The Steamer New Orleans

The voyage was a family trip. Nicholas Roosevelt left Pittsburgh in October 1811 with his wife Lydia and their young daughter, and their son Henry was born aboard near Louisville on October 30. The boat was built from a design by Robert Fulton and owned by Fulton and Robert R. Livingston. The New Madrid earthquakes of December 1811 changed river landmarks and confused the pilot, and villagers begged for passage, but there were too few provisions. Afterward it ran between New Orleans and Natchez until it struck a snag near Baton Rouge on July 14, 1814.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• 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 — steps away
  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.
• 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.
• Congo Square — 0.5 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

• Lower Pontalba Building — steps away
• Natchez Steamboats — steps away
• Original Pierre Maspero's Slave Exchange — steps away
• Birthplace of Danny Barker — 0.3 mi