Charles Didier Dreux

Charles Didier Dreux was born in New Orleans on May 11, 1832, and became a lawyer, serving as a district attorney and in the legislature. In 1861 he commanded the first battalion of Louisiana volunteers to organize, five companies in all, in the army of a Confederacy founded to protect slavery. He was killed at Young's Mill, Virginia, in a skirmish on July 5, 1861, at the age of twenty-nine. About 30,000 mourners attended his funeral in New Orleans, and he is buried in Metairie Cemetery. A monument to him stands at Canal Street and Jefferson Davis Parkway.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 — 1.5 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 — 1.6 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 — 1.9 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 — 2.0 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

• Gen. Albert Pike — 0.5 mi
• The Old Portage — 0.6 mi
• Central Congregational Church — 0.8 mi
• Heinemann Park/Pelican Stadium — 0.8 mi