House as it appears today, with galleries, ironwork added in 1870’s.
Strangely, these distinguished writers and authors went back to their offices in the East and proceeded to turn out bales of copy about New Orleans but with only side references to the Garden District. Passing mention was made of the luxury and beauty of the homes of this area, but the French Quarter was the subject of all the sketches and engraved illustrations. Rare is the surviving sketch, tintype or glass plate photo of amateur or professional.
Yet the district captivated the earliest of many visitors who put their sentiments down for posterity. The Rev. Theodore Clapp, beloved parson of the mid-nineteenth century, wrote of his arrival in 1822, before Lafayette was so named:
“On a beautiful morning near the close of February we were landed at Lafayette where the boat stopped to discharge a part of her cargo, about three miles above New Orleans. The passengers, impatient of delay, concluded to walk to the city. Leaving the levee, we took a circuitous route through unenclosed fields, which a few years before had belonged to a large sugar plantation. They were adorned with a carpet of green grass, where herds and flocks grazed in common. Here and there we passed a farm house in the midst of gardens, luxuriant shrubbery and orange groves.... The air was cool, inspiring and scented with the flowers of early spring. The music of the thrush and various other species of singing birds, saluted our ears with their sweetest notes. All things, so far as our eyes could reach, seemed like a paradise. These suburbs, then so radiant with rural charms, are now the site of a large portion of the buildings belonging to New Orleans.”
Walt Whitman, a writer for the New Orleans Crescent in 1848, living on Washington Street near the river and travelling to and from his desk in New Orleans by omnibus, must have been impressed by the large live oak trees in Lafayette City. In a later edition of “Leaves of Grass”, he refers to the live oak as “rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of myself.”
Commenting on the ways one kept cool in summer, Julian Ralph, in Dixie, or Southern Scenes and Sketches, related:
“... when I rode through the Garden District—the new part of the town—my lady friends pointed to the galleries and said: ‘You should see them in the summer, before the people leave or after they come back. The entire population is out-of-doors in the air, and the galleries are loaded with women in soft colors, mainly white. They have white dresses by the dozen. They go about without their hats, in carriages and in street cars, visiting up and down the streets. In-doors, one must spend one’s whole time and energy in vibrating a fan.’”
Writing of the Garden District, Mark Twain said: “All the dwellings are of wood ... and all have a comfortable look. Those in the wealthy quarter are spacious; painted snowy white, usually, and generally have wide verandas, or double-verandas, supported by ornamental columns. These mansions stand in the center of large grounds and rise, garlanded with roses, out of the midst of swelling masses of shining green foliage and many-colored blossoms. No houses could well be in better harmony with their surroundings, or more pleasing to the eye, or more home-like and comfortable-looking....”
