Centennial Marker

Gretna was Jefferson Parish's fourth seat, and the earlier ones trace how New Orleans kept outgrowing the parish. After Lafayette was annexed in 1852, voters chose Carrollton in 1853, and Henry Howard's Greek Revival courthouse and jail, built for $59,000, were finished in late 1855. Courts sat there for nineteen years, and condemned prisoners were hanged behind the building. Carrollton lost the seat in 1874 when New Orleans annexed it, and the courthouse later served as a public school, McDonogh 23.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lafayette Cemetery No. 1 — 1.5 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.
• New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park — 2.6 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 — 2.7 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 — 2.8 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

• Gretna City Hall — steps away
• Royal Cyril Brooks — steps away
• Mechanickham — steps away
• Stumpf's Magic Hoodoo — steps away