Basile, Achilles, Congo and many other enslaved people labored on Étienne de Boré’s plantation within today’s Audubon Park. Alongside planting and harvesting sugar cane, enslaved labor on the Boré Plantation included fishing, masonry, woodworking, blacksmithing, and bringing cypress logs from the swamps to cut and use for building. [3] Though these enslaved people cultivated the land that Audubon Park now resides, it is Boré who continues to receive the credit.

Between 1847 and 1875, Charles-Étienne Arthur Gayarré, the grandson of Étienne de Boré, published five books about antebellum Louisiana. Gayarré, with his connections as the Louisiana Secretary of State and reputation as a historian, produced a lengthy, romanticized publication about Étienne de Boré’s sugar development and industry, named “A Louisiana Sugar Plantation of the Old Regime.” [1] Within this text Gayarre dubbed Boré the master of sugar in New Orleans. And the "savior of Louisiana,” stating that Boré’s sugar industry was a "bourgeois epic.” [2] With Gayarré’s political and social influence, his historical writings shaped the public memory of Boré and slavery in Louisiana.

Unwittingly, Gayarré’s work also highlights the work of enslaved people that labored and lived on the Boré Plantation. Although Gayarré drives romanticism into the stories of those enslaved by Boré, this may be the only time the names of the enslaved are mentioned within the historical record.

Among the stories of enslaved people told in “A Louisiana Sugar Plantation of the Old Regime,” is mention of Basile, a “commander” over those enslaved on the Boré Plantation. Gayarré describes Basile as an enslaved man invested with “limited power” and “armed with an enormous whip, at least twenty feet in length.” [3] Gayarré states, however, that Basile did not command with the whip but with words and songs to the enslaved working the sugarcane fields.

Basile was likely a slave driver for the Boré Plantation. Slave drivers were usually enslaved men who worked as an assistant to the white overseers and enslavers. [4] Typically, slave drivers had some power in directing the work happening within the fields. Though experiences differed among enslaved people, some slave drivers used their power as a “go between” to protect the enslaved from punishment from the overseers. [4]

Like Basile, Achilles also worked on the Boré Plantation. Gayarré states that Boré named this enslaved man Achilles for his fiery attitude, implying that this was not his birth name. [4] His story presents a reminder that enslaved people lived within and outside of slavery, creating their own identies, families, and homes while simultaneously subjugated to the violence of slavery.

The last named enslaved person within “A Louisiana Sugar Plantation of the Old Regime” is Congo. Gayarré tells a story of Congo that represented him as a Sambo character, stating that the overseer tasked Congo to pass a note to Boré, who in turn gave it to a portrait of Boré rather than Boré himself. The Sambo character myth, created by Stanley Elkins in his book Slavery: A problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (1959) describes enslaved people as “docile, infantile, lazy, and irresponsible.” [6] Like Elkins, Gayarré portrays Congo as unintelligent and reliant on enslavers and overseers for direction. [5]

Other historians, such as Deborah Gray White, combat this stereotype by countering the Sambo character with an actor of resistance. Enslaved people would fake illnesses, “misplace” or destroy tools, work slowly, or act unintelligent to create daily acts of resistance. [6]

Though remembered within a white supremist text, each of these enslaved men labored, lived, resisted and cultivated what is now Audubon Park.

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In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, many of the people who lived in the Melpomene neighborhood of Central City rented their residences with some addresses seeing rapid turnover. Even though people filled features like privy shafts rapidly (so that the date of the filling episode can be dated to within a few years), the neighborhood’s high resident turnover can make connecting archaeological assemblages to specific families tricky. This is the case at 1304 Howard Street in Square 350, the block historically bounded by Erato, LaSalle (or Howard), Thalia, and South Liberty Streets. In 2013, archaeologists excavated a large wood-lined privy shaft near what would have been the rear property line of the address. While most of the material within it dated to the end of the nineteenth century, it was probably filled in the early 1900s, perhaps as late as 1910.

The U.S Census enumerated a laborer named Leo LeBlanc living there in 1900 with his wife and two children; a year later, the City Directory lists them as still there, along with a laborer named Paul Manuel. The directories list at least three other residents at the address between 1902 and 1909. When the census came again in 1910, a large and complex household of renters were enumerated at the address, including William Smith, a laborer identified as Black, and his wife Virginia, a washerwoman, identified as Mulatto; another woman named Mattie Hawkins, and her teenage sons, both laborers (at a wharf and a lumber yard), all identified as Mulatto; and a lodger named Lem Diggins, also a laborer at a lumber yard. One can speculate about the connections that brought this household together: perhaps Hawkins was part of Virginia’s extended family, while one can also guess that Diggins worked with her son at the lumber yard. Such networks of extended family and friends were vital for sustaining Black families in the era. By 1912, the occupants of the address shifted again.

Who then was responsible for the artifacts within the wood-lined privy at 1304 Howard Street? It contained a rich assemblage of materials: large quantities of ceramic tablewares, in a variety of forms (plates, saucers, cups, bowls, and serving vessels), vessels for hygiene like wash basins and chamber pots, bottles from medicines, perfumes, soda and mineral waters, bitters and schnapps, perfumes, foods, and alcoholic beverages, glass tablewares, lamp parts, tools, cutlery, and numerous small personal items, like buttons, smoking pipe fragments, hair combs, and items of jewelry. Occasional highly distinctive items may give hints about the identity of the occupants, like the images featured below.

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By the early 1900s, the Melpomene neighborhood in Central City was a densely populated urban neighborhood, where many residents worked in occupations related to shipping, particularly in the nearby rail yards. Broadly speaking, the area was home predominantly to working class immigrants of European descent in the period between Reconstruction and the end of the nineteenth century, with the neighborhood gradually becoming a predominantly Black neighborhood in the first decades of the twentieth century. The demographic changes in the neighborhood can be tracked in documentary records like the census and city directories, which provide information at the address level about residents’ race and ethnicity, household composition, occupations, and property ownership.

Larger-scale political events always loomed in the background of neighborhoods with such racially integrated patterns of residence. The period after Reconstruction was a particularly turbulent one, as the city’s Black residents found opportunities for social advancement subverted and blocked. Black voter registration in Louisiana had reached a high of 128,150 by 1888, but white supremacists attacked their rights on all fronts. The 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision legalized segregation, and the new Louisiana Constitution of 1898 distinguished the right of citizenship from the “privilege” of the vote, using this language to disenfranchise Black voters. By the next year, Black voter registration plummeted to just over 12,000; by 1930, there were just over 2,000 Black voters left in the entire state. White supremacists segregated schools and public facilities, attacked biracial labor organizations, and used extralegal violence like lynching to reinforce state-sanctioned oppression.

Archaeological assemblages can only indirectly illustrate such widespread changes, but they do help explore the individual strategies that working class families employed to live and, in some cases, to prosper, even in the face of considerable adversity. They also help us to understand how people experienced such broad changes at an everyday level: in foodways and diet, in health, in childcare, in social interactions, and in recreation, as displayed through consumer behaviors.

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In 2013, archaeological firms conducted test excavations in City Square 383 in the Melpomene neighborhood, the city block once bounded by Erato, Freret, Thalia, and South Robertson (or Locust) Streets. Testing focused on lots along the former corner of South Robertson and Erato Streets, where archaeologists identified a number of brick building foundations and midden (domestic waste) deposits. In 1895, the construction of a double house at 1300-1302 South Robertson Street replaced an earlier frame dwelling. This structure would eventually function as a combination business and residence, variously identified as a corner grocery, saloon, barber shop, soft drink establishment (as it was called after Prohibition), retail liquor business, and barroom over some five decades. A man named Saverio (Americanized to Sam or Jim) Salvaggio served as the longest tenured proprietor of this shop, and at least some of the archaeological material recovered from the address is likely related to his family’s tenure at the location from around 1905 until 1925.

Both Sam and his wife Josephine (born Giuseppa) arrived in the United States from Bisacquino, Sicily in the latter part of the 1880s, just before the infamous 1891 lynching of eleven Italian men by a mob angered over the murder of a New Orleans police chief. This violent episode, which became an international scandal, must have affected the Salvaggio’s sense of security in their new country. In 1883, Sam and Josephine married and in 1902 Sam naturalized his status as a United States citizen. A man named Hillary M. Nugent served as the witness in Sam’s naturalization. This is presumably the same Hillary Nugent listed as the owner of the 1300-1302 South Robertson Street property in 1900, an Irish-born clerk living there with his wife and four children. Nugent sold the property to Sam Salvaggio in 1908, but apparently Sam already participated in the business there in 1903, when a short blurb in the Daily Picayune mentions the results of a pool tournament at “Salvaggio’s,” identified as being on that corner.

According to the 1910 Census, Sam Salvaggio lived at the address with Josephine, their three children, and Josephine’s mother. All of these people still resided there in 1920, although daughter Virginia, now an adult herself, had married Leo Conners. Virginia continued to live at 1300-1302 South Robertson Street, along with Leo and a four-month-old infant, while the Salvaggios had added another daughter themselves.

Sam Salvaggio ran afoul of the city’s increasing attempts to segregate social spaces in 1908, when the City cited him for violating the ‘Gay-Shattuck’ law, which mandated that saloons and bars be racially segregated. Italian immigrants found themselves in a difficult situation in regard to segregation, as racist ideologues and anti-immigrant activists sought to cast doubt on the ‘whiteness’ of people from southern and eastern Europe and stigmatize them as criminals.

As for many operators of saloons and barrooms, the federal prohibition of alcohol also created legal and financial problems for the Salvaggios. Many bar owners tried to circumvent the new legislation. The City fined “Savario Salvaggio” $50 for violations of the “Federal Dry Law,” and a 1924 account of an arrest describes Frank Salvaggio, Sam’s son, as a “two-timer” for liquor-related crimes. In 1929, the police arrested Frank Salvaggio and Vincent Puleo, husband of Salvaggio’s daughter Mary, in connection with the discovery of a 75 gallon still.

Perhaps these legal troubles (and the difficulty of operating a ‘soda’ vending establishment profitably) caused Sam to give up the business on South Robertson. Sam is last associated with the property in 1925. Sam Salvaggio died in 1929, survived by Josephine Salvaggio who died in 1957, while their family thrived in the city’s growing civically active Italian American community.

The images below illustrate a number of archaeological findings from this site that tell us more about the Salvaggio family’s time living in the Melpomene neighborhood.

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In working class neighborhoods like the Melpomene in Central City, the importance of women’s labor in the household’s economy is visible both in historical records and archaeological materials. Women worked as dress makers, cooks, and laundresses. Their work financially sustained households, especially in times of labor instability.

From 1900 to 1930, Black men living in the Melpomene neighborhood found jobs around the nearby railyards, though this period saw a general shift away from higher paying skillful or union jobs and towards unorganized labor or service work. This shift played a part in a concerted effort by business and industry to marginalize Black workers and subvert biracial labor cooperation, a campaign that continued throughout the twentieth century.

After 1900, Black residents made up an increasing proportion of the Melpomene neighborhood. However, it provided a frequent home for immigrants who found themselves at the margins of white society, especially those considered non-white in the two-tiered racial hierarchy of the segregated South. Chinese immigrant Sue Wah operated a laundry at 1233 South Liberty Street from 1900-1908. The late-nineteenth century saw large-scale immigration from Sicily and from Eastern Europe. Archaeological artifacts found at the corner of South Robertson and Erato Streets, indicate that the Salvaggios, a Sicilian American family, lived there in the early 1900s.

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In 2013, archaeological consulting firm Earth Search, Inc., excavated a block of the Melpomene neighborhood originally bounded by South Liberty, Erato, Clio, and Howard/LaSalle Streets. Earth Search identified brick foundations and artifacts from a number of different addresses across this particular block. The most informative materials recovered came from a wood-lined privy shaft located along a property line between two homes at 1220 and 1222-1224 Howard/La Salle Street. Archaeological findings suggest that the privy was filled during the 1930s, presumably representing a cleaning episode linked to a family moving from the house or a change in ownership. Glass bottles and containers, many of them intact, filled the privy along with a smaller collection of ceramic tablewares, personal items, and butchered animal bones.

The 1930 Census recorded a woman named Minnie Puckett as the owner of 1222 Howard Street. The Census described Minnie Puckett as a 49-year-old “Negro” widow, born in Mississippi to parents from Virginia. The Census valued the home, where she resided with her 13-year-old granddaughter, at $4400. Minnie Puckett’s thirty-year-old daughter, Lucille Puckett, rented the other side of the house. Also born in Mississippi, Lucille Puckett lived with her four daughters: Edna (10), Helen (8), Genieve (5), and Minnie (3), named for her grandmother. Minnie Puckett resided at this house until her death, after which the house appears in an advertisement for a property seizure and auction by the Civil Sheriff in 1937. By the time of the 1940 Census, the Puckett family no longer owned 1222 Howard Street. The Pucketts’ departure from the house seems like the sort of life event that caused the filling of the privy.

The archaeological assemblage from the privy gives us a small glimpse of everyday life in the household, and of the hopes and obstacles faced by Black families of this generation. The images below illustrate and describe some of the objects found in the Puckett family privy.

The Puckett family’s story epitomizes the aspirations of Black migrants to New Orleans in the early twentieth century, but it also shows the precarity of their position in a segregated society in which oppressive forces devalued their labor and sabotaged their chances of property ownership. The Pucketts moved to New Orleans from Mississippi by 1920, when both Minnie and Lucille lived at 2605 Calliope Street. Minnie was already widowed and working as a laundress. Lucille’s husband, Eddie Carr, a laborer from Alabama, and Andrew Puckett, Minnie’s son working as a brakeman on the railroad, also resided with Minnie and Lucille on Calliope Street.

It must have taken considerable hard work for the family to purchase the property on Howard Street, particularly after the death of Andrew Puckett in 1920. Legal problems surrounded Andrew’s succession, trapping Lucille in litigation issues until the late 1920s. The loss of the property must have been a devastating blow to Lucille and her family.

Of course, the Puckett family’s dreams didn’t end at the moment in time captured by the archaeological assemblage at 1222 Howard Street. Lucille’s children grew up and had families of their own, eventually moving into the Calliope Housing Project nearby. The story of the house lost at 1222 Howard Street passed through family generations as a lesson in being careful in business and personal affairs, and a warning to not be taken advantage of. Lucille’s family remembers her tough and hard-working character, taking on extra jobs to provide more for her family. She insisted that they shouldn’t be content with their lot and should strive for better. Her daughter inherited some of her tastes for fine china and elegant petticoats, symbols of affluence in a racist society structured to keep them as second-class citizens. Many of Minnie’s descendants still reside in New Orleans and saved photos of Minnie, Andrew, and Lucille that they shared with researchers for this project.

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Between the 1930s and 1960s, racist policies at every level of government pushed Black residents of New Orleans into lower-paying jobs and racially segregated neighborhoods. Throughout the nation, local and federal government agencies used coded terms like urban renewal, racial covenants, and red-lining to describe their efforts to segregate housing and homeownership. These policies limited possibilities for Black residents to achieve independence, financial security, and other opportunities for their families.

Of course, Black New Orleanians worked to resist and counter the effects of structural racism in whatever ways they could. The written historical record gives glimpses of individual families who tried to use homeownership as a foothold on economic security in the Melpomene neighborhood. Segregation in an urban setting also provided avenues for prosperity with the formation of businesses catering to Black customers that white-owned businesses often excluded.

By engaging archaeological artifacts excavated from the Guste Homes site in 2004, alongside the written historical record that documents the lives of families who lived in the Melpomene neighborhood prior to its 1961 demolition, we can gain a deeper understanding of residents’ lives.

For instance, Edward Shannon, first a renter at 1219-1221 Howard/LaSalle Streets, owned the property by 1930 while working as a superintendent for a life insurance company. He later opened a furniture repair business at the same location. Another home at 1216 Freret was owned by a series of railroad porters in the period from 1920-1940, while, in 1926, a Black family of Puerto Rican descent headed by Jose Fuentes purchased a home at 2317 Erato and lived there through 1949.

It is often a mixture of luck and circumstance when a particular household is represented in the archaeological record of a neighborhood, and sometimes it can be very difficult to link material remains with specific families. However, the Puckett family at 1222-1224 Howard/LaSalle can be traced in both documents and in the objects they left behind in a privy shaft, apparently filled when they moved out in the 1930s.

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In 1964, the Urban League of Greater New Orleans published the results of “A Survey of the Recreational, Social, and Economic Conditions of the Negro Population of the William S. Guste, Sr., Homes and the Adjacent Areas.” The Housing Authority of New Orleans (HANO) recently opened the Guste Homes and housed a population of 2,443 residents, not including the high-rise home for elderly residents that made up a part of the project. Many saw such housing projects as an important first step in addressing the needs of low-income residents of the City. However, the report recognized that housing covered only one aspect of neighborhood revitalization; of those 2,443 residents, 1,731 were young people, and the report emphasizes that for them “recreational and cultural opportunities in the area [were] woefully inadequate.”

Surveys like the one produced by the Urban League can give important glimpses into the demographics and social conditions in the neighborhoods that organizations identified as slums. In the seven tracts of the census considered part of the Guste area (roughly the blocks bounded by Dryades, Claiborne, First, and Calliope Streets, encompassing the Guste Homes and the adjacent areas) the overall population consisted of 28,293 people, 77% of whom the census classified as “Negro.” Streets other than major thoroughfares were unpaved, inadequately lit, and “cluttered with debris.” The survey deemed the tenement buildings adjacent to Guste Homes occupied by renters as “overcrowded and hazardous.” According to the survey, a woman with a family of seven children complained of rats almost as big as cats in the Melpomene neighborhood, saying that several of her children had been bitten and that the rodents occasionally invaded her broken ice box.

Of 103 households the Urban League surveyed in detail, only 29 had lived in New Orleans all their lives. Many of those living in the Melpomene neighborhood recently transplanted to the city from rural parts of Louisiana and Mississippi, and felt isolated from social life and economic opportunities in the city. Ironically, many cited the improved educational opportunities for their children as a reason to move to the city, but the two schools that served Black children in the neighborhood, McDonough No. 36 and No. 38, were so overcrowded that students attended in what was called the “platoon system,” splitting the student body into two groups, each attending only half a day, switching over at lunch time. For working parents, this was a hardship, and many residents complained about the adverse effects the lack of childcare facilities and community centers had on young people in the neighborhood.

Naturally, residents were not happy about these conditions. Tenants complained about the conditions of housing and their inability to get absentee landlords to make needed repairs, though the survey noted that the few owner-occupied properties showed “care and pride” in their upkeep. Many renters felt that landlords overcharged for rent, creating cycles of poverty from which it was almost impossible to escape.

Underlying all of this was segregation and structural inequality. A racist social, political, and economic structure -- meant to keep Black residents of the city in permanent second class citizenship -- limited their choices about where to live, where to work, where to go to school, and even where to shop and socialize. Soon enough, the Guste area would become one of many centers of organizing for the Civil Rights struggle in New Orleans. But the inequalities within it were not inevitable. The Melpomene neighborhood that became the Guste Homes was always a site of struggle for residents of the city, and we can trace those struggles over generations of change in the neighborhood.

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Today’s Audubon Park was once the location of the Boré Plantation. In the late eighteenth century, Étienne de Boré converted his plantation crop from indigo to sugar cane due to significant financial struggles. This conversion was only made possible by Antoine Morin, a chemist and a free man of color originally from Saint-Domingue. [3]

On the Boré Plantation, Morin innovated a new process that allowed for sugar granulation. This innovation led not only to the increased wealth and status of Étienne de Boré, but also jump-started the Southern Louisiana sugar industry. While the ability to granulate sugar in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries caused an economic boom for plantation owners and the local economy, it came with the aggressive expansion of the slave trade and deadly working conditions for people enslaved on sugar plantations. The domestic slave trade expanded to meet sugar plantation owners increased demand for enslaved labor. The sugar industry directly contributed to the forced relocation of hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children from the Upper South to the Lower South, disrupting lives and tearing apart families.

After the introduction of the sugar industry to Louisiana in 1795, New Orleans became a hub for the domestic slave trade. [5] Sugar production in eighteenth century Louisiana was labor-intensive and brutal for enslaved people. Sugarcane grows in tropical climates and requires a full eleven or twelve months to reach maturity. Louisiana differs from other sugar-producing regions in the Caribbean belt, such as Saint Domingue or Jamaica, in that Louisiana experiences annual frosts in the winter months. Facing the possibility of losing their crop to frost, Louisiana enslavers and plantation owners forced enslaved people to work day and night during the harvest months between October and December because of sugarcanes’ short window of harvest. [1] Sugar harvesting proceeded at a furious pace, each day enslaved people worked sixteen to eighteen-hour shifts. [2] Nobody was too young or too old to work. Child labor in sugar production was common, leaving children exposed to boiling kettles, hot furnaces, and machetes. [2]

While harvest season was brutal in its breakneck pace, labor on sugar plantations was difficult for the rest of the year as well. The spring and summer months were not restful, as enslaved people tended to other crops and maintained farm equipment and plantation buildings. Combined with the dangers of harvesting, the furnaces, and mills, environmental factors on sugar plantations also made a dangerous life for enslaved people. While the possibility of disease was a risk all year for enslaved people, the hot and swampy summer months created an increased risk for diseases like malaria, cholera, and yellow fever. [2]

Across the United States, Louisiana sugar plantations were the only plantations where the death rate of enslaved people exceeded the birthrate. The dangers of disease, the violence of the slave trade, and the sugar production’s grueling labor for enslaved people were all exasterbated by Boré’s sugar plantation. [4]

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In 1794, Étienne de Boré (1741-1820) forced enslaved men and women to convert his failing indigo fields into a sugar plantation. [4] This forced labor camp sat across the lower parts of today’s Audubon Park. The plantation history is memorialized through historical markers in the park depicting Étienne de Boré as the man that revolutionized sugar production in Louisiana. These markers leave out historical figures essential to Louisiana's sugar industry.

Beginning in the 1730s, plantations around New Orleans produced mostly tobacco and indigo. [3] But by 1795, sugarcane became an enormous money-making crop around the Caribbean as the demand for sugar escalated in Europe. Beyond its use as a sweetener, people used sugar for food preservation and medicinal purposes. [1]

Because the sugarcane crop grew well in the subtropical environment of Louisiana, Boré aimed to capitalize on what people of the time considered “white gold.” [2] Before 1795, refining sugar cane into granulated sugar on a large scale had not yet been done successfully and was only done in experimentation. [3] To ensure his sugar plantation’s financial success, Boré hired Antoine Morin, a chemist and a free man of color originally from Saint-Domingue. [3] Boré heard of Morin’s engineering success through Antonio Mendez a contemporary of Boré and the owner of the Terreaux-Boeufs Plantation located in St. Bernard Parish. [7] Morin, through his work with the Terreaux-Boeufs Plantation, cultivated a reputation for having the best technical knowledge of sugar production and granulation. [4] According to historian Richard J. Follet, Antoine Morin was “an alumni of distinguished Parisian colleges” and “proved an excellent chemist and botanist who enjoyed considerable fame in New Orleans as the premier sugar maker in the colony.” [4]

Today, historians have little knowledge of Morin’s sugar making process. To begin his sugar industry, Boré purchased sugar cane from Antonio Mendez. In 1795, Boré commissioned Morin as his sugar maker. [5] This commission required Morin to organize the work of enslaved people to build a sugar mill and factory, as well as planting the sugar cane fields. [4] Morin innovated a new sugar-making process and produced the first granulated sugar for commercial sale in Louisiana through the Boré Plantation. [5]

In 1796, Morin and Boré’s first sugar crop yielded twelve-thousand dollars profit, which is worth the equivalent of over three million dollars today. So how did Boré become the memorialized revolutionary of the Southern Louisiana sugar industry? During the nineteenth century, Charles Gayarre, Boré’s grandson, was a writer, historian and the Secretary of State in Louisiana. Gayarre grew up on the Boré plantation and wrote a lengthy, romanticized version of Boré’s sugar development, innovations, and industry. [6] Through Gayarre’s political and social influence and historical writings, Boré’s name lived on as master of sugar in New Orleans, with Gayarre naming Boré as the hero of a "bourgeois epic" and the "savior of Louisiana.” [4]

Gayarre’s works do not include any information on Antoine Morin. It is clear that Antoine Morin and his work as a chemist shaped the Southern Louisiana sugar market. However, popular histories continue to memorialize Étienne de Boré as the sole contributor and maker of the Louisiana sugar boom. Without Antoine Morin or the labor of enslaved people, Boré would not have developed a successful sugar plantation.

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Today, Audubon Park is a space dedicated to leisure in New Orleans. Every day, hundreds of New Orleans tourists and locals enjoy the public jogging path, lagoons, picnic shelters, golf course, playgrounds, and the Audubon Zoo. However, during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the land that is now Audubon Park was the Boré Plantation (lower Audubon Park) and the Foucher Plantation (upper Audubon Park). [1] The Boré and Foucher were “sister” plantations, meaning that the Borés and Fouchers were related by family ties. The Audubon Nature Institute highlights the plantation history of the park with plaques, markers, such as the “de Boré” oak tree, and artifacts like eighteenth-century sugar kettles placed throughout the park. 

From 1776 to 1794, the Boré Plantation produced mostly indigo. [2] After a failed indigo harvest in 1794, Étienne de Boré (1741-1820) ordered enslaved people to convert the fields into a sugarcane plantation in order to avoid financial ruin. [3]

Popular histories often credit Étienne de Boré, an enslaver and the first mayor of New Orleans, with establishing the sugar industry in Southern Louisiana. This historical narrative ignores the grueling and deadly work that the sugar industry required of enslaved people. This tour reframes Boré’s contributions to the sugar industry and centers the work of enslaved and free people of color who made the industry’s growth possible. 

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Shirley Thompson, the youngest of the Thompson sisters,  joined the New Orleans Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) Freedom Rides as they tested the Interstate Commerce Commission’s desegregation of bus transit. At eighteen years old, and just a few days after graduating from George Washington Carver High School, Shirley boarded her first Freedom Ride on June 6, 1961, to Jackson, Mississippi. [1]  The previous Freedom Rides into Mississippi were met with violence, an increase in jail penalties from two months to four, and a request from President John F. Kennedy to the Freedom Riders for a “cooling-off period.” However, CORE leaders remained diligent in their protests and continued ahead with their Freedom Rides and sit-ins across Mississippi. [2] Because of CORE members’ vigor and determination to fight white supremacy, police jailed activists for their continued acts of civil disobedience, imprisoning Riders in the Parchman State Penitentiary when local jails exceeded capacity. Police arrested Shirley Thompson for “breach of peace” while attempting a sit-in within a waiting room. Given the increased sentence of four months, police took Shirley to the Parchman State Penitentiary. [3] While there, Shirley stated that “she was slapped by police officers.” [4] CORE activist Abdul Aziz Khaalis documented the brutalities at Parchman State Penitentiary in his diary, later published online as a series entitled Letters to My Children. Khaalis stated: 

"Yes, they took our mattresses from us. We still sang freedom songs. Yes, they took our clothes. Yes, we froze when our bodies touched the steel bunks with the air turned on high. Yes, we were eaten by insects released from jars into the cell block with the air turned off and the windows closed to make it hot like hell as we were bitten and eaten everywhere. Yes, they dragged a screaming white Freedom Rider past our cells. They had a wrist breaker attached to his right arm. It was a handcuff with big screws that hit the nerve points in his wrist. It was attached to a chain with a wooden handle. They dragged him, flipped the chain, making his body flip like a fish from the agony he experienced, and I felt it In my cell and still hear his screams when I have the memory. Yes, they put stuff in our food to give us the runs. Yes, they were devil-mean hateful jailers." [5]  While newspapers reported one piece of Shirley’s testimony from within the walls of Parchman State Penitentiary, Shirley likely faced other violence as well. Jean Thompson posted a bond for her sister and the prison released her. Shirley’s release date is unknown.  Before her death at age 47, Shirley also participated in the 1962 Louisiana Freedom Summer, 1962 Mississippi Freedom Summer, and 1963 March on Washington alongside her sister Alice Marie Thompson. 

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On May 24, 1961, Jean Thompson, at age 19, participated in the Freedom Ride from Montgomery, Alabama to Jackson, Mississippi as civil rights activists tested the Interstate Commerce Commission’s desegregation of bus transit. Jean’s bus was the first to make it safely to its destination in Mississippi. Previously, white groups acted violently to activists and burned Freedom Ride buses. [1] This safe arrival was short-lived. According to the Times-Picayune, city police arrested Jean along with eleven other riders “moments after they alighted from their buses and set foot in a white waiting room at the bus terminal.” [2]  Jean and the other Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) Freedom Riders refused to move from the white waiting room after police ordered them to leave. The police then immediately booked the riders on “two counts of refusing to move on when ordered by police and causing a breach of the peace.” [2] The following day, Jean appeared in front of the municipal court led by Judge James L. Spencer. CORE’s attorney advocated for the riders stating that all people have the right to travel. Judge Spencer did not alleviate the penalties and charged Jean and the other riders with the maximum penalty of a $500 fine and up to six months in jail. [2] 

On November 1, 1961, Alice Marie Thompson joined other New Orleans Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) members to test the Interstate Commerce Commission’s new policy of bus desegregation at the New Orleans Trailways bus terminal located on Loyola Avenue. [1] Information regarding the test’s impact on Riders or the New Orleans community has little documentation. However, according to Julia Aaron-Humbles, another New Orleans activist, some locals regularly took care of the New Orleans CORE members, providing housing, food, nurturing, and training to prepare those like Alice for the violence ahead. [2]  On November 14, Alice Marie Thompson and other CORE members tested bus desegregation in Hattiesburg and Poplarville, Mississippi. The police arrested Alice and charged her with a “breach of peace.” [3] The mayor of Poplarville, Pat Hyde, fined Alice Thompson $250.00 and sentenced her to two months in jail. The police released Alice, along with two other activists, Frank Nelson and Patricia Smith, through a paid bond. [4] On November 29, 1961, Alice also joined in the testing of bus desegregation in McComb, Mississippi along with her sister, Jean. While there, a mob of white people attacked Alice and other CORE members, shouting “Kill ‘em! Kill ‘em.” [5] According to the New York Times writer Claude Sitton, Alice and the other CORE members fled the bus terminal, rested for the evening, and then attempted a sit-in at a local cafe after a reported gas leak at the bus terminal. White men attacked the CORE members, kicking and shoving them through the cafe door onto the street. [6]  Though the Freedom Ride to McComb was the last for Alice Thompson, she continued to engage in other civil rights activism including the 1962 Louisiana Freedom Summer, the 1962 Mississippi Freedom Summer, and the 1963 March on Washington, known for Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream Speech.” [7]  

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McDonoghville Cemetery is a burial site of enslaved and formerly enslaved people. This cemetery was once a part of enslaver John McDonogh’s plantation. According to a 1915 interview with Jacob Dinckel, then sexton of the McDonoghville Cemetery, this “‘colored’ graveyard consisted of an army of white wooden headboards quaintly lettered and surmounted by crosses [...] with their feet to the rising sun.” [1] These wooden markers are long-gone and today McDonoghville Cemetery is dominated by marble, granite, copings, and some unmarked mounds. Upon his death in 1850, John McDonogh was buried in the McDonoghville Cemetery and later reinterred in his native Baltimore in 1860. [2] According to Dinckel, after McDonogh’s death, a person formerly enslaved by McDonogh buried Black and white people side by side in the McDonoghville Cemetery. [1]

The history surrounding the ownership and municipal jurisdiction of McDonoghville Cemetery is complicated. In 1890, forty years after McDonogh’s death, the McDonoghville Cemetery came to the attention of Joseph A. Shakspeare, Mayor of New Orleans, when The Daily Picayune reported that a citizens’ group complained that “a colored man claim[ed] to be the owner of the ground.” [3] According to the article, the man caring for the cemetery said that “his father, [...] belonged to McDonogh and the cemetery was left to him,” and that he “... sells lots in the cemetery but can show no title when called upon to produce it.” [3] Mayor Shakspeare subsequently ordered the relocation and racial segregation of the people buried in the cemetery. [1] In 1891, Mayor Shakspeare granted the Jefferson Parish Police Jury use of the cemetery on behalf of the City of New Orleans. [2, 4] Since then, the City of New Orleans has maintained a hands-off approach to the McDonoghville Cemetery, with the rare exception of allotting funds to maintain McDonogh’s tomb. [2]

When McDonogh purchased plantation land on the Westbank of the Mississippi River in the early nineteenth century, the property was considered part of Orleans Parish. In 1825, the Louisiana State Legislature created Jefferson Parish by carving land out of Orleans Parish, this new parish line bisected McDonogh’s plantation. [5] Today, the parish line runs diagonally through McDonoghville Cemetery. [6] When the City of Gretna, located in Jefferson Parish, incorporated in 1913, the portion of McDonoghville Cemetery on the Jefferson side of the parish line was then also within the boundaries of the City of Gretna. John Ehret, then Mayor of Gretna, formed a commission to enable the City of Gretna to take control of McDonoghville Cemetery. [7] A title search referenced by historian G. Leighton Ciravolo “suggests that McDonoghville Cemetery has never been formally conveyed either to the Parish of Jefferson or the City of Gretna.” [2]

In 2016, the Jefferson Parish Historic District sponsored the erection of a state marker recognizing the historical significance of McDonoghville Cemetery. This marker states that John McDonogh created the cemetery and it is the final resting place for “many prominent local families.” Even though historical evidence documents that McDonoghville Cemetery served as a burial site for enslaved and freed people, the marker makes no mention of them. Community members are appealing to the various municipalities and organizations connected to McDonoghville Cemetery to have McDonoghville Cemetery’s historical significance as a burial site of enslaved and freed people formally acknowledged.

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The French may claim New Orleans French bread, but later immigrant bakers' influence on the city's bread-making traditions is undeniable. At the turn of the nineteenth century, a wave of Sicilian immigration to New Orleans left a lasting impact on the city's culture and economy. Nowhere is this more evident than the French Quarter, where traces of a once-thriving community known as "Little Palermo" are still etched in tiles and memories. Many of the Sicilians who arrived in New Orleans lived and worked in the French Quarter and forged a path in the commercial food business, unloading produce on the wharves, truck farming, and establishing grocery stores, restaurants, macaroni factories, and bakeries.

The 1891 City Directory lists a baker on St. Philip Street named Agostino Lombardo, who arrived in New Orleans from Trabia, outside of Palermo. [1, 2] There were almost 200 bakers in New Orleans at that time, most with German or French names. Agostino Lombardo was one of only two bakers at that time with an Italian last name (the other was Lorenzo Federico, a pasta maker, also on St. Philip Street). With his father Francesco and brother Filippo, Agostino Lombardo soon moved to 1210 Decatur Street, where "F. Lombardo and Sons Bakery" operated until declaring bankruptcy in 1941. [3]

Lombardo Bakery was one of the earliest recorded Italian bread bakeries in New Orleans. [4] With entrances facing both Decatur Street and French Market Place (previously Gallatin Street), Lombardo Bakery served the port, and the growing Sicilian community clustered near the bustling French Market. The grandson of Francesco Lombardo, Frank Lombardo, wondered in a 2015 oral history, "why do they call this the French Market? It's all Italians. Sicilians!" [5] This tight-knit community added their language, traditions, and foods to an already vibrant mix of New Orleans cultures. Other small, multi-generational Sicilian bakers such as Lanasa, Ancona, Aiovolasiti/Ace Bakery, Lovoi, Ruffino, Evola, Gendusa, Brocato, and LoGiudice/United Bakery, continued the French and American bread-making traditions of New Orleans. But they also added their own styles of bread to the mix, including the famous "poor boy loaf," St. Joseph's bread, braided sesame twist loaves, sfincione pizza, and the other well-known loaf, the muffuletta. Lombardo's bakery laid the groundwork for this dynasty of Sicilian bread-makers to follow.

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Bread-baking is a hard, physically demanding job. Before the Civil War, most bakery owners relied on apprenticeships and enslaved laborers to handle the workload. Postbellum bakery workers inherited a system of forced on-premises lodging, 16 to 23-hour shifts with no days off, low wages, hard manual labor, and dangerous, unsanitary conditions. The New Orleans bakers’ union took shape in the 1880s to address these concerns. Although largely a forgotten force, the New Orleans bakers’ union is an important piece of the city's baking and labor history. It is responsible for what are now considered standard labor practices (eight-hour workday, overtime, paid vacation, and safety measures).

On January 13, 1886, representatives from the local bakers’ union joined those from ten other cities in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to establish the Journeymen Bakers’ National Union. In New Orleans, the Journeymen Bakers’ Union presented a list of demands at their offices at No. 52 and 54 Exchange Place (now 220 Exchange Alley). [1] Although the union occupied several different downtown addresses throughout its existence, this first recorded location was on a busy commercial thoroughfare that housed several other labor organizations. A group of fifty-three mostly small bakery owners formed a separate Baker Bosses’ Union to “support and assist the Journeymen Bakers’ Union.” [2] It was later renamed the Master Bakers Association of New Orleans and was tasked with negotiating agreements with the labor union.

By 1892, the union expanded to include ice cream and candy makers, renaming itself Union of Journeymen Bakers and Confectioners. 1892 also marked the general strike in New Orleans when several other labor movements joined together to force business owners to negotiate. The bakers’ union demands included a closed union shop, a six-day workweek, a twelve-hour day (fifteen on Friday), the abolishment of forced lodging, union product labeling, and two holidays. [3] Most of the owners agreed to the union demands. [4]

One unexpected result of the union’s action to highlight working conditions was an increased public concern not for the well-being of bakers, but customers, due to perceived unhygienic bakeries and “unclean bread.” Advertisements in the early 1900s emphasized “sanitary bakeries” and bread “untouched by human hands.” [5] The New Orleans Health Department passed several related sanitary ordinances around this time, requiring bread to be placed behind a screen or wrapped. A 1909 newspaper article described the "crusade" of the pure food department of the city's Board of Health to enforce bakery ordinances. The inspectors frequently targeted immigrant bakers in the Sicilian section of the French Quarter. [6]

The bakers' union continued to strengthen in size and power, becoming one of the city's largest labor organizations. [7] The New Orleans branch of the union, Local No. 35, opened its doors to Black bakers in 1918, a rare example of an interracial bakers' association in the South, but common in a city where Black and white laborers often worked together in the same trade. [8] A 1939 bulletin by the United States Department of Labor titled "Wages, Hours, and Working Conditions in Union Bakeries" points to a changing industry and union. As bakery work shifted from small hands-on shops to factory-type bakeries, the list of job descriptions moved beyond ovenmen, mixers, and benchmen to include machine operators, maintenance men, elevator operators, clerks, and janitors. The union bakeries in New Orleans maintained more hands-on jobs than other cities. They also had slightly lower wages and a longer workweek than other cities. [9]

Collective bargaining negotiations preceding a threatened strike in 1947 revealed that 90% of bakeries in New Orleans employed union labor. These 1,100 union bakers produced 700,000 loaves of bread per day to feed a city. [10] While the bakers’ union no longer operates in New Orleans, many of the benefits and conditions it fought for still linger in the city’s remaining traditional bread bakeries. Local No. 35 laid the groundwork for bakery workers to earn their daily bread.

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On the morning of November 14, 1960, Ruby Bridges, a six-year-old Black New Orleanian, took her first steps through the front door of William T. Frantz Elementary School (now Akili Academy). A mob of white people greeted Bridges with jeers and threatened to remove their children from Frantz Elementary if Bridges entered the premises. Bridges later described the loud mob’s roars as “being at Mardi Gras.” (1) Bridges did not understand what was happening that morning, only that she would be attending a new school.

Federal marshals escorted Bridges to school. Bridges did not go into a classroom the first day but remained in the principal’s office watching parents remove their children from the classrooms. (2) In addition to student withdrawals, teachers quit as they refused to teach African American children. One teacher remained to instruct Bridges. Once Bridges finally joined other students at play, she realized the reason for her isolation. Bridges attempted to make new friends; however, she was told by a fellow student that they were instructed by their parents not to play with her because of the color of her skin.

In 1999, Ruby Bridges formed The Ruby Bridges Foundation in New Orleans. The foundation’s mission is “to promote respect and equal treatment to all races.” (3) Through her foundation, Bridges attends public speaking engagements, hosts a virtual classroom and podcast, and she also has a book club. Bridges’ desire is to teach others how to overcome racism. Bridges is the subject of the Norman Rockwell painting, The Problem We All Live With, (4) and a movie made about the history-making event that shaped her life. Bridges visited the White House under former President Barack Obama’s administration when Rockwell’s painting was on display. President Obama, stated “I think it’s fair to say that if it wasn’t for you guys, I wouldn’t be here today.” (5)

Bridges has two elementary schools named in her honor, one in Alameda, California, and the other in Woodinville, Washington. Bridges has a bronze statue dedicated in her honor at William T. Frantz Elementary (present day Akili Academy). (6)

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