Mater Dolorosa Church

The parish began in 1848 as the Church of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin, a wooden church seating 200 for French-speaking Catholics in Carrollton, with German and Irish families among its people. The Germans formed their own congregation; accounts give 1866 and 1871. In 1897 Archbishop Chapelle sent Father John Francis Prim to unite the French and German parishes as Mater Dolorosa. In 1909 the congregation gave its original church and school to the Josephite Fathers to serve Black Catholics in Carrollton, and that site is now Blessed Sacrament-St. Joan of Arc.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lafayette Cemetery No. 1 — 2.9 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.
• Congo Square — 3.8 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 — 3.9 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

• Town of Carrollton — 0.3 mi
• Carrollton Cemetery No. 1 — 0.4 mi
• H. Sophie Newcomb Memorial College — 0.6 mi
• Newcomb Pottery Garden — 0.7 mi