The operator of this mule car branch railroad which first served Lafayette City crosstown was the New Orleans and Carrollton Railroad Company. In July, 1834, it was franchised to construct a “single railway commencing from the intersection of Jackson and Nayades Streets into said city running through Jackson to the site of the projected market house, thence branching around said market house and running to the river Mississippi.” The rate of travel could not, by law, exceed four miles per hour.
Quaint old picture from Stanton home on Jackson Avenue, with mule car going past Trinity Church towards St. Charles Avenue. Jackson has always been one of Garden District’s elegant streets.
Historically, the Lafayette river front had long been the scene of commerce. The succession of Spanish governors, who took over the colony after 1763, failed to enforce the strict embargo against any but Spanish vessels trading with New Orleans merchants. The British, under the pretext of sailing their commercial vessels up the Mississippi past New Orleans to their own colonies at Manchac, Baton Rouge and Natchez, would tie up above New Orleans in the future Lafayette area, and carry on a heavy trade in merchandise and slaves with the businessmen and planters in and around the city. Directly across the river from the site of Lafayette, in what is now Gretna, the audacious British maintained two floating warehouses and even “built a warehouse on land to facilitate the passage of the floating warehouses of their vessels” according to a contemporary report.
We can visualize the busy river front at this point on the east bank, with merchants plying back and forth in skiffs, and larger batteaux bringing loads of the high quality English goods, including cloth, cutlery, farming utensils—and slaves. New Orleans businessmen who dared not indulge in this illicit trade protested to the Spanish authorities who continued to wink at the British until the American revolution made anti-British sympathies fashionable. Then Bernardo Galvez, the Spanish governor, on April 17, 1777, seized the English boats and warehouses, and the illegal trade stopped. But it is safe to assume that the commercial identity of what became Lafayette’s riverfront persisted, perhaps even its later competition with New Orleans having begun in that early illicit trade.
The good business prospects in Lafayette caused men to say that the city might possibly “capture” New Orleans some day. The Texas cattle trails ended their long treks over the prairies at Gretna. Cattle boats brought the Stock across the river to the slaughter houses with special landings for the pounding, snorting beasts, skittering down the gangplanks into the pens, as if entirely cognizant that the end of the trail had come now for certain.
If one could stand the smell, it was a curious and exciting vista watching the steamboats unload cattle at Lafayette. Satellite industries lined the river front, the tallow renderers, the soap-boilers, the hide merchants, the tanners, the disposers of unused parts, and the bone grinders, whose odoriferous products made tasty vegetables and sweet sugar cane grow, paradoxical as that seemed.
King Cotton considered the wharves at Lafayette one of his royal ports. The puffing, graceful white swans of the Mississippi began to nudge the rows of flatboats from the river front. In the Forties the city council decreed exclusive facilities between First and Second Streets for steamboats, with inclined landing areas. The city supplied heavy, thick planks, bound on each end with iron bands and proudly branded “L”, for the use of the steamboats calling at its wharves. By 1850 twenty piers had been constructed to accommodate the packets.
The “breadbasket” of the upper valley dumped its cargoes at Lafayette wharves also. The first grain elevator on the lower river was built at the foot of Harmony Street. Flour was an important commodity, with busy factors waiting to trade as the clumsy broadhorns, floating on the current, edged into their moorings. So crowded were the flatboat moorings—above Second Street—that flatboat captains received a $10 fine for not immediately removing the large steering oars on each side. Twenty-four hours was the time limit for unloading.
At first, 80-foot sections of the river front had been set aside for the flatboats, once delivered of their cargoes, to be broken up. But this became a nuisance, and by 1845, it was forbidden along the entire Lafayette river front.