Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Fall 2007 - (Page 42)

New Orleans’ Faubourg Tremé Rooted in Tradition assembled in a green expanse called Place Congo to dance the bamboula and perform the hideous rites imported from Africa by the Yolofs, Foulahs, Bambarras, Mandigoes, and other races of the Dark Continent.” The neighborhood’s namesake, Claude Tremé, acquired the land that became Tremé from the dissolution of the Morand-Moreau plantation. In 1798, he began selling lots. Along with French and Spanish colonialists and immigrants, the first 37 purchasers included three free women of color: Gotton Meunier, Agnes Mathieu, and Rose Tisouneau. The three ladies bought lots on St. Claude Street, initiating a lasting affinity between people of color and the Tremé neighborhood. The following year, other people of color purchased lots. In 1810, the city of New Orleans paid $40,000 for the remainder of the Morand-Moreau plantation. Tremé’s early years paralleled New Orleans’ emergence as a major American city. Victory in the 1815 Battle of New Orleans burnished the city’s prestige in an American setting quite different from its French-Spanish-African roots. By 1820, New Orleans had become the largest city in the South and the fifth largest in the country. New Orleans’ 8,700 buildings included coffee roasting opera- St. Augustine’s Church remains a focal point for Tremé. Designed by architect J.N.B. de Pouilly and built in 1841-42, at the time of its construction half of St. Augustine’s congregation consisted of Creoles of French and Spanish ancestry and recent French immigrants; the other half was composed of free people of color with a few pews reserved for slaves. HISTORIC NEW ORLEANS COLLECTION tions and oyster houses, the 6,000-volume Orleans Library, a convent for Ursulines nuns, hotels, lottery offices, brickyards, cotton presses, “fumigatory public baths,” and “six large rum distilleries, three for gin, and nine for cordials.” New Orleans embarrassed puritanical New Englanders who recoiled at the sight of men playing billiards in rooms visible from the street on the Sabbath, not to mention the city’s other scandalous diversions. “Oh where are our good men of Salem?” one New England traveler exclaimed. New Orleans in the 1820s contained a population of 13,000 Whites, 7,000 enslaved Africans, and 6,000 free people of color. In the French Quarter, a public improvement campaign produced newly paved streets near the river that boasted curbstones, replacing the wood-planked streets and raised sidewalks. The Mississippi River propelled the city’s growth as an American trading powerhouse. Steamboats, barges and keels, thousands of flatboats, and other seaworthy vessels jammed the city’s river and waterways. As a teenager, Abraham Lincoln made a 1,200 mile river journey by flatboat to trade Illinois produce for cotton and tobacco that he then sold on the riverfront of New Orleans. Up through the 1840s, Tremé’s population density seemed confined to the riverside of North Claiborne Avenue. In subsequent years, homes arose on North Claiborne’s lakeside creating an Old Tremé and a New Tremé. Even before the Civil War, Tremé produced persons 42 LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES\Fall 2007 HISTORIC NEW ORLEANS COLLECTION

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Fall 2007

Contents Friends & Letters Editor’s Column Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Big Charity: A History of New Orleans’ Public Hospital Historic New Orleans Collection Making Groceries: A History of New Orleans Markets New Orleans’ Faubourg Tremé: Rooted in Tradition Jazz Notes Louisiana Association of Museums Chinatown New Orleans Louisiana Foodways A Question of Secession Louisiana Architecture Louisiana State Museum The Unnatural History of Cypress Parish Terra Incognita Bookstand Sound Advice Forum

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Fall 2007

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