Photo by Charles E. Leche, courtesy of the Preservation Resource Center.
The Cottage on Tchoupitoulas, one of the oldest homes in New Orleans, is the site of several moments central to Louisiana history. Richard Campanella tells all in his latest book.
In Richard Campanella’s latest book, the geographer and historian poses one of New Orleans’ oldest homes has a witness—albeit a silent one—standing stolidly in Uptown for centuries, as history unfurls around it. Campanella, in his signature way of historical storytelling, acts as the voice of the cottage on Tchoupitoulas—recalling, in marvelous detail illuminated by comprehensive and well-delivered research, the dramas that have unfolded in this bend in the Mississippi River.
The Cottage on Tchoupitoulas: A Historical Geography of Uptown New Orleans starts with Pierre Le Moyne, sieur d’Iberville’s very first glimpse of the lower Mississippi River Valley—described in his journals, from the visual perspective atop a “nut tree” as : “nothing other than canes and bushes,” the land becoming “inundated to a depth of four feet during high water”.
By choosing this moment as a starting place, Campanella alerts the reader that this will not simply be a story of a place and what happened there. Iberville’s impression of the land that would become the Crescent City immediately establishes the signature tensions that define this region: water and the wild, colonialism and power, a river and its people.
With “our site,” as Campanella refers to the property on which the cottage sits, as our grounding place—he tells the story of New Orleans, starting with its initial ownership by the city’s very founder, Jean Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville. Upon “our site” Louisiana history parades: when the Spanish gained control over the region, here is where meetings were held to stage the 1768 coup to oust the Spanish governor. When the rebellion ultimately failed, and the owner was banished to prison in Cuba—the people he enslaved on “our site” became some of the first to take advantage of the new Spanish policy that allowed for purchasing one’s own freedom.
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This site is also where, during the height of its own plantation era, sugar was first granulated in Louisiana. Campanella dedicates ample space to this period in time in which the property was owned by Jean Étienne de Boré, not only to emphasize the significance of this development for Louisiana agriculture, but to meditate on its implications for the thousands and thousands of enslaved individuals whose forced labor would fuel that industry. “The misery of the many brought great wealth to the few,” he writes. Besides underlining de Boré’s magnificently influential role in Louisiana agriculture and politics (he became New Orleans’ first mayor), Campanella spends just as much, if not more, time sharing as much as we can know about the hundred-or-so enslaved people who worked on his plantation—while also acknowledging the limitations of the source material, written from the enslaver’s perspective, from which that information comes. It is also during this era that the original foundation for the cottage on Tchoupitoulas was built.
The evolutions of “our site” in its post-plantation era reflect a changing New Orleans, one of increasing urbanization and transportation technologies. It saw the effects of “subdivision fever” and the benefits of the New Orleans and Carrollton Railroad (now, the St. Charles Avenue streetcar line). Under the ownership of Polycarp Fortier in the mid-nineteenth century, the property facilitated the manufacturing of ten thousand bricks a day, many of which Campanella points out likely still remain in walls and chimneys around the country. During the Civil War, federal troops took possession of the property, bringing an end to one hundred and forty years of slavery there.
“Our site’s” history as a place of healing begins in 1883, when Fortier’s wife Celestine, sold it to the government to be transformed into a Marine hospital. When the Children’s Hospital opened upriver in 1955, the cottage remained—veterans healing on one side of her, children on the other. When Nixon administration budget cuts closed all Public Health Service hospitals in 1981, the Marine Hospital’s closing ceremonies featured the Olympia Brass Band, performing a symbolic jazz funeral.
After a few years serving as the New Orleans Adolescent Hospital, the campus was eventually abandoned after damage caused by Hurricane Katrina. Campanella’s book, published by the Preservation Resource Center, comes in the wake of the 2014 purchase of the property by Children’s Hospital New Orleans and a long process of strategic planning with preservation in mind. The restoration of the cottage, which has stood there through it all, was completed in 2020 and will be used as a place “of respite for patients and their families,” according to the Preservation Resource Center. Now, Campanella concludes, “it will not be so silent, but rather filled with life and hope.” Find The Cottage on Tchoupitoulas at prcno.org.
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