107 markers in the database — showing 1–60.
New Orleans, LA · est. 2010
On August 29, 2005, as Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, the federal floodwall along the vital 17th Street Canal gave way at this spot, unleashing floodwaters that killed hundreds. It was one of some fifty failures in the region's flood-protection system that day. A 2008 federal court laid the collapse at the feet of the Army Corps of Engineers, even as a 1928 law shielded the agency from financial liability.
Abbeville, LA
This building on Père Mégret Street in Abbeville dates to about 1920, an era when the town — named for the French priest who founded its parish — was maturing into an established commercial center. Its inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places honors its place in that early-twentieth-century streetscape. The address itself carries the name of the missionary whose 1843 land purchase gave rise to the community.
New Orleans, LA
This sturdy commercial building at 700 South Peters went up in 1910–11 for the Orleans Manufacturing Company in New Orleans's bustling riverfront warehouse district. Its brick-and-timber construction is typical of the working structures that stored and moved the goods of a booming Gulf port.
Abita Springs, LA
Abita Springs grew up around an old Choctaw village that took its name from the medicinal springs prized in the area. The site included the Choctaw people's last burial and execution grounds nearby, used until about 1880. The springs later drew health-seekers, but their reputation began with the Native community that lived here.
Grand Coteau, LA
Opened in 1821 in the small Louisiana town of Grand Coteau, the Academy of the Sacred Heart became one of the state's earliest schools, founded by Mother Audé and Sister Layton of the Religious of the Sacred Heart. The order had been brought to America in 1818 by Philippine Duchesne, a French nun later canonized as a saint. For two centuries the academy has educated young women on the same grounds.
St. Tammany Parish, LA
Abbé Adrien Rouquette (1813–1887) was a New Orleans poet who became a Catholic priest and spent his last decades as a missionary among the Choctaw of the Bayou Lacombe region, from 1859 until his death. He lived so closely among them that they called him 'Chata Ima' — 'like a Choctaw.' His life bridged the literary world of the city and the Native communities of the north shore.
New Orleans, LA
This land was once the Allard plantation, tied to some of colonial Louisiana's founding families. Purchased in the 1770s by Don Santiago Lorreins from the estate of Francisco Hery — called Duplanty, who built New Orleans's first Cabildo in 1769 — it passed to Louis Allard and, in 1845, to the philanthropist John McDonogh, who gave it to New Orleans in 1850. Like other Louisiana plantations of its era it was worked by enslaved laborers, and the tract later became the heart of the city's City Park.
Abbeville, LA
In the summer of 1843, the missionary priest Père Antoine Désiré Mégret purchased 160 arpents of land along the bayou to establish a church, a rectory, and a burial ground — the seed from which the town of Abbeville grew. The oldest surviving grave belongs to Eufemie Broussard, laid to rest in 1852, with the land's seller, Joseph LeBlanc, buried here two years later. The cemetery preserves the French Catholic roots of Louisiana's Acadian country in stone and inscription.
New Orleans, LA
Standing in New Orleans, this monument to Andrew Jackson carries his ringing declaration in defense of national unity. Jackson first won fame here as the general whose ragtag force turned back the British at the Battle of New Orleans in 1815, the climactic victory of the War of 1812. He went on to become the seventh president, and his famous toast against disunion became a byword for federal resolve.
New Orleans, LA
Erected in 1826, the Bank of Louisiana survived repeated fires and, after the bank's liquidation in 1867, led a remarkable second life — serving briefly as Louisiana's State Capitol in 1868–69 and later as a criminal court, an American Legion hall, and more. Architect James Gallier, Jr., added the Royal Street entrance after an 1861 fire.
Baton Rouge, LA
In September 1779 the fighting of the American Revolution reached the Gulf Coast, where Spanish forces under Governor Bernardo de Gálvez captured the British-held fort at Baton Rouge. As Spain's ally-in-effect against Britain, Gálvez opened a southern front far from the thirteen colonies, and this marker recalls the men who fought there. It stands as a reminder that the Revolution was won on a wider map than the eastern seaboard alone.
Mandeville, LA
On September 10, 1779, Captain William Pickles won a naval fight off this shore, and on October 16 the British living between Bayou Lacombe and the Tangipahoa River formally surrendered to him. The action helped bring the Revolutionary War's Gulf Coast fighting to a close in Spanish Louisiana. It was part of the wider struggle in which Spain, allied against Britain, pressed the British out of the lower Mississippi region.
New Orleans, LA
Purchased in 1853 by Judah P. and Joseph Benjamin, this Hurstville-suburb house sheltered their widowed sister Rebecca Benjamin Levy until the U.S. Treasury confiscated it in 1889 as enemy property. Its frequent visitor, Judah P. Benjamin, rose from U.S. Senator for Louisiana to Secretary of War and then State for the Confederacy. The house once faced St. Charles Avenue and was relocated to this spot in 1892.
New Orleans, LA
Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, the French-Canadian colonizer who founded New Orleans in 1718, spent decades governing France's struggling Louisiana colony along the lower Mississippi. Erected in 1955 for the Louisiana Purchase Sesquicentennial, this statue offers the "homage of Louisiana, Canada, and France" to the man who chose the crescent bend in the river where the city still stands.
Abbeville, LA
This Abbeville building dates to around 1890, the Gilded-Age decades when south Louisiana's small towns were knitting themselves together with brick storefronts and a growing commercial life along the bayous. Its listing on the National Register of Historic Places recognizes the survival of that era's everyday architecture. In time the structure became home to a seafood restaurant and oyster bar, part of the Gulf Coast's deep culinary tradition.
Lake Charles, LA
Blue Star Memorial Highways originated in 1945 as a garden-club tribute to World War II service members, named for the blue-star service flags of the era. This Lake Charles, Louisiana marker was sponsored by the Lake Charles Garden Club and the Diggers & Weeders Garden Club with the Louisiana Garden Club Federation and the state Department of Transportation. It brings southwest Louisiana into a nationwide chain of remembrance.
New Orleans, LA
This Garden District mansion was built in 1857 for Albert Hamilton Brevard, designed by architect James H. Calrow. Over the following century it passed through prominent hands — including federal judge John Minor Wisdom — before becoming, in 1989, the home of novelist Anne Rice and her husband, poet and painter Stan Rice.
New Iberia, LA
This New Iberia grave holds Willie 'Bunk' Johnson, a Louisiana trumpeter whose playing reached back to the earliest days of New Orleans jazz. Largely forgotten by the 1930s, he was rediscovered by music scholars in the 1940s and fitted with new teeth and a horn so he could record again. His late-career comeback made him a living link to the music's founding generation.
Jefferson Parish, LA
In 1862 Confederate and Louisiana authorities laid out Camp Parapet as part of the northern defenses of New Orleans, expecting an attack from upriver. Instead the city fell to a Union fleet coming up from the Gulf, and the fortifications passed into Federal hands, serving as a Northern training camp for the rest of the war.
New Orleans, LA
On this spot in New Orleans' Vieux Carré, a French colonial church first rose in the 1720s, only to burn in the catastrophic fire of 1788. A generous benefactor funded its grand successor, dedicated on Christmas Eve 1794, which was later enlarged and largely rebuilt at mid-century into the landmark that presides over Jackson Square today. Raised to a cathedral and eventually honored as a minor basilica, it has anchored Catholic life in the city for nearly three centuries.
New Orleans, LA
In 1719, in the earliest years of French Louisiana, the colony's attorney general Pierre Chartier de Baulne secured the first land grant along Chapitoulas Road, at the former village of the Colapissa people. His family were among the first colonists to settle the area that would grow into greater New Orleans. The concession marks where European agriculture began overwriting an Indigenous landscape.
St. Mary Parish, LA
The Chitimacha are Louisiana's only tribe still living on a portion of their ancestral homeland, in the bayou country of St. Mary Parish. Like many Native nations, they sent their sons and daughters into America's armed forces in numbers far beyond their share of the population, serving through the World Wars and the conflicts that followed. This monument gathers that record of service into one place of honor, closing with the soldier's vow "Lest We Forget" and a phrase in the Chitimacha language, "Qapx Kimaa."
Covington, LA
Built in 1846 by London craftsman Jonathan Arthur for descendants of English settlers who had lived under British West Florida, Christ Church was consecrated in 1847 by Bishop Leonidas K. Polk. It remains the oldest public building still in use in Covington.
Jefferson Parish, LA
In the summer of 1927, a twelve-square-mile stretch of Jefferson Parish incorporated first as a village and then, weeks later, as a city, with Charles P. Aicklen serving as mayor and bringing natural gas service the following year. But the young municipality moved to outlaw the gambling that flourished nearby, and casino interests fought back in court. By November 1928 the Louisiana Supreme Court had voided the incorporation entirely.
New Orleans, LA
The carousel in New Orleans's City Park has delighted riders since about 1906, its hand-carved animals and ornate pavilion making it a rare survivor of America's golden age of amusement rides. Lovingly restored in 1988, it is one of the last antique wooden carousels of its kind still turning. The National Register listing recognizes both the ride and its building.
New Orleans, LA
Built in 1859 for the Kentucky commission merchant Robert H. Short and designed by noted architect Henry Howard, this New Orleans mansion is famous for its cast-iron cornstalk-and-morning-glory fence. During the Federal occupation the house was seized as Rebel property; in 1864 it briefly served as the residence of Louisiana's Union governor Michael Hahn and then of Major General Nathaniel P. Banks. It was returned to Short after the war, and he lived there until his death in 1890.
Covington, LA
Columbia Street Landing was the working waterfront where Covington began. From the early 1800s, schooners and steamers tied up here to move cotton, lumber, bricks, whiskey, and mail between this harbor and the river cities beyond. Oyster luggers still delivered their catch into the late 1930s, and many of the area's first settlers first stepped ashore at this spot.
New Orleans, LA
Cucullu Row is the oldest intact row of houses in the French Quarter, six brick rowhouses built in 1828 for the merchant Simon Cucullu. But the corner's history runs deeper: here stood the 1730 celestial observatory of the architect-scientist Pierre Baron, followed by the Condé Market of 1782 and a fish market that grew until the great fire of 1788 swept the complex away. For nearly a century, from 1877 to 1970, Desporte Pharmacy served the neighborhood from these buildings.
New Orleans, LA
Architect Nathaniel C. 'Buster' Curtis designed this house in 1963 for his own large family, and it stayed with the Curtises for half a century. Boldly modern in a city famed for its older styles, it was the first modernist house in New Orleans and the first work by the noted firm Curtis & Davis to reach the National Register. The city named it a landmark in 2010, and the National Register listing followed in 2014.
Mandeville, LA
The Dew Drop Social and Benevolent Hall in Mandeville dates to 1895, built by a mutual-aid society of the kind Black communities across the South formed to provide fellowship, insurance, and burial support. Its simple wooden hall became a stage for early jazz, hosting musicians in the music's formative decades. Now on the National Register, it stands as one of the oldest rural jazz halls in the country.
Mandeville, LA
The Dew Drop Social and Benevolent Hall in Mandeville dates to 1895, built by a mutual-aid society of the kind Black communities across the South formed to provide fellowship, insurance, and burial support. Its simple wooden hall became a stage for early jazz, hosting musicians in the music's formative decades. Now on the National Register, it stands as one of the oldest rural jazz halls in the country.
Jefferson Parish, LA
Joseph Villars Dubreuil settled here in 1719, becoming an early agricultural pioneer and prosperous entrepreneur in the young French colony of Louisiana. Nearby he raised one of the first plantation levees along the Mississippi, an early step in the vast river-control system that would one day protect the region.
New Orleans, LA
The French Impressionist Edgar Degas had deep New Orleans roots through his mother's Creole family, the Mussons, and this house connects him to that heritage. The property passed through prominent local hands, including a figure tied to the 1803 transfer of Louisiana from France to the United States. Degas's ownership ended when the house was sold in 1866, and it was later honored as a National Landmark in 1978.
Abbeville, LA
This marker, in the Cajun French still spoken in Acadiana, records that four churches dedicated to Sainte Marie Madeleine have stood in succession on land Père Antoine Désiré Mégret bought from Joseph LeBlanc in 1843. The present church was built in 1911 under Père Laforest. The French inscription is itself a testament to the living French Catholic culture of Abbeville.
New Orleans, LA
In 1925 the young William Faulkner, later a Nobel laureate, lived here in the French Quarter and wrote his first novel, Soldiers' Pay. The building itself dates to 1840, raised by the widow of Jean Baptiste LaBranche on ground that once held part of the yard and buildings of the French colonial prison. The address marks an early, formative chapter in one of America's greatest literary careers.
Mandeville, LA
"Flagstaff" is a residence dating to about 1850, from the antebellum era of the Louisiana lakeshore near Mandeville. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1983 in recognition of its architectural and historical value. Structures like it survive as tangible links to the mid-19th-century Gulf South.
Covington, LA
John Wharton Collins founded the town of Wharton here in March 1813, naming it for his grandfather. Three years later the Louisiana legislature renamed it Covington in honor of General Leonard Covington, a hero of the War of 1812.
New Orleans, LA
Built in 1857 in New Orleans' French Quarter, this elegant townhouse was designed by architect James Gallier, Jr. as his own residence. Gallier was among the city's most accomplished designers, responsible for the French Opera House and other notable buildings, and he died here in 1868. The land itself had earlier been part of the grounds of the Ursuline Convent, tying the site to the city's colonial roots.
New Orleans, LA
The Garden District grew out of the old Livaudais Plantation, subdivided as Americans poured into New Orleans after the Louisiana Purchase and built the wealthy suburb of the City of Lafayette in the 1830s. Absorbed into New Orleans in 1852, its blocks of columned mansions and lush gardens became one of the best-preserved collections of nineteenth-century domestic architecture in the South. In 1974 the whole neighborhood was named a National Historic Landmark.
Lafayette, LA
Jean-Jacques Alfred Alexander Mouton (1829–1864) was a Lafayette-born Confederate brigadier general who fought through the western campaigns of the Civil War — Shiloh, Lafourche, the Bayou Teche, and the Red River. He was killed in 1864 at the Battle of Mansfield, a Confederate victory that halted the Union's Red River Campaign in Louisiana.
New Orleans, LA
This St. Charles Avenue site was home to New Orleans University and Gilbert Academy, Black educational institutions run under the Methodist Church from 1873 to 1949. Founded in the years after emancipation, they offered schooling to African American students across generations. The Gilbert Academy Alumni Association erected the marker in 1993 to keep that legacy visible.
New Orleans, LA
Designed in 1859 by the noted architect Henry Howard, the Goldsmith-Godchaux House is a jewel of antebellum New Orleans residential design. It is prized for its painted interiors, said to hold more fresco and stencil decoration than nearly any other mid-nineteenth-century home in the South. The state tourism department erected the marker in 1980.
New Orleans, LA
From 1915 to 1957, this ground held Heinemann Park, later Pelican Stadium, home of New Orleans' first professional sports team, the baseball Pelicans. Negro league clubs such as the Black Pelicans and Creoles also played their home games here, and the field hosted spring training and exhibitions featuring Babe Ruth, Hank Aaron, and Jackie Robinson. For four decades it was the heart of the city's baseball life.
New Orleans, LA
Laid out in 1721 by engineer Adrien de Pauger as the French colonial Place d'Armes, this square became the Spanish Plaza de Armas and, in 1803, the stage for the flag ceremonies transferring Louisiana from Spain to France and then to the United States. After the Pontalba buildings rose in 1851, the Baroness Pontalba had it redesigned and renamed for Andrew Jackson, whose equestrian statue was unveiled in 1856.
Jefferson Parish, LA
Named for Thomas Jefferson and completed in 1926, the Jefferson Highway was among the first great intercontinental auto routes, running some 2,194 miles from Winnipeg, Canada, to New Orleans. Nicknamed the "Pine to Palm" route, it linked the northern forests to the Gulf, and stretches of it still carry the Jefferson name.
New Orleans, LA
This gleaming equestrian statue honors Joan of Arc — the "Maid of Orléans" who rallied French forces during the Hundred Years' War before her death in 1431 — and celebrates the deep bond between France and New Orleans, the American city named for the French house of Orléans. Rooted in that shared heritage, the golden Joan presides over the French Quarter as both saint and warrior.
New Orleans, LA
New Orleans author John Kennedy Toole created Ignatius J. Reilly, the unforgettable misanthrope of 'A Confederacy of Dunces,' whose opening scene unfolds beneath the clock at the old D.H. Holmes department store on Canal Street. Toole died before the novel found a publisher; his mother championed the manuscript, and it appeared in 1980. In 1981 it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
New Orleans, LA
During his second pastoral journey across the United States, Pope John Paul II stopped in New Orleans in September 1987, worshipping with clergy and religious inside the historic Cathedral-Basilica of St. Louis. His visit drew crowds to the Crescent City and marked a moment of celebration for one of America's oldest Catholic communities. The plaque records the occasion at the very altar where he prayed.
St. Martinville, LA
A St. Martinville native, Émile Édouard Simon studied law at Harvard under the celebrated jurists Joseph Story and Simon Greenleaf, earning his degree in 1846, and went on to serve as 14th Judicial District Judge — the second of four generations of judges in his family. Family tradition holds that while both were at Harvard, Simon described the Acadian exiles' 1765 settlement of the Teche country to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who was then composing his epic poem Evangeline. The plaque honors him as a distinguished son of the Acadian community.
New Orleans, LA
Fred J. Cassibry (1918–1996) served in the U.S. Navy in World War II, then gave four decades to public life in New Orleans — on the City Council, the Orleans Civil District Court, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana, and a state economic development body. The marker remembers him as a dedicated official who never forgot he served the people. The square was dedicated by 1999 under Louisiana Acts 708.
New Orleans, LA
Julia Row is a terrace of thirteen identical townhouses erected in 1832–33 for the New Orleans Building Company, designed by architect James H. Dakin. The second house from St. Charles Avenue was the childhood home of Henry Hobson Richardson, who grew up to become the Boston architect famous for the Richardsonian Romanesque style; in 1976 the Preservation Resource Center restored 604 Julia Street.
New Orleans, LA
On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, breaching New Orleans's levees and flooding roughly four-fifths of the city in one of the deadliest and costliest disasters in American history. These storm-killed trees, left standing as stark sculpture, were dedicated on the fifth anniversary by University of New Orleans students as a living reminder of the storm's force and the city's long recovery.
Lafayette, LA · est. 1975
The first church of Lafayette's parish, St-Jean du Vermilion, rose on this spot in 1821 on land donated by Jean Mouton. Three years later Mouton gave ground for a courthouse and founded the town of Vermilionville, which grew into the city of Lafayette. From that early French Catholic congregation descends today's Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist.
New Orleans, LA · est. 1972
Lafayette Cemetery No. 1 was laid out in 1833 to serve the growing City of Lafayette, its raised stone tombs answering the low, wet ground of New Orleans where burial below the surface was impractical. Generations of the city's residents — immigrants and epidemic victims among them — were interred in its famous above-ground vaults. It was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1972.
New Orleans, LA
Laid out in 1788 as the public square of Faubourg Ste. Marie, New Orleans' first suburb, this green honors the Marquis de Lafayette, the French nobleman who fought for American independence. He declined an offer to become the first governor of the Louisiana territory the United States had just purchased, but on his triumphal 1825 tour he was met here with cries of 'Vive Lafayette!' A French-American society dedicated the marker in 1985.
Lafayette, LA
This great live oak had already stood for roughly three centuries by 1800, when the surrounding land was given to the Catholic Church in the young settlement that would become Lafayette. Its estimated age of nearly 500 years means it took root long before French and Spanish colonists reached the bayou country of south Louisiana, quietly outliving the empires that traded the region back and forth. Heritage live oaks like this one became gathering points and landmarks for the Acadian and Creole communities who settled Acadiana.
St. Tammany Parish, LA
When its first span opened in August 1956, the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway stretched nearly 24 miles across open water, and a second span followed in May 1969 to handle growing traffic. Carried on more than 9,000 concrete pilings, it pioneered large-scale use of prefabricated, prestressed concrete bridge construction in the United States. The crossing knit the lake's north shore into the Greater New Orleans area.
St. Tammany Parish, LA · est. 2013
The original 1956 span, designed by Palmer & Baker and now carrying southbound traffic, opened as the longest bridge in the world by more than 15 miles. Built in just fourteen months, it used assembly-line, mass-production methods for the first time in bridge construction — identical hollow pilings, caps, and pre-stressed deck sections cast onshore and barged into place. Engineering News-Record hailed the project as a bold venture of unusual foresight and resourcefulness.
Mandeville, LA
On the Mandeville lakefront, this site marks the Lake Shore Hotel, which served as a Soldiers' Home between 1854 and 1868. Spanning the Civil War years, it sheltered soldiers along Lake Pontchartrain during one of the most turbulent chapters in Louisiana's history.
New Orleans, LA · est. 1976
This stately mansion on New Orleans' St. Charles Avenue was recognized on October 21, 1976, when the Department of the Interior placed the Latter Memorial Library on the National Register of Historic Places. Serving the public as a branch library, the building preserves the grandeur of the avenue's early twentieth-century residential architecture. The bronze plaque records its formal listing among the nation's protected historic places.