Stumpf's Magic Hoodoo

John Stumpf was born at sea in 1857 while his German parents were emigrating to New Orleans. He trained in pharmacy at Tulane, graduated in 1876, and moved to Gretna to open a drug store and a Magic Hoodoo plant. The flagship product was an ant remedy he discovered in 1881; Magic Hoodoo products were sold widely and shipped to Egypt, China and Turkey. After he died in 1911 the business carried on as John Stumpf's Son, and in 1959 the family opened Stumpf's Westside Shopping Center, described as the first of its kind in Louisiana.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lafayette Cemetery No. 1 — 1.4 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 — 2.5 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 — 2.6 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 — 2.7 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

• Mechanickham — steps away
• Royal Cyril Brooks — steps away
• Gretna City Hall — steps away
• David Crockett Firehall — steps away