Wedell - Williams Airport Site

The money came from Harry Williams, a Patterson oilman, sugar and lumber businessman whom Jimmy Wedell taught to fly. Their airline began with a New Orleans to Houston passenger route and was Louisiana's first commercial airline. Wedell's racers were low-wing monoplanes of his own design, the Model 44 among the fastest in the country; he reportedly called it hot as a .44. In 1933 he won the Thompson Trophy and every race he entered, and set a land-plane record of 305.33 mph. Eastern Air Lines bought the airline in 1936 for $160,000.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lafayette Cemetery No. 1 — 5.9 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.
• St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 — 6.7 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.
• Congo Square — 6.9 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.
• The Historic New Orleans Collection — 7.0 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

• Huey P. Long Bridge — 0.5 mi
• Marsalis Mansion Motel — 1.4 mi
• Camp Parapet — 1.7 mi
• Jefferson Highway — 2.1 mi