Beautiful Crescent: A History of New Orleans

Free Beautiful Crescent: A History of New Orleans by John B. Garvey, Mary Lou Widmer

Book: Beautiful Crescent: A History of New Orleans by John B. Garvey, Mary Lou Widmer Read Free Book Online
Authors: John B. Garvey, Mary Lou Widmer
Tags: History
far-flung ports of England and France. At one port in France, 375 families arrived (comprised of 1,574 people).
    Since the Spanish needed farmers to provide food for the colonists in Louisiana, bowing once again to expediency, they transported the Acadians on Spanish ships from the ports of France to make their homes in Louisiana. The Acadians settled in the Lafourche-Teche area, where they would become substantial farmers and permanent inhabitants of the region. The Spanish gave the newcomers land grants, livestock, and grain to begin their new lives in southwest Louisiana. To Louisiana, they brought warmth and gaiety, love of home and family, and a love of the land. Like the Germans, they provided food for the tables of the colonists. But unlike the immigrants who eventually amalgamated, they kept to themselves in the bayou country, working their land and establishing their homes. They spoke almost exclusively to one another, using the seventeenth century French of their forefathers. Few of them spoke anything but French until the First World War.
    The Disastrous Fires
    In 1788, during Miró’s administration, the first of two terrible fires in New Orleans occurred. On Good Friday, March 21, 1788, Don Vincente Jose Nunez, the military treasurer, was in his private chapel in his residence on Chartres Street near St. Louis. It was a very windy day, and a candle fell from the altar, setting the chapel on fire. Flames spread and engulfed the entire city. Residences and business places burned to the ground. The fire spread around the Plaza and ignited the town hall, the arsenal, the parish church, and the quarters of the Capuchins, all of which disappeared into smoke. Prisoners were released from jail just in time to escape the flames. In the morning, tents covered the plaza and the levee, and only chimneys remained of the 856 buildings that had been lost. Nearly half the town was in ashes.
    Six years later, in 1794, some children playing on Royal Street accidentally set fire to a hay store. Within three hours, 212 stores and houses had burned down. The new buildings that had been built at the bottom of the Plaza escaped, but only two stores were left standing, and once again, the levee and the Plaza became camping grounds for the city’s inhabitants.
    From this time on, buildings were erected with sturdier material. Tile roofs came into general use. Homes now displayed Spanish-American features, and the beauty of the town, as well as its safety, was improved. The new buildings stood shoulder-to-shoulder with party walls, each a different color of stucco over brick. The overall effect was Caribbean, from which area much of the architecture was borrowed.
    An ordinance had been passed that buildings of more than one story be made of brick. Walls were designed with lovely arcades, and patios came alive with the plangent sounds of fountains. There were prominent doors and windows and heavy iron bolts and gratings, all of which adorned sturdy structures. As a finishing touch, magnificent wrought-iron lacework decorated the balconies of the two- and three-story dwellings. The French called the inner yards “courtyards,” for they were the heart, le coeur, of the household. The Spanish called them patios, a word that sounded like horses’ hoof s on cobblestones.
    Charles III of Spain died in 1788 and was succeeded by Charles IV, a weak and ineffectual ruler. Soon after, Father Antonio de Sedella (known as Père Antoine to the French) was sent to Louisiana as a representative of the dreaded Inquisition to introduce this tribunal to New Orleans. Governor Miró had the Commissary of the Inquisition arrested at night, put on board a ship, and taken back to Spain. In his official dispatch to the Spanish government, Miró commented: “When I read the communication of the Capuchin, I shuddered . . . The mere name of the Inquisition uttered in New Orleans would not only be sufficient to check immigration . . . but would also be capable of

Similar Books

Christmas is Murder

C. S. Challinor

Chloe

Cleveland McLeish

S.O.S

Will James

Conan: Road of Kings

Karl Edward Wagner

His One Woman

Paula Marshall

Cutter and Bone

Newton Thornburg