History of Camp Salmen

The camp's name belongs to a family business that began with one worker and a mule. Fritz Salmen, a Swiss-born brickmaker, started it in Slidell in 1882. With his brothers Jacob and Albert he built it into a store, a sawmill and a brick plant, and he invented a crate for carrying brick from the kiln. By the mid-1920s the plant was reported to turn out more than 250,000 bricks a day, and the firm employed about 1,000 people, with mills as far away as Nicaragua.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fontainebleau State Park — 12 mi
  Lakeshore park on the Northshore where Tchefuncte potters, Acolapissa and Choctaw lived, and where 153 people were enslaved at Marigny's sugar and brick plantation by 1840; the mill ruin still stands.
• Chalmette Battlefield — 26 mi
  The ground of the January 8, 1815 Battle of New Orleans, beside Chalmette National Cemetery and the site of Fazendeville, a freedpeople's community founded in 1867 and bought out in the 1960s.
• Congo Square — 27 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 Cabildo — 27 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.

More markers nearby

• Abbé Adrien E. Rouquette — 6.4 mi
• Original Lone Star Republic — 6.8 mi
• Indian Village — 8.7 mi
• Fontainebleau Plantation Sugar Mill — 13 mi