Higgins Boat (LCVP)

Higgins Industries grew out of a failure. Andrew Higgins reached New Orleans in 1910, and when his lumber company folded in 1922 he turned to designing boats. His Eureka, a 36-foot hull that rode over logs and ran up onto beaches, sold first to oil crews and fur trappers. Payroll climbed from about 400 in 1940 to about 20,000 in 1944, and the company hired women and African Americans. A 1945 strike over hiring veterans without union cards ended with Higgins announcing he would close his New Orleans plants. He died in 1952.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lafayette Cemetery No. 1 — 0.7 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 — 1.5 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.
• The Historic New Orleans Collection — 1.6 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 — 1.6 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

• Mass Lynching in New Orleans / Racial Violence in America — 0.3 mi
• Margaret's Place and Walk / Lower Garden District — 0.4 mi
• Confederate Memorial Hall — 0.6 mi
• Freret's Folly — 0.6 mi