Derbigny Plantation

Pierre Derbigny was born in Laon in 1769 and was studying law when the Revolution interrupted. In 1791 he left for Saint-Domingue, then moved through Pittsburgh, the Illinois country, New Madrid, Florida and Havana before reaching Spanish New Orleans in 1797. He argued for keeping the civil law of the French and Spanish years instead of British common law, protested Congress's 1804 act closing the slave trade, and helped draft the Civil Code that appeared in 1825. In 1811 he joined in founding the College of Orleans, where he served as a regent.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lafayette Cemetery No. 1 — 1.4 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 — 2.7 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 — 2.8 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 — 2.9 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
• Centennial Marker — steps away
• Mechanickham — steps away