Orleans Tours and Step-On Guides

06/10/2026

Great Ladies

06/09/2026

Often forgotten

Madame John's Legacy is one of the oldest surviving buildings in the French Quarter and one of the most important historic landmarks in Louisiana. Built after the devastating fires of the late 1700s, the structure offers a rare glimpse into colonial New Orleans during both the French and Spanish eras.

Its distinctive architecture reflects a time when New Orleans looked very different from the city visitors know today. The building survived wars, hurricanes, floods, and centuries of change while much of the surrounding city evolved around it.

Today, visitors can explore exhibits that tell the story of early Louisiana life, colonial culture, and the people who helped build New Orleans. Walking through the property feels like stepping back into the eighteenth century.

Madame John's Legacy remains one of the best places in Louisiana to experience the state's colonial roots firsthand.

06/09/2026

She had purpose

She was born into a world that had a very specific plan for her. Henriette Delille was born free in New Orleans around 1813, the daughter of a free woman of colour and a white Creole man, raised in the tradition of plaçage — the system by which free women of colour in antebellum New Orleans entered into formal arrangements with wealthy white men, relationships that offered financial security in exchange for a kind of institutionalised concubinage. It was the expected path. It was also the path she refused.

At a time when Louisiana law prohibited women of colour from entering established religious orders, Henriette Delille founded her own. In 1842, with two other free Creole women — Juliette Gaudin and Josephine Charles — she established the Sisters of the Holy Family, a religious congregation for women of colour in New Orleans. The congregation's mission was not abstract: they ran schools for free Black children, operated homes for elderly enslaved people who had been abandoned by their enslavers, and ministered to the sick during the yellow fever epidemics that swept New Orleans repeatedly through the mid-nineteenth century.

She gave away a substantial personal inheritance to do it. She walked away from the plaçage system, which her mother and other women in her family had navigated, and she chose instead a life of public religious service — which, in the antebellum South, for a woman of colour, was not a retreat from the world but a direct confrontation with it. The white Catholic establishment in New Orleans was uncomfortable with her congregation for decades. She persisted. Her order survived.

Henriette Delille died in 1862, having spent roughly two decades building an institution that would outlast her by more than a century and a half. The Sisters of the Holy Family still exist today, still based in New Orleans, still operating as one of the oldest African American Catholic religious congregations in the United States. In 2010, the Vatican recognised Henriette Delille as Venerable, a formal step in the Catholic process of canonisation — meaning the Church formally declared that she had lived a life of heroic virtue.

She has not yet been made a saint. The investigation continues. But in New Orleans, in the communities she served, people have known what she was for a long time. If your family has roots in the New Orleans Creole community — the Seventh Ward, the Tremé, or the river parishes — does her name appear anywhere in your family's memory? ⚜️ 🌿

06/06/2026

Man who was willing to take a chance

On June 7, 1892, Homer Plessy bought a first-class railroad ticket in New Orleans, walked to the first-class car of the East Louisiana Railroad, and sat down. He was twenty-nine years old, a shoemaker, a Catholic Creole of colour whose complexion was light enough that many strangers read him as white. He sat and waited for the conductor. He knew what was coming. That was the entire point.

Plessy's arrest that afternoon was not spontaneous. It was the result of months of planning by the Comité des Citoyens — the Citizens' Committee — a New Orleans organisation of free Creoles of colour who had been fighting Louisiana's Separate Car Act of 1890 since the moment it passed. The Act required railroads to provide equal but separate accommodations for white and Black passengers. The Committee had already identified the law as an unconstitutional violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. They needed a plaintiff. They chose Plessy deliberately. They chose the East Louisiana Railroad deliberately. They even arranged with the railroad company's lawyer in advance — the railroad opposed the Act on financial grounds, since providing separate cars cost money — to ensure Plessy would be formally charged rather than simply removed. Everything was coordinated. Nothing was accidental.

Plessy informed the conductor of his racial identity. He was arrested, removed, and charged under the Act. The case climbed through the courts over four years. In 1896, the United States Supreme Court ruled seven to one against Plessy in Plessy v. Ferguson, enshrining the doctrine of separate but equal into American law — a doctrine that would not be formally overturned until Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, fifty-eight years later.

The sole dissenting voice in 1896 was Justice John Marshall Harlan of Kentucky, a former slaveholder, who wrote that the Constitution is colour-blind and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. He was alone.

Homer Plessy lived until 1925. He paid a twenty-five dollar fine, returned to his life in New Orleans, and died in the segregated city his case had helped cement. The Supreme Court formally expunged his conviction in 2022. ⚜️ 🔥

If your family comes from New Orleans or the River Parishes — what surname do you carry? Some of the Creole families who supported the Comité des Citoyens have descendants in Louisiana to this day.

06/05/2026

Creole Tomato Festival

05/31/2026

05/24/2026

We can always learn