McDonoghville

The freedom John McDonogh offered the people he enslaved had to be bought. In 1822 he devised a scheme that let them purchase themselves, and it took about fifteen years, so he profited from their labor first. He backed the American Colonization Society and used it to send many of them to Liberia. He also sent two enslaved men, David and Washington McDonogh, to Lafayette College in 1838. Washington left for Liberia in 1842 and spent the rest of his life there; David graduated in 1844, refused deportation and settled in New York City.

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.
• New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park — 2.2 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 — 2.3 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 — 2.3 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

• U.S. Marine Hospital — 0.8 mi
• McDonoghville — 0.9 mi
• Terrytown — 0.9 mi
• David Crockett Firehall — 1.0 mi