eventually, this triggered a violent backlash from white supremacist forces, culminating in the so-called “Battle of Liberty Place”, which restored former Confederate elites to power. Archaeological assemblages that adequately reflect the turbulence of these years are rare, but one of the most unusual deposits uncovered in the Melpomene neighborhood likely gives a glimpse of daily life in the era.

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“Many of the places and locations known to tourists and travelers worldwide, such as the Port of New Orleans, the French Market, and Congo Square, served as thoroughfares for trade and culture long before the arrival of whites.” -Bulbancha is Still a Place

The origins of the French Market date back to 1675, almost one hundred years before most histories tell of the Market. [1] Most historians have focussed primarily on the colonization of New Orleans rather than the Native histories rooted in Bulbancha, the Native name for the region, translating to “the place of many tongues.” [2]

The Native peoples of this area derived the name Bulbancha for its purpose as a thriving trading port for many different people, heritages, and linguistic groups. [3] Indigenous groups such as the Chitimacha, Choctaw, Ishak, Tunica, and Natchez nations traded with one another and with white explorers and colonizers. [3]

The Oumas Natives founded what is known as the French Market today. The Oumas sold goods to travelers exploring lands down the Mississippi River, including Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, the colonial governor of Louisiana and founder of New Orleans. [1] After the founding of New Orleans in 1718, the Oumas and the Tchouchoumas, who had another market along Bayou St. John, combined trading spaces in today’s French Market.

Between 1770 and 1790, General Alexander O’Reilly recorded the French Market as an official site in government documents, noting structures “built entirely of cypress lumber.” [1] Over the next two centuries, other Native people, such as the Choctaws, contributed to the life of the French Market. While indigenous identity became more and more difficult to maintain through the colonization of New Orleans and the forced displacement of indigenous groups, the French Market “still constituted a meaningful form of identity as well as a helpful source of income” to the New Orleans Natives. [3]

The most robust written information historians have on the origins of the French Market comes from the mid to late nineteenth century. As tourism increased throughout New Orleans, so did art and newspaper articles on the French Market. Most of these newspaper articles play into stereotypes and create negative depictions of the Native people. Some sources, however, do describe the wares and foods the Natives sold including Gumbo, fish, fruits and vegetables, and woven baskets. [3]

In more recent years, the “New Orleans French Market Board sought assistance from the Louisiana Office of Indian Affairs to involve American Indians in celebrating the two-hundred-year anniversary of the market’s official beginning.” [3] The New Orleans bi-centennial celebration committee recognized the Natives’ contributions to the French Market’s history.

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Big Oak Island and Little Oak Island are camps and habitation sites associated with the people of the Tchefuncte culture of the Lower Mississippi Valley, dating from as early as 800 BCE to as late as AD 200. The sites are located in the marshes of eastern New Orleans in the Bayou Sauvage National Wildlife Refuge.

The sites were first investigated in 1939 when a team of archaeologists with the Works Progress Administration excavated the remains of a large shell midden at Big Oak Island composed of small Rangia clamshells as well as pieces of pottery, clay pipes, stone and bone tools, and human burials. The artifacts found at Big Oak Island were re-analyzed in 1945 by James A. Ford and George I. Quimby. Taken with similar artifacts from other prehistoric sites around the Lake Pontchartrain Basin, Ford and Quimby suggested that the Tchefuncte culture emerged from the late Poverty Point culture between 800 and 700 B.C. in the Lower Mississippi Valley and developed into what is termed the Marksville culture by 200 A.D.  

Additional archaeological digs led by University of New Orleans (UNO) anthropologist J. Richard Shenkel began in the Summer of 1972. Shenkel noted two principal site types in the eastern New Orleans marsh. One type of site, exemplified by Big Oak Island, consisted of large shell middens that resulted from seafood processing. The other site type, as at Little Oak Island, was a village or base camp consisting of an earthen midden and postholes indicative of the presence of structures. Big Oak and Little Oak Islands are two of what were once many Tchefuncte sites around the edges of Lake Pontchartrain. The Tchefuncte were hunters, fishers, and gatherers who lived in small villages centered in eastern Louisiana and stretching along the coast to west Mississippi and southeast Texas. They were also one of the first Native cultures of southeastern Louisiana to intensively produce pottery, with a remarkable range of decorative motifs.

When Dr. Shenkel and the students of UNO archeology summer program started digging in the early 1970s, the fate of Big Oak and Little Oak Islands was far from certain. The prehistoric sites were part of a large tract of land in private ownership that was slated for development. An ad hoc committee of concerned citizens formed to have Big Oak Island and Little Oak Islands placed on the National Register of Historic Places. They were successfully added in 1971. The aim of further research into Big and Little Oak Islands was to preserve the land as part of the Jean Lafitte National Historic Park. Under the Emergency Wetlands Act of 1986, Big Oak and Little Oak Islands came under the protection of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

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The intersection of St. Peter and Royal Streets is loud and busy with the passing hustle of to-go drinks, music, and tourists, making it hard to notice a faded patch of tile work outside the corner grocery store located at 701 Royal Street. However, this almost hidden marker is a powerful reminder of a long line of baking and confectionary businesses that once occupied the space and built on French and Spanish colonial baking traditions.

Mannessier’s Confectionary was the last of several bakeries to operate out of the location. An 1895 photograph shows the elegant and ornate interior of Mannessier’s, lined with the above-mentioned tilework. (Pictured below) According to owner Adolph LeClerc’s 1912 obituary, “he owned a confectionary at the time of his death, which is noted throughout the city as one of the landmarks of the old French section.” [1] The first recorded bakery to operate out of this location was Cadet’s Bakery (1789 to 1824). Frenchman Jacques Molon (or Moulon) established Cadet’s in a rear structure facing St. Peter Street and operated a mill "in which coarse flour, floated down the Mississippi River on flatboats, was reground to a finer grade – the grade that made the loaves Cadet sold over the counters of his corner store second to none. No other baker made a better brioche." [2]

Bakers and millers were among the first laborers sent by the French government to New Orleans in 1718, bringing the supplies and knowledge necessary to establish strong bread-making and bread-eating traditions. The first recorded commercial bakery in New Orleans was for a baker named Francois Lemelle (or Lemesle), who operated under the alias of “Bellegarde” at the corner of St. Ann and Chartres Streets. [3] These transplanted French bakers relied on standard methods and recipes. The types of bread baked resembled those popular in eighteenth-century France – large dense round loaves of mixed grains, smaller enriched loaves of white flour, and hard, long-lasting biscuits suitable for sea voyages. Bakeries often produced two qualities of bread, one of more refined quality and one of second quality, for those unable to afford the higher-priced loaves. This two-tiered bread system continued into the next century and reinforced bread as a marker of social class. [4] Eventually, the more elite white loaves of bread became the norm, replacing the large whole grain loaves. [5] Today, small artisan bakeries are again reversing the trend, returning to whole grain rustic loaves, but this time at an elevated status/price.

Bakeries in eighteenth-century New Orleans also resembled bakeries of the same time in France -- equipped with one or more wood-burning brick ovens, wooden peels to move the loaves in and out, long wooden dough troughs to mix the dough, and a workbench to weigh and shape loaves. By 1820, approximately sixty French bakers and confectioners operated in New Orleans close to the Mississippi River – a source for the water needed to make bread. Rainwater collected in outdoor cisterns provided an additional source of water. While the bread baked at Cadet’s bakery maintained a French identity, the bakery opened when New Orleans was under Spanish colonial control. The Spanish colonial forces had a lasting impact on bread-making history in New Orleans not through recipes but by implementing ordinances on the price of flour and the size and price of bread due to flour shortages. The Municipal Council of New Orleans also taxed the number of barrels of flour bakers consumed to collect funds for the city's illumination system. This tax replaced a system of taxation based on the number of chimneys on each building, obsolete following a fire in 1784 that destroyed many buildings and chimneys. [6] These government regulations contributed to the standardization of a loaf of bread in the city.

After Cadet’s bakery closed, several other bakers and confectioners operated in that same location (Leblanc, Lefevre, Tambelli, Vincent, Desbonnes and Bonnecayes, Mannessier, and LeClerc). [7] While always evolving and adapting, the bread-making traditions of New Orleans remain firmly established in the familiar identity of the early French bakers.

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In 1819, President James Monroe commissioned Fort Pike’s construction alongside six other forts on the Louisiana coast. [2] Originally known as Fort Petites Coquilles, Monroe commissioned the fort with the intention of protecting the city of New Orleans from a second British invasion after the War of 1812. Fort Pike received a name change to honor General Zebulon Montgomery Pike, a War of 1812 leader and avid explorer of the Louisiana territory.

Originally, Fort Pike served as a barracks for up to 400 men and provided storage for gear and ammunition. While the military that occupied Fort Pike never fired a single cannon, the walls of Fort Pike still hold a violent past. During the Seminole Wars (1817-1858), the US government attempted to push Indigenous peoples from their lands in Florida and Alabama. Because of Fort Pike’s location and accessibility, the US government imprisoned Seminole people and previously enslaved self-emancipated people within Fort Pike’s walls in order to steal the Seminoles’ lands. [3] Prior to imprisonment, the Floridian Seminole people “rejected a dubious treaty signed at Fort Gibson in 1833” between delegates of the US government and Seminole leaders that would exile Seminoles and relinquish their land to the US. [3] Shortly after this rejection, self-emancipated enslaved people sought asylum within the Seminole territory in exchange for an allyship. Unfortunately, the Seminole people interchanged the language of allyship to re-enslavement of the self-emancipated people.

[3 pg.85]

With this exchange in place, the Seminoles would require the enslaved people to serve as military support against the US government if necessary. Soon enough, it was. After multiple attempts from the US government to remove the Seminoles and their Black allies from the land, war broke out. According to historian Daniel H. Usner, Jr., “what would become known as the Second Seminole War began with the assassination of agent Wiley Thompson in December 1835 and lasted until August 1842, costing the United States more than twenty million dollars and the lives of some fifteen hundred soldiers and uncounted militiamen and settlers.” [3] The lives of the Seminole people and previously enslaved were not taken into consideration during this cost count. This devastation allowed General Thomas Jesup to deceive the Seminoles. Under false pretenses of a truce, Jesup captured Seminole leaders and forced them to turn over Seminole land. [4] Jesup arranged for ships to transport the Seminole and Black peoples to northern lands, where he promised security “in their lives and property.” [3] This promise was a deception. Instead, “Thomas S. Jesup captured the popular Anglo attitude toward the Seminoles,” stating that “‘the country can be rid of them only by exterminating them.’” [1] It was in this genocidal notion that Jesup, with the help of the US government, imprisoned and shipped Indigenous and Black people to Fort Pike. [3] Usner states that, “over many months at a time, thousands of Indian and [B]lack prisoners of war were confined to Fort Pike on a narrow split of land at the entrance of Lake Pontchartrain or to US army barracks on the downriver outskirts of New Orleans.” [3] Imprisoned Seminole and Black peoples waited for ships to retrieve them and bring them to the new lands supposedly awaiting them. By March 30, 1838, the ships never came. This act left 1,150 imprisoned people stranded at Fort Pike. Major Issac Clarke, a quartermaster assistant, took note that of these 1,150 people, most were sick and the person who was to look after their “shelter” was nowhere to be found. After being stranded for up to a year, the Seminole people emancipated themselves and left Fort Pike. [3]

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Human history from the 15th-20th centuries is dominated by Europeans’ unrelenting encroachment on and theft of land and natural resources in the “new world” and the “global south”. Though chicanery was deployed from time to time to accomplish these aims, military brutality was the invaders’ primary tool of conquest and control. The native peoples who were supplanted, dispersed or eliminated were generally at a technological disadvantage when it came to waging war against these adversaries. Psychologically, too, the occupants were sometimes slow to grasp the unmitigated greed of these new arrivals from across the sea – a greed that was hard to fathom in a land of abundance. There was plenty for everyone; that was clear. But since some people had already established long-standing domain over certain areas, the newcomers would have to find open, unclaimed territory or places generously granted to them by the natives if they intended to stay.

That line of thinking was wasted on these hordes of adventurers, however. They routinely just took what they wanted and killed anyone who dared protest. These Europeans possessed superior weapons of destruction and they fought to the death. It is not surprising, then, that they were overwhelmingly victorious in their battles year after year, century after century, place after place, until they could proclaim complete sovereignty over entire continents.

Nevertheless, every now and then the underdogs in these confrontations struck a blow for justice and gave their boorish rivals a bit of momentary comeuppance. This was the case with the Natchez Uprising of 1729.

During the early part of the 18th century when the French claimed control of the lower Mississippi River Valley, they established a military settlement near the traditional home of the Natchez Indians, 175 miles northwest of New Orleans. The French had selected the area as their tobacco-growing region and forced the native people to be part of the undertaking’s labor force – along with imported Africans. But when a new commander demanded possession of the main Natchez village to annex to his own plantation, the natives stalled the Frenchman until they could plan a proper response.

On the morning of November 29, 1729, they made their move and attacked the French fort and other living quarters, killing 230 white men but sparing women and enslaved Africans. This revolt was a major blow to the fortunes of the French and helped contribute to the collapse of the Company of the Indies, which had a contract with the French monarchy to economically exploit the territory. The Europeans later waged a retaliatory campaign against the Natchez using Choctaw (aka Chahta or Chata) and African forces (an alliance they later regretted fostering).

The fighting went on for several years, forcing the Natchez eventually to seek refuge among the Chickasaw, then the Creeks and, finally, the Cherokees before disappearing as a distinct people by the mid-1730s. In the meantime, the French repossessed the Natchez lands, which remained under white control thereafter. A hundred years later, the town named Natchez had become a major trading center for enslaved Africans working in the cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta.

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New Orleans is an Indian town. When Frenchmen and Africans arrived in the bend of the Mississippi that would eventually be re-named New Orleans, they encountered a place that had been home to Native Americans for hundreds of years.

We know from archaeology and historical accounts that just prior to colonization, there were settlements in the French Quarter near Conti and Chartres streets, in the Lower Garden District near Orange and Constance Streets, and at the mouth of Bayou Saint John.

Although we are not certain what they called this place, Tchoupitoulas Street shares an origin with the ‘village of the Chapitoulas’, or ‘river people’ in Choctaw, as recorded in 1718. The Chapitoulas were one of the small groups that moved up and down the river according to trade routes and seasonal hunting in the 1600’s and early 1700’s.

Native American know-how and labor helped build the city. In the garden behind St. Louis Cathedral, archaeologists discovered the oldest known building from the colonial period – a palmetto thatch hut built in the Indian style. Hand-built pottery, smoking pipes, trade beads, and stone hide scrapers are found in underground layers scattered throughout modern-day New Orleans.

After the founding era, the site behind the cathedral was used by Indian traders to exchange their goods on market days. Native American hunters, fisherman, and herbalists supplied the French Market well into the 1800s. Some communities of Choctaw, Chitimacha, and Houma maintained their independence outside the city while others blended into the urban population, contributing one of the many lineages that makes up Creole culture.

While many have debated the cultural origins of the Mardi Gras Indians, there is no question that this unique New Orleans tradition honors the memory of the city’s earliest inhabitants in a way that no paper archive can rival.

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As the Mississippi River flows to the Gulf of Mexico it brings sediment and silt with it, depositing them along the banks of the river and creating new land masses. Before the US Army Corps of Engineers took control of the river to allow for the safe passage of ships, the Mississippi River's path would occasionally change while winding its way towards the Gulf, creating various bends and curves. Each time the river flooded it deposited extra earth, raising the surrounding land. The banks of the river retained the most land, eventually becoming higher than the surrounding plains.

The changing pathway of the river also causes the development of distributaries, which are simply branches of a river that flow away from the mainstream. According to Edna B. Freiberg, noted Bayou St. John historian, the last main distributary of the Mississippi River in this area was cut off from the present river between approximately 600 B.C. and 1000 A.D. The banks of this distributary created the Metairie-Gentilly Ridge, where you are currently standing. This high land became the home of various native tribes who were the first inhabitants of this region.

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