Natchez Steamboats

Blanche Leathers was born in Tensas Parish in 1860, the daughter of a cotton planter. She married Captain Bowling S. Leathers in 1880, and he taught her to pilot and navigate the river. She earned her master's license in 1894 and captained the Natchez on regular New Orleans to Vicksburg trips; she is called the only woman captain of a large Mississippi River packet. After retiring she returned in 1929 to pilot the Tennessee Belle, and she last renewed her license in 1935. She died on January 26, 1940. The National Rivers Hall of Fame inducted her in 2009.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• 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.
• 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.
• The Historic New Orleans Collection — 0.2 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.
• Congo Square — 0.6 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 Steamer New Orleans — steps away
• Original Pierre Maspero's Slave Exchange — steps away
• Lower Pontalba Building — 0.2 mi
• Hermann - Grima House — 0.3 mi