Town of Jean Lafitte

The town is named for a man who sold people. By one account the Lafitte brothers' first prize, in January 1813, was a British brig carrying 77 enslaved people, and selling the captives with the cargo cleared about $18,000. Their Barataria base ran auctions, among them one known as the Temple, and a January 1814 sale near New Orleans ended in a gunfight that killed a customs inspector. In September 1814 Commodore Daniel Patterson's raid captured about 80 people and seized the base's schooners; Lafitte escaped and soon offered his men to Andrew Jackson in return for pardons.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Barataria Preserve — 1.9 mi
  A Jean Lafitte National Historical Park unit of bayou, swamp and marsh on the site of a Chitimacha and Houma shell-mound landscape, with the visitor center and most trails closed for about two years of repairs.
• Lafayette Cemetery No. 1 — 12 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 — 14 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 — 14 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.

More markers nearby

• Barataria Preserve — 1.2 mi
• Manila Village — 2.3 mi
• Clark Cheniere — 2.3 mi
• Poblacion de Barataria (Barataria Settlement) — 3.4 mi