Inside Church of St. Charles Red Church

Father Joseph Paret, a missionary priest from Pélussin in France, led this parish from the late 1840s until 1869. He wrote letters to his family and kept a private journal about his years here. In it he complained about who came to Mass: the wealthy sugar planters rarely attended, he wrote, while the enslaved people who worked their fields came every Sunday. By his account, the pews held the enslaved far more often than their owners.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Destrehan Plantation — 0.8 mi
  A River Road house begun in 1787 where, in January 1811, a tribunal of five slaveholders tried people who had risen on the German Coast, and where an exhibit now tells the revolt.
• Lafayette Cemetery No. 1 — 17 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.
• Whitney Plantation — 18 mi
  A museum on a former sugar plantation along the River Road that tells its story through the people who were enslaved there, with memorials to 107,000 enslaved Louisianans and 2,200 children.
• St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 — 18 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

• Ormond Plantation — steps away
• Watercolors — steps away
• Saint Charles Borromeo Church — steps away
• St. Charles Borromeo "Little Red Church" — steps away