The appearance of the Greek Revival mansions now rising from the vicinity of Nayades and in toward Magazine supported the claim that at this time, New Orleans had more per capita wealth than New York.
It appears from the best sources that the first house of consequence to be built in what is now the Garden District proper was that of Thomas Toby in 1838. He came from Philadelphia, and his father’s ships brought some of the materials for the house from his native city. This house is still standing at Prytania and First Streets. Others who built in the same general neighborhood in the following decade were F. B., T. B., and Charles Conrad, P. N. Wood, Judge R. F. Ogden, Captain Thomas Ivey, and Charles Briggs. The Fifties saw the greatest activity of construction of the great houses of the Garden District.
This section, peopled as it was chiefly by those who conducted their businesses in New Orleans, but who enjoyed the shaded gardens for their residences, rapidly developed a life apart from the teeming waterfront of Lafayette City. Inevitably a rivalry began. The catalyst was the constant annoyance of pounding hooves and the odors of the slaughterhouses and tanneries. Eventually, the early residents of the Garden District were instrumental in getting the Lafayette City Council to pass restrictive measures which removed the cattle landing. The important commerce of this trade moved upriver to the neighboring town of Jefferson, which caused the fiery editor of the Spectator, the outspoken champion of the city’s growth, to howl from his columns that the city had lost a million and a half dollars in trade a year by this act.
He belabored particularly the aldermen from the “rear of the city” who “turned up the whites of their eyes and stopped their delicate noses as they passed by with their white gloves on and exclaimed, ‘What a nuisance!’”
Tomb of members of Jefferson Fire Company No. 22 in Lafayette Cemetery. “Ready at the First Sound” was motto. Relief shows 1832 engine.
Despite these earmarks of a brewing donnybrook, one couldn’t exactly blame the owners of the fine gardens for objecting to “the great numbers of horses and mules running at large, particularly at night, occupying the sidewalks to the danger of the passers-by and racing up and down streets, disturbing the rest of the families.” Not only horses and mules, but goats, too! “If a gate is left open for a minute, choice rose bushes suffer and the rare plants of the most careful training are ruined. Our feed stores are compelled to keep an extra clerk to protect the corn sacks and bales of hay from these bold plunderers.” At least there was a law passed in 1841 which prohibited the keeping of bears in Lafayette City.
One of Garden District’s great houses was the Stauffer mansion on Jackson, corner of Prytania, shown in Archives drawing dated 1870.
In the early days of Lafayette and the Garden District, “the war” referred only to the very real and fresh memories of Jackson’s battle with the British at Chalmette hardly twenty years previously. In the Forties, it referred to the War with Mexico, in which many Lafayette citizens took part. Troops were encamped and trained on some of the vacant lots. The Rev. Jerome Twichell held Presbyterian services for them, and a government warehouse near the river on Washington dispensed supplies to troops coming down the Mississippi for Mexican service.