1/ The Louisiana State Lottery Company was established in 1868 by Charles T. Howard and John A. Morris. In exchange for being granted an exclusive franchise to operate for twenty-five years, the capital fund of Charity Hospital in the city of New Orleans would receive ... 2/ ... $40,000 annually (approximately $765,250 today). For several years the venture languished on the brink of collapse until Maximilian Dauphin convinced Howard and Morris in 1877 to enlist the help of former Confederate generals Jubal Early and P.G.T. Beauregard to ...

1/ Throughout most of the late spring and early summer of 1871, residents of New Orleans were monitoring the rising waters of the Mississippi River. Newspapers carried dire stories from Memphis and other cities upriver. In late April, flood waters submerged the tracks of the ...

2/ ... Mobile and Ohio Railroad in Meridian, Mississippi, and washed out several roads. In May, the flood waters claimed a train of the Alabama and Chattanooga Railroad with the engine, baggage cars, and second class cars being swept away.

1/ Tucked away on St. Charles Avenue between Terpsichore and Euterpe Streets was a restaurant like none that you may have ever experienced – Corinne Dunbar’s. Opened in 1935 during the Great Depression on the ground floor of her family home, Mrs. Dunbar served a set menu ...

2/ ... every day using fresh and seasonal ingredients. Oh, there was a menu (see below) but it simply listed the dishes that her household cook, Leonie Victor, had prepared. No one knew what to expect as the menu changed daily. As novel as that sounds this was actually common ...

1/ One of the longest and most important streets in New Orleans is Earhart Boulevard, running from Loyola Avenue downtown all the way to the Jefferson Parish line where is becomes the Earhart Expressway terminating 5.2 miles later on Dickory Avenue in River Ridge. 2/ They are named after Frederick Adam Earhart. Earhart became a pharmacist and opened his first pharmacy on Eighth and Chippewa Streets in 1896 when he was only 21 years old. He would later teach at Loyola University and serve on the Board of Pharmacy and National Pharmacy ...

1/ The French Market on any given day was a tongue-duel between the various citizens of the city – French bartering with Germans, Americans haggling with Creoles, Indians negotiating with everyone. The scene below is of Sunday morning, a time when people might purchase ... 2/ ... provisions for the week, or anything else that was offered for sale. Delicate lace, fish and flowers, chicken and lamb, sweet-smelling spices, a suit of clothes, and so much more. The aroma of cooked delicacies from every immigrant group mingled with the fresh ...

1/ When I post old photographs, I always enjoy a silent chuckle when people express the romantic notion “I wish I could have lived back then” without thinking about what that time period was really like. For instance, they look at an old photograph of people crossing ...



2/ ... Canal Street and notice how well-dressed everyone is. What they never remark on is how dark and dirty the city was, being a riot of numerous unpleasant odors surrounded by periodic fires, frequent floods, swarms of determined mosquitos that blessed us with all manner ...

1/ Legendary coach Francis Thomas “Tad” Gormley shares a moment on the bench with his Loyola football team during a 1938 game at Loyola Stadium. A native of Cambridge, Massachusetts, Gormley was born in 1884. After successfully training runners who won the Boston Marathon in ... 2/ ... 1904 and 1906, the twenty-three-year-old Gormley was hired to manage the Young Men’s Gymnastic Club in New Orleans, which is today part of the New Orleans Athletic Club. Gormley left the Gymnastic Club in 1914 to become the track coach at Tulane University.

1/ Before the construction of the Huey P. Long Bridge across the Mississippi River in 1935, there were only a couple of options to travel from the East Bank to the West Bank -- steam ferries (fare $0.05) and skiff ferries (fare $0.10).) 2/ In 1893 there were five steam ferry terminals located across the city:
(1) First District Ferry from Canal Street to Algiers;
(2) Second District Ferry from the French Market to Algies;
(3) Third District Ferry from Esplanade Avenue to Algiers; and,

1/ For this Steamboat Saturday we combine two of my favorite subjects – steamboats and railroad ferries. In this instance we have an unattributed photograph from 1900 from the collection of the LSU Library of the steamboat Wm. Edenborn pushing a train ferry barge on the ... 2/ ... Mississippi River. The second image is of the Sarah Edenborn, named for his wife, also maneuvering a train barge. The first railroad bridge across the Mississippi River was completed on April 21, 1856, between Illinois and Iowa at Davenport, Iowa, for the Rock Island Line.

1/ For Fountain Pen Friday, a tip of the cap to a gentleman who has cost me a lot of money over the years – William B. Purvis. On January 7, 1890, he was issued U.S. Patent 419,064 for a new pen that caused ink to be delivered evenly, preventing ink blots and faded writing ... 2/ ... – the modern fountain pen. Although the improvements to the fountain pen was Purvis’ most notable invention, it was not his only one. His first business was the Sterling Paper Bag Company which he founded in 1885, but which went bankrupt in 1894.

1/ The French Market depicted in one of twenty-five original oil paintings commissioned by the St. Charles Hotel from artists Robert W. Grafton and L.O. (Louis Oscar) Griffith and which were exhibited in the hotel's second floor gallery in 1917. 2/ They were published in the third edition of the hotel's complimentary souvenir booklet and were also issued as a set of postcards. Grafton and Griffith produced these large works from their French Quarter studio that they shared with Clarence Millet between 1916 and 1920.

1/ With the behind the scenes influence of General Motors and the Detroit lobby, cities across the country began replacing their streetcars with new, modern, busses beginning in 1940. This photograph below by Charles Franck from the archives of The Historic New Orleans ... 2/ ... Collection dates from 1941 and shows the model TG-3201 “old look” transit bus. It was termed “old Look” because the design by Yellow Coach, partially owned by General Motors, was meant to resemble the PCC streetcars produced during the 1930s.

1/ The daughter of a prominent Southern family, Grace King developed a passionate love of New Orleans that was greatly influenced by Creole historian Charles Gayerré. Although a contemporary of George Washington Cable, she wrote that she believed that he distorted the Creole ... 2/ ... way of life. This led to a response from Richard Watson Gilder, editor of Century Magazine, who she met during the 1884 World Industrial & Cotton Centennial Exposition, with the challenge to provide her own portrayal of Creole life.

1/ Bienville and his party of explorers and settlers landed on Lake Pontchartrain and traveled by land from their portage near the mouth of Bayou St. John to the Mississippi River. This pathway was known to the native indigenous people and thus Bayou St. John became ... 2/ ... integral in the founding of New Orleans. Being a strategic waterway, it was marked with a lighthouse, becoming the first lighthouse constructed outside of the thirteen original colonies when it was first built on Bayou St. John and Lake Pontchartrain in 1811.

1/ In honor of Cinco de Mayo, the Mexican Pavilion at the 1884 World Cotton & Industrial Exposition in New Orleans may be seen in the first photograph in the left foreground in front of the Exposition’s Main Building, which at the time was the largest building in the world ... 2/ ... in terms of square footage, covering 33 acres. This building could accommodate four Louisiana Superdome inside its walls. This photograph is from the personal collection of Kenneth Speth.

1/ A group of five track athletes from Loyola University posed for Edwin Lewis Stephens for a photograph during the 1927 Southwestern Relay Carnival in Lafayette sponsored by the University of Southwestern Louisiana (now the University of Louisiana Lafayette). 2/ This was the first track and field team organized by the university who had only a rudimentary track on which to practice at the time. Nonetheless, Athletic Director Fred Walker – who was also the baseball coach and the track coach – selected seven of his best athletes: ...

1/ Levi Spear Parmly was born on a Vermont farm in 1790, the oldest of nine children. He and three of his brothers shared a dislike for farming and became dentists. Levi learned dentistry in Boston as an apprentice to Dr. John Randall before moving to Quebec and Europe where ... 2/ ... he attained great acclaim. He eventually settled in New Orleans. Throughout his life he was a prolific writer and researcher. His “Practical Guide to the Management of the Teeth, Comprising a Discovery of the Origin of Caries or Decay of the Teeth with its Prevention ...

1/ One of the lesser-known projects of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programs during the Great Depression was designed to put out-of-work editors and writers back to work in a program called the Federal Writers Project. Thousands of writers and editors across the ... 2/ ... country were tasked with producing collections of local history and guidebooks for their respective cities and states. In New Orleans, the project was spearheaded by local writer Lyle Saxon, a writer for the Times-Picayune newspaper and author of numerous short stories ...

1/ A proposal made before the New Orleans City Council in early 1883 would have, had it been approved, drastically changed the character of the city of New Orleans. A group led by Henry Shaw, General Agent for the New Orleans & Mississippi Valley Railroad Company, and ... 2/ ... Joseph H. Oglesby, President of the Louisiana National Bank, proposed the construction of an elevated railway along the riverfront from Louisiana Avenue down to Press Street. Among the company’s other officers and directors were J.F. Mason, Victor Meyer, ...

1/ The timeless beauty of the delicate cast-iron railings and ornaments on the balconies throughout the French Quarter is captured here by photographer Arnold Genthe in 1920 from the collection of the Library of Congress. This perspective is from the inside looking out from ... 2/ ... the balcony of the Lower Pontalba toward the cathedral and the Upper Pontalba up Chartres Street. Cast iron balconies are both incredibly intricate and bulky. Their delicate patterns are what most people think of when they look up in the French Quarter.

1/ Fort Jackson is located approximately seventy miles south of New Orleans and forty miles upriver from the mouth of the Mississippi River in Plaquemines Parish. Construction on the masonry fort began in 1822, taking the traditional five-pointed star of the time, and ... 2/ ... completed sometime around 1832. The illustration below by Alfred Waud shows Fort Jackson in the background located across the Mississippi from the older Fort St. Philip, which replaced the 18th century Fort San Felipe constructed by the Spanish.