Judge John Howard Ferguson House

Ferguson was born on June 10, 1838, in Chilmark, into a family of Martha's Vineyard sea captains, and he taught school and studied law before moving to New Orleans in 1865. Appointed to Criminal District Court Section A in 1892, he heard Homer Plessy's challenge to the Separate Car Act. He held it unconstitutional for trains crossing state lines but constitutional for trains running only within Louisiana. The Louisiana Supreme Court affirmed, and when Plessy went to the U.S. Supreme Court the case took Ferguson's name. In 1896 the Court upheld segregation. He died on November 12, 1915.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lafayette Cemetery No. 1 — 2.1 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 — 3.6 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.
• New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park — 3.8 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 — 3.8 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

• Audubon Park History — 0.5 mi
• Gilbert Academy and New Orleans University — 0.6 mi
• Audubon Zoo — 0.7 mi
• Jefferson City — 0.7 mi