The Harvey Canal

Local histories credit the first ditch to enslaved laborers on Jean-Baptiste Destrehan's plantation, who cut it south from the Mississippi toward the back of Bayou Barataria. Joseph Hale Harvey, born in 1816, married Louise Destrehan, a great-granddaughter of that planter, and ran the settlement at the river end as a company town. It had been called Cosmopolite City before it took his family's name. His son Horace, born around 1860, went on developing the canal and the land beside it until he died in 1938.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lafayette Cemetery No. 1 — 1.2 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 — 3.3 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 — 3.4 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.
• St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 — 3.5 mi
  New 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.

More markers nearby

• Derbigny Plantation — 1.1 mi
• Newcomb House — 1.2 mi
• McDonogh No. 7 Elementary School — 1.2 mi
• Royal Cyril Brooks — 1.2 mi