Chalmette Battlefield

The ground of the January 8, 1815 Battle of New Orleans, beside Chalmette National Cemetery and the site of Fazendeville, a freedpeople's community founded in 1867 and bought out in the 1960s.

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Duration

One to two hours.

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Admission

No admission fee for Jean Lafitte National Historical Park and Preserve; donations accepted at its visitor centers.

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Best Season

Open year round. Per the Park Service, the battlefield is open to pedestrians sunrise to sunset and vehicle gates run 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.; the cemetery gates open 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Confirm before you go.

The Story

Chalmette Battlefield, about five miles southeast of the French Quarter, is where Andrew Jackson's army met the British on January 8, 1815. The British had landed near the Villeré Plantation on December 20, 1814, and Jackson held a line behind the Rodriguez Canal. His men included regulars, Marines, militia that counted free men of color, Baratarian privateers and Choctaw warriors, and enslaved people built the ramparts. The Treaty of Ghent had been signed fifteen days earlier, on December 24, 1814, and the main British assault failed in about half an hour.

The ground has a longer Black history. Jean Pierre Fazende, a free man of color and New Orleans grocer, inherited the land in 1857, and after the Civil War he sold parcels to formerly enslaved people from nearby plantations. Fazendeville was established in 1867 and grew to more than 200 people. The Park Service bought the land in the mid-1960s after long, contentious negotiations, and many residents moved to the Ninth Ward. Beside the field, Chalmette National Cemetery began in May 1864, and its oldest section holds U.S. Colored Troops; in 2016 volunteers cleaned and reset 671 headstones there. A Freedmen's Cemetery of about four acres was set out next to it in 1867.

The one-hundred-foot Chalmette Monument was begun by the state in 1855 and finished with federal funds in 1908. It closed after Hurricane Katrina and was rededicated on September 28, 2013.