Former site of Holy Family Sisters' Convent

Henriette DeLille was born March 11, 1813, to a free woman of color and a French father who lived together in the plaçage custom, and her mother raised her for such an arrangement. She came to oppose it as a violation of marriage. In 1836 she founded a small congregation, which took the name Sisters of the Holy Family in 1842. The sisters taught free and enslaved children and took in the elderly. Bishop Antoine Blanc would not let them wear a habit. In her will she freed Betsy, an enslaved woman she owned. She died in 1862.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• The Cabildo — steps away
  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.
• The Historic New Orleans Collection — steps away
  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.
• 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.
• Congo Square — 0.3 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.

More markers nearby

• Faulkner House — steps away
• Lower Pontalba Building — steps away
• Homesite of Oliver Pollock — steps away
• Louis J. Dufilho — steps away