Bring Forth the Fiery, Untamed Steeds

The lost mule market district of New Orleans

by

Countless photos of New Orleans’ bygone days reminisce of men flaunting daring mustaches and women pulling up hems to dodge gutter filth—coaches and wagons clogging the streets. They give pause to otherwise hectic moments, full of hustle and bustle, hawking and chimes. For every dozen or so pedestrians, there’s an equine. Horses, considered the noblest steed, pulled coaches and cabs for the gentry, raced at the Fairgrounds, and performed heroic feats alongside firefighters. Mules, the long-eared horse-donkey hybrid—often perceived as dumb, lazy, and famously stubborn—worked the dirty jobs, pulling massive wagons, towing boats along canals, and lugging large cypress logs out of the swamp. Despite stereotypes, mules dominated Southern roads and farms, including urban streets, for nearly a century as the preferred draft animal over horses or oxen. Farmers and planters concluded that humble mules could out-muscle a horse and tolerate the Louisiana heat better, while in New Orleans, merchants and retailers made deliveries, collected laundry, and sold produce from mule-drawn wagons. Eclipsing horses in numbers and dutifully employed, the mule became a sort of blue-collar beast of Louisiana’s cotton and sugar industries, and a silent side player in the Queen City of the South, as it stewarded trade between global markets and the vast Mississippi River Valley.  

Where did these draft animals come from? Louisiana farmers and planters did not typically breed draft animals; instead, they purchased equine raised in the interior South—in Tennessee, Missouri, and Kentucky—or to the west in Texas. Auctioneers and dealers purchased substantial ‘heads’ of horses and mules from the Bluegrass Basin region and drove them overland, shipped on water or rail to markets in Louisiana. Though plenty of New Orleanians owned their equine and stabled them near home, most were company-owned, kept in large purpose-built stables, and simply rented out. To supply the incessant demand for cheap draft power, entrepreneurs opened large barns and liveries in New Orleans in patterns of spatial convenience, unfettered by ordinances or zoning codes. 

Early newspaper advertisements shine light on the city’s geography of horse and mule stables. As early as 1822, the Circus Street Livery Stables operated on today’s South Rampart and Common Street in what was then the Faubourg St. Mary, today’s Central Business District. Two blocks down were the Eclipse Stables at Union and Phillippa. Today’s O’Keefe Street boasted auctions of 150 horses and mules. In subsequent decades, competitors would also set up shop in this conveniently centralized vicinity, forming something of a cluster by 1860, when it extended to Gravier Street with W.K. Spearing Stables. Around the corner, Maxwell & Leonard’s Stable on Baronne Street became the largest advertised equine dealer in Louisiana. 

Equines, like men, went to war during 1861-1865, leaving the streets of New Orleans with fewer beasts of burden during the chaos of the Civil War. Yet afterwards, mules would ascend in the South, becoming its predominant draft animal for over half a century. As cotton and sugar prices rose, so did the need for mules. As additional acres were cleared or drained for new crops, so expanded the mules’ distribution. As more commodities needed to get to market, so increased the number of mules on country roads, city streets, and port wharves. 

Breeders experimented with jackstock and horses to develop mules preferable for purchase. Categorized by size, smaller cotton mules, ranging from eight hundred to one thousand pounds, likely became the preferred beast for most urban drayage needs. Vendors, truck farmers, and merchants needed an animal to transport their goods for sale and deliveries, but one that wasn’t expensive to own and keep. Sugar mules hauled cane, streetcars and heavier materials. Draft mules, the largest of the three, plowed Louisiana’s thick soil and worked in forestry, lugging cypress or pine from the state’s ample woodlands. 

By 1875, the decades-old agglomeration of stables in the heart of New Orleans developed into a bona fide industry district, known generally as the “mule market.” George Engelhardt observed in 1904, “in the greater cities everywhere, concerns akin assemble together. Thus the grocery and provision lines, the import coffee trade, the iron works, the printing and publishing houses, the horse and mule markets have each their own special locality somewhere in or about this particular quarter of trade.” Indeed, it centered along the 300 to 500 blocks of Baronne Street between Common and Lafayette streets, the city’s “population centroid,” that theoretical point around which residents are evenly distributed, as geographer and Tulane University Professor Richard Campanella points out. Where there were people, port activity, and industry, there was a demand for mules, be it for pulling streetcars, garbage wagons, cotton floats, or construction bricks. For stable and livery proprietors, collocating by other commercial districts also meant further convenience to potential clients. So long as downtown land values did not rise too high or neighbors complain about the nuisances, market forces drove the mule market to be situated in the urban core. 

The mule district had a distinctive streetscape—you knew when you were there. Businesses changed names constantly, but operations remained constant. Barns are not the most aesthetically pleasing forms of architecture; function dominates the form. The barns in the district were spacious to accommodate the constant movement of equines and were generally uniform with large bays and center halls for ventilation, while topped with a hayloft. Another common ‘footprint’ of large liveries included a perpendicular driveway known as a “hitch alley” where potential buyers could test the beast of burden for heartiness, speed, and workability.

Stables had multiple overlapping commercial modes: to board equines, to rent out for day use, or to sell. Brays echoed down Baronne before dawn, when the beasts bellowed for food. Work began shortly after. While the equines worked, stable workers replenished water, mucked stalls, shod hooves, swatted at flies, and repaired buggies. Auctioneers and customers brokered deals, talked down prices and relegated tall tales of heroic feats amongst mishaps. 

Who worked the quadrupeds? Given that drayage was an archetypal blue-collar job, men of all backgrounds and races worked in the industry. Census records indicate that in 1880, 28.2% of draymen were African Americans, and 30.5% listed as “foreign.” Stablemen would jest at a newcomer’s intrigue at the prospect of working with a ‘green’ mule (slang for an untrained mule, not literally sporting a green coat).

The horse and mule market were lucrative trades that entailed sub-industries and trades. Wheelwrights acted as mechanics to fix wagons; farriers shod hooves and treated ailments; tanners designed proper fitting harnesses and saddles. Then there were the wagon-builders, the carriage vendors, the plough dealers, the rope salesmen, and so forth. During the late nineteenth century peak of the mule markets, these trades typically dotted the Faubourg St. Mary between Baronne Street and the cotton wharves along the Mississippi River ten blocks away. Cotton funneled in and out of the city, and factors and financiers convened in the aptly named Cotton District that centered around Carondelet and Gravier, near the mule markets. Though offices comprised the district rather than gins, buyers needed cotton “samples” to grade the lint and put a price on a bale. These samples were hauled in wagons nicknamed ‘cotton floats.’ With a little flair and elaborate decor, cotton floats eventually transitioned to Carnival parade floats. A photo by George François Mugnier, taken during the heyday of the mule market district, simply named Cotton Sample, shows two men sitting on top of a large heap of cotton that nearly reaches a French Quarter gallery with a two-mule team, waiting patiently to move.

With the new century came new technological era that sputtered, backfired, careened—and changed everything. Though mules worked well into the mid-20th century, the internal combustible engine would forever change transit and agriculture. As automobiles became more common on the road, the city’s livery industries faced new challenges.

Baronne was going through a transformation. What had previously been known as the Faubourg St. Mary increasingly became a standard modern American downtown commercial district. Real estate mogul Emilien Perrin noticed the potential of Baronne Street and quickly achieved fame for developing the De Soto Hotel (now Le Pavillon Hotel), and transforming Baronne into a commercial and entertainment thoroughfare. Perrin set his sights on the mule market, viewing its unsightly stables as “practically unimproved property.” With Perrin’s hefty cash flow, the cumbersome stable owners of 500 Baronne eagerly sold for a “fanciful” $100,000 in 1905, and the city eagerly anticipated for the other liveries to follow suit. 

Simultaneously, the city legislated a series of measures to push the mule markets out. The first ordinance prohibited “the driving of mules through public streets unhaltered” after a mule, and subsequently two men on horseback, strayed and bolted through a neighboring business on Baronne. Mule drives were already banned from Canal Street after a green mule previously ran through D.H. Holmes department store. In 1905 the city cow-kicked again with more ordinances to push the mule market away from the urban core. The Brandao Ordinance aimed to prohibit stables on residential streets and had a retroactive clause, meaning that decades-established stables that served neighborhoods out of the periphery of the district would also have to relocate or close shop. Large firms and the longtime horse baron of Baronne Street, William Leonard—then 70 years old—bitterly fought the proposal. One owner told the Times-Picayune that the city “simply want[s] to dictate to us where we should carry on our business, and this is something that we are not going to stand for.”

What the defenders of the district were up against, of course, were not simply obstinate officials but rather a changing world that would eventually render their industry nearly obsolete. Livery proprietors on Baronne Street finally found a compromise in 1906, when several firms partnered with the New Orleans Terminal Company. The rail company established a horse and mule market behind the stockyards in Arabi and a new series of barns at the intersection of Bienville Street and Carrollton Avenue in Mid-City. The Times-Picayune boasted that the new structures, “were patterned after the great stables in Kansas City, but many improvements were devised . . . The result is that, while they are not as extensive as those in Kansas City, the stables are the finest in the world.” Not as extensive, but still impressive—three of the large barns could quarter up to fifteen hundred mules.

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“Time immemorial Baronne Street has been the center of the mule trade,” a Times-Picayune reporter wistfully reminisced on the pending decline of the district and the trade. Baronne Street became a new beacon of progress, boasting car dealerships rather than liveries. By 1915, there were no more stables on Baronne.

With origins in the 1820s and a peak in the late 1800s, New Orleans’ mule market helped supply Louisiana with, as the Times-Picayune noted, “patient and obstinate animals plodding through the streets, conveying heavy loads from place to place and assisting in the commercial progress of the city.” Relics of the mule markets are sparse today. Typically, these locations are now parking lots or high-rises. 

In the 21st century, mules are the only animals used to pull sight-seeing carriages in New Orleans. A new generation of drivers dote on the animals; they are now seen more as companions than machines, and the city, alongside the LASPCA, regulates the carriage industry with nearly sixty municipal codes. No longer hauling tons of sugarcane or cotton bales, the animals use only a fraction of the efforts their predecessors did. The stables of Baronne may be gone, but the mule’s legacy plods on.