Frances Benjamin Johnston House

Frances Benjamin Johnston was born in Grafton, West Virginia, on January 15, 1864. In 1899 Hollis Burke Frissell commissioned her to photograph the Hampton Institute, a school for Black and Native students, and the pictures were shown in Paris in 1900. A 1933 Carnegie Corporation grant started her survey of Virginia's early architecture, which grew into an eight-year project covering 95 counties and then reached eight other southern states. She bought a French Quarter house in 1940 and retired to New Orleans in 1945. She died there on May 16, 1952, at 88.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• The Cabildo — 0.3 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.
• Congo Square — 0.4 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 — 0.4 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.
• New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park — 0.5 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.

More markers nearby

• Gallier House — steps away
• First Protestant Church in New Orleans — steps away
• Birthplace of Danny Barker — steps away
• Archbishop Antoine Blanc Memorial — steps away