Barthélémy Lafon

Lafon reached New Orleans about 1789, as the Spanish town rebuilt after the 1788 fire, and designed the Macarty house in 1794 and the Riviere house in 1797. As deputy surveyor general from 1805 to 1809 he completed one of the earliest accurate maps of Louisiana. His 1806 and 1807 plans for the Delord-Sarpy plantation enlarged Faubourg St. Mary and created Faubourg Annunciation, with Tivoli Circle and streets named for the muses. He never married but had two children with the free woman of color Modeste Foucher. He died in 1820 during a yellow fever epidemic.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 — steps away
  New Orleans' oldest surviving city of the dead, opened in 1789 after the fire of 1788 and the burial place of Homer Plessy, reachable only on a guided tour since March 2015.
• Congo Square — 0.3 mi
  The 2.35-acre corner of Louis Armstrong Park where, from 1817, New Orleans confined Sunday dancing by enslaved people to one place, and where crowds of hundreds gathered to drum, dance and trade.
• The Historic New Orleans Collection — 0.4 mi
  A French Quarter museum and research center founded in 1966, whose 2015 Purchased Lives exhibition took on New Orleans' place as the largest slave market in antebellum America.
• The Cabildo — 0.5 mi
  The Spanish town hall on Jackson Square, finished in 1799, where Louisiana changed flags in 1803 and where the state Supreme Court sat in the same room until 1910, Plessy v. Ferguson among its cases.

More markers nearby

• General Humbert — steps away
• Homer Adolph Plessy — steps away
• Bernard de Marigny — steps away
• Marie Laveau — steps away