Some contemporary observers found the severe classical exterior a bit plain, but inside there was a lavishness of detail which made even these carpers wax enthusiastic. The house contained frescoes by the celebrated Dominique Canova, priceless European pictures, furniture, rugs and objects. The most famous art work was probably Hiram Powers’s Greek Slave, the daring marble beauty which had shocked New York. Robb allowed it to be exhibited in several cities before bringing it to his home. Everywhere it aroused controversy. Today it is in Washington’s Corcoran Gallery of Art.

Robb, millionaire businessman, president of the first trunk line railroad to New Orleans, the New Orleans, Jackson and Great Northern (later part of the Illinois Central) lost his fortune and in 1860 the great house which had been dubbed “Robb’s Folly” was acquired by another millionaire, John Burnside. Under his ownership the beauties of the dwelling were preserved. The noted octagonal room, decorated in the Pompeian fashion, with its arrangement of mirrors which reflected the scene ad infinitum, continued to excite admiration.

In 1890, Mrs. Josephine Newcomb purchased the three-acre square and its buildings for the girls’ college which she had endowed some years before. In converting it into a school, great care was taken to preserve the architectural beauty. When Newcomb College moved to its present campus in 1918, the old campus was acquired by the Baptist Bible Institute, later the Baptist Theological Seminary. They used the site until 1955, when they, too, moved to larger quarters. The Baptists extended Conery Street through the square, divided the property into lots, and sold them. Fine new homes have arisen there.

The people of Lafayette were notably deep in their religious faiths and in love for their fellow men. This is shown by their early church organizations, by their solicitation for the welfare of the indigent and the orphans of the immigrants devastated by cholera and yellow fever epidemics, and by their inauguration of public education, lyceum programs and a library.

It is interesting to note that, with the background of Germans and Irish, it was a Protestant church which first was erected for a Lafayette City congregation. In a building on St. Mary Street, near Fulton (now St. Thomas), as early as 1831 the Methodists were meeting. Some 10 years later the same denomination built a new church on Magazine Street out of flatboat gunwales, and this was known for years as the “Flatboat Church”. Later it became identified with a young pastor, Elijah Steele, who had died of yellow fever. As Steele’s Chapel it united with the St. Mary Street Church and the Andrew Chapel, which had been built on Dryades and Felicity in 1835, to form the Felicity Methodist Church.

Although a parish was chartered for Lafayette Roman Catholics in 1836, they had no church and no priest until 1843. That year Father Peter Chakert, of the Redemptorist order, gathered the faithful in Kaiser’s Hall on Chippewa and Josephine Streets for masses on Sunday morning after the past evening’s dance had ceased. The following year saw the start of their first church on Josephine Street, St. Mary’s Assumption. This lovely little wooden chapel, with its bell which was cast at Des Allemands, was later replaced by the present structure. However, the first building is still standing, moved to St. Joseph’s cemetery on Washington Avenue, where it serves, all white and clean, as a mortuary chapel, 117 years old.

St. Mary’s Assumption first served all the Roman Catholics of Lafayette with sermons alternating in German, French and English. In 1850 St. Alphonsus Church was completed across the Street, chiefly for the Irish, and nine years later, this remarkable tri-lingual parish opened a church for the French people on Jackson Avenue. This was taken down in 1925, but is perpetuated in the Chapel of Our Mother of Perpetual Help at Third and Prytania, the old Lonsdale-McStea house.

Surveyor’s drawing of Livaudais Plantation, or “Faubourg”, divided into squares for sale of lots following purchase from Mme. Livaudais. She retained square with her house and garden, near river. Note how this square governed size of entire row of squares, as they are today.

[High-resolution Map]