Freret's Folly

The architect of the speculative row had a career that crossed the war. William Freret, born in 1833, enlisted as a private in the Washington Artillery and rose to lieutenant colonel of engineers on Kirby Smith's staff in the Trans-Mississippi Department of the Confederacy. After the surrender he served as Louisiana's state engineer from 1866 to 1868 and then oversaw about sixteen public schools. In 1882 he supervised the rebuilding of the Old State Capitol in Baton Rouge after a fire, adding a spiral staircase and a stained-glass dome. His federal buildings stretch from Key West to Aberdeen, Mississippi.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lafayette Cemetery No. 1 — steps away
  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 — 2.1 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 — 2.2 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.
• St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 — 2.2 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.

More markers nearby

• Commander's Palace — steps away
• Garden District — steps away
• Christ Church Cathedral (Episcopal) — 0.3 mi
• Higgins Boat (LCVP) — 0.6 mi