Historical Marker
The Birthplace of "Dixie"
New Orleans, Orleans County · Louisiana
The bank-note story is one theory among three. In it, Citizens State Bank printed the French word dix on the back of a ten-dollar bill, and other banks later copied it. A second theory derives the name from the Mason-Dixon line. A third traces it to Dixy, a supposedly kind Manhattan slaveholder, a tale that painted his plantation as nearly paradise for enslaved people. No published use of the word is known before Daniel Emmett's 1859 song.
Where it stands
29.95382, -90.06822 · Directions
Worth the stop nearby
- New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park — 0.2 miA 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 — 0.2 miA 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 — 0.4 miThe 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.
- St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 — 0.4 miNew 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.