H. Sophie Newcomb Memorial College

Josephine Louise Newcomb founded the college in memory of her daughter Sophie, who died in 1870 at fifteen. She gave $100,000 at first and about $3 million in all to support a liberal arts education for young white women. It was the first women's coordinate college inside a US university, a model later used at Brown and Columbia. Tulane's first president, Brandt V. B. Dixon, also founded Newcomb High School, which ran from 1888 to 1920. After Hurricane Katrina, Tulane reorganized the college in 2006 into the coeducational Newcomb-Tulane College, and the heirs' suits failed by 2011.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lafayette Cemetery No. 1 — 2.4 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.
• St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 — 3.3 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 — 3.5 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 — 3.5 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.

More markers nearby

• Newcomb Pottery Garden — steps away
• Town of Carrollton — 0.7 mi
• Gilbert Academy and New Orleans University — 1.2 mi
• Audubon Park History — 1.2 mi