Big Finds In The Big Easy - UPDATE

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                  ST. LOUIS CATHEDRAL









                                                              Big finds in the Big Easy



                                                   Cathedral site yields 3 centuries of history






Janet McConnaughey,
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Wednesday, July 9, 2008

NEW ORLEANS

Archaeologists digging behind St. Louis Cathedral are unearthing nearly three centuries of history: the porcelain head of a tiny doll, an ersatz Colonial-era pipe from the 1800s, bits of pottery that Indians may have traded to the men who built New Orleans.



Tourists watch Megan Edwards and Zachary Chase, graduate students in the department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago, during an archeological dig behind St. Louis Cathedral in the French Quarter, New Orleans, Tuesday, July 1, 2008.

(AP Photo/Cheryl Gerber)



The current cathedral, completed in 1794, is the third church facing what is now Jackson Square. A small wooden church built for the first colonists gave way in 1727 to a larger, more ornate building. That church burned down in 1778, along with most of the city.

Now the first archaeological excavation ever at St. Louis, one of the nation's oldest cathedrals, is turning up bits and pieces from the lives of people who lived and worshipped there.

There's been a lot of digging in the fenced rectangle behind the cathedral called St. Anthony's Garden. Variously in history, it has held a real garden; an encampment for people left homeless by the "Great Fire" of 1788; an ice cream pavilion and flower market; and, after a 1915 hurricane, a temporary chapel.

But until now there has never been an archaeological excavation anywhere on cathedral property, said cathedral spokeswoman Nancy Averett. After Hurricane Katrina toppled the garden's live oak and sycamore trees in August 2005, the cathedral secured a Getty Foundation grant to restore the garden and further dig into its history.

"What stories could be told," said Betty Norris, a neighborhood resident who happened on a recent open house at which University of Chicago archaeology students and assistant professor Shannon Lee Dawdy, who is supervising the dig, showed some of their finds.

The biggest find so far was at Ms. Norris' feet.

Next to an alley between the cathedral and the rectory - perhaps extending under the spot where Ms. Norris stood -were probably the earliest remnants of European settlement in New Orleans, Ms. Dawdy told the Associated Press on Thursday. There, the dig uncovered what may be some of the area's first Indian trade goods.

Fragments of American Indian pottery, some painted red and others tempered with crushed shells, were mixed about equally with French artifacts from the early 1700s - bits of ceramics and the bottom of a wine bottle.

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                                                   Beginnings through the 19th century






 
La Nouvelle-Orléans (New Orleans) was founded August 25, 1718 by the French Mississippi Company, under the direction of the French Canadian Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville at the crescent of the Mississippi River.

It was named for Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, who was Regent of France at the time; his title came from the French city of Orléans.

The French colony was ceded to the Spanish Empire in the Treaty of Paris (1763) and remained under Spanish control until 1801, when it reverted to French control.

Most of the surviving architecture of the Vieux Carré (French Quarter) dates from this Spanish period.

 Napoleon sold the territory to the United States in the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. The city grew rapidly with influxes of Americans, French, and Creole French. Major commodity crops of sugar and cotton were cultivated with slave labor on large plantations outside the city.

The Haitian Revolution of 1804 established the second republic in the Western Hemisphere and the first led by blacks. Haitian refugees both white and free people of color (affranchis) arrived in New Orleans, often bringing slaves with them.

While Governor Claiborne and other officials wanted to keep out more free black men, French Creoles wanted to increase the French-speaking population.

As more refugees were allowed in Louisiana, Haitian émigrés who had gone to Cuba also arrived. Nearly 90 percent of the new immigrants settled in New Orleans. The 1809 migration brought 2,731 whites; 3,102 free persons of African descent; and 3,226 enslaved refugees to the city, doubling its French-speaking population. Sixty-three percent of Crescent City inhabitants were now black, as Americans classified people.

During the War of 1812, the British sent a force to conquer the city. The Americans decisively defeated the British troops, led by Sir Edward Pakenham, in the Battle of New Orleans on January 8, 1815.

As a principal port, New Orleans had the major role of any city during the antebellum era in the slave trade. Its port handled huge quantities of goods for export from the interior and import from other countries to be traded up the Mississippi River. The river was filled with steamboats, flatboats and sailing ships. At the same time, it had the most prosperous community of free persons of color in the South, who were often educated and middle-class property owners.

The population of the city doubled in the 1830s, and by 1840 New Orleans had become the wealthiest and third-most populous city in the nation. It had the largest slave market. Two-thirds of the more than one million slaves brought to the Deep South arrived via the forced migration of the internal slave trade. The money generated by sales of slaves in the Upper South has been estimated at fifteen percent of the value of the staple crop economy. The slaves represented half a billion dollars in property, and an ancillary economy grew up around the trade in slaves - for transportation, housing and clothing, fees, etc., estimated at 13.5 percent of the price per person. All this amounted to tens of billions of dollars during the antebellum period, with New Orleans as a prime beneficiary.

The Union captured New Orleans early in the American Civil War, sparing the city the destruction suffered by many other cities of the American South.



FROM

wikipedia.com

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                                        FRENCH QUARTER

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