Marie Laveau

Laveau was a hairdresser who served wealthy families, and also a herbalist, midwife and nurse, and she practiced Catholicism alongside Voodoo. She visited people sentenced to death, prepared their last meals and prayed with them. Records confirm she owned at least seven enslaved people. She was born on September 10, 1801, and died on June 15, 1881; the Daily Picayune said she died peacefully at home. Her tomb is only generally believed to be plot 347 in the Glapion family crypt, and Robert Tallant disputed it. Most of the magic attached to her name is folklore.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 — steps away
  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 — 0.2 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 — 0.4 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.
• The Cabildo — 0.5 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

• Homer Adolph Plessy — steps away
• Bernard de Marigny — steps away
• Déterrer Storyville — steps away
• Congo Square — 0.2 mi