Historical Marker
The Pythian Temple
New Orleans, Orleans County · Louisiana
The money came from a lodge. The Colored Knights of Pythias was founded at Vicksburg in 1880 because the white Pythian orders barred Black men, and it spread through Mississippi and Louisiana. At the Grand Lodge session of 1906 in Alexandria, Smith W. Green, born enslaved in Waterproof, proposed a temple in New Orleans, and later sessions voted the funds. Green chaired a building committee with H. H. Ford, John D. Brown, Frank B. Smith and John W. Cooke. The seven stories cost about $200,000, and the building rented space to Black merchants and insurance companies.
Where it stands
29.95343, -90.07563 · Directions
Worth the stop nearby
- St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 — 0.5 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.
- The Historic New Orleans Collection — 0.6 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.
- New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park — 0.7 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.
- Congo Square — 0.7 miThe 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.