When a Meteorite Landed in New Orleans

New Orleans is a city of legends. The histories of battles and beauties and brutalities abound. Carlos Marcello. Marie Laveau. Jean Lafitte. But there is one such myth that goes relatively untold in the history books, the tours, the plaques. Mostly living on the whispers of a select few locals, the subject of the 131-year-old story lives on just about as conspicuously as it possibly can: sitting on the golf course of New Orleans’ Audubon Park.

While on my search for the ancient landmark, I asked one of the golfers if he knew where I could find it, to which he explained he was from out-of-town and had no idea what I was talking about. Mid-conversation, over his shoulder, I suddenly saw it, just a few feet away. The meteorite. The grand rock stuck out so prominently in the field of golf carts, trees, and lakes, I wondered how it had possibly taken me this long to find it.

Up close, the strokes of maroon and brown blend together to create the bronze shade painting the meteorite. Light green lichens fill the small and large vesicles scattered on the weathered surface. Overgrown weeds, daisies, and puddles from the afternoon rain adorn the bottom, but the boulder’s depth in the ground remains evident. It’s possible that spending over a century battling floods and seasonal hurricanes in New Orleans has aged the meteorite more than its falling from the sky.

My father is the one who first told me about the Audubon Park meteorite, years ago, strolling not very far from this very spot. Some other elder had told him the story as a child, how the giant rock had fallen from the sky and landed right here on the park grounds. Like most other locals who have been told the story as a sort of fable, he had no idea where it had originated. After some digging, I found the answers in the archives of the New Orleans Roosevelt Review, a publication published exclusively for guests of The Roosevelt Hotel. But first, we have to go back further, to another article, in another publication.

"My father is the one who first told me about the Audubon Park meteorite, years ago, strolling not very far from this very spot. Some other elder had told him the story as a child, how the giant rock had fallen from the sky and landed right here on the park grounds."

In April of 1891, The Daily Picayune reported that the meteorite crashed into the city before daylight. The writer described the landing as loud enough to awake sleepers as far away as Biloxi and Atlanta. According to the article, the boulder’s grand arrival shook houses and broke window panes from as far as a mile away, but left no one hurt. The rush of firemen and police to the scene added to the chaos that had already broken out in the city. Eight hours later, at exactly noon, the boulder’s fires still had yet to die down. Officials were collecting fragments as far as two hundred yards away from the main rock.

The reporter described the extraordinary chemical composition of the meteorite “as the most wonderful phenomenon of the kind which has ever visited our earth,” specifically since “meteorites are of several different types, but in the great New Orleans wonder, all of these types are apparently combined.” Outside of the unique composition—which he described as “almost pure iron” with “holosiderite, etched with crystalline figures; cellular iron imbedded with silicates or siderolite; and the stony mass of silicates, with a little iron or sporadesiderite, and of masses without iron, or osiderite”—the meteorite was measured to be eight feet in height and twenty-one feet in circumference.

Most readers believed every word reported in the paper. After all, New Orleans has long been a place of mystical happenings. Some readers, though, took note of the publication’s date: April 1st.

Over half a century later, in April of 1945, The Roosevelt Review settled the debate, coining The Daily Picayune’s article as “one of the most famous hoaxes in New Orleans journalism.” A magnificent cluster of iron-nickel and crystallines had not, in fact, fallen from the sky and landed in the soil of New Orleans.

The Roosevelt Review article revealed that the meteorite is actually an iron ore from the hills of Alabama. The Daily Picayune told locals that the meteorite appeared in 1891, but the boulder in Audubon Park had already been there for years, since its original display as an exhibit in the World Cotton Centennial of 1884-1885. Because of the boulder’s extreme size and weight, it was never removed from the park grounds, and still remains there to this day.

An April Fool’s joke typically only lasts for the day, but The Daily Picayune’s gag has managed to stay alive for 131 years, proving the power of a fantastical story well-told and the imagination of New Orleans. Surviving floods and dozens of devastating hurricanes, the lasting historical display from the World Cotton Centennial can still be found on the golf course of Audubon Park.