Bienville's Plantation

The Jesuits began buying this land from Bienville in 1726, and by 1763 their plantation ran from present Common Street to Felicity Street. France expelled the order that year and confiscated it, and after Spain took full control in 1769 the land went to private buyers. Most of today's Central Business District went to the Gravier family, which subdivided it from 1788. The rest was split among four families, Delord-Sarpy, Saulet, Robin and Livaudais, whose plantations kept dependencies for enslaved workers near the front, until Lafon laid them out as faubourgs in 1806 to 1810.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park — 0.3 mi
  A National Park Service unit created in 1994 to tell where jazz came from, with free programs and a visitor center in the French Quarter and park land inside Louis Armstrong Park.
• 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.
• St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 — 0.6 mi
  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.

More markers nearby

• United States Customhouse — steps away
• Bank's Arcade — steps away
• Merchants Mutual Insurance Company Building — steps away
• Louis André Martinet / Office of L.A. Martinet, The Crusader & Comité Des Citoyens — steps away