Merieult House

The merchant Jean François Merieult bought the lot at auction in 1792 and hired the builders Jacob Cowperthwaite and Robert Jones, with 7,200 pieces of lumber floated down from Natchez. The main house stood finished in 1794, and a warehouse, counting house and slave pens went up behind it by 1797. One local historian counts more than 400 enslaved Africans bought and sold on the property between 1792 and 1812. Lizardi Hermanos acquired it in 1832 and took it back in 1835 after a buyer, Antonio Maria Pintado, failed to meet his terms.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• The Historic New Orleans Collection — steps away
  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 — steps away
  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.
• New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park — steps away
  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.
• Congo Square — 0.3 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.

More markers nearby

• The French Opera House — steps away
• Homesite of Oliver Pollock — steps away
• Jack Teagarden — steps away
• Louis J. Dufilho — steps away