Camp Parapet

In 1862 Camp Parapet filled with people the army had not planned for: enslaved men and women walking in from the sugar plantations. General John W. Phelps, who ran the camp, would not send them back. Planters complained to Benjamin Butler, naming Sam, Mary, Nancy and Louisa among those who had fled. Phelps asked for weapons for three regiments of freed men and, after refusing to act as a slave driver, offered to resign. Washington ruled that the refugees could not be returned, and the camp's labor system fed into the Freedmen's Bureau.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lafayette Cemetery No. 1 — 4.8 mi
  The Garden District's 1833 cemetery of about 1,100 family tombs, closed to visitors in 2019 and reopened on October 1, 2026 for small guided tours run by the Preservation Resource Center.
• St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 — 5.1 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.
• Congo Square — 5.3 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 — 5.5 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.

More markers nearby

• Marsalis Mansion Motel — 0.3 mi
• Jefferson Highway — 0.5 mi
• Huey P. Long Bridge — 1.2 mi
• Wedell - Williams Airport Site — 1.7 mi