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Louisana Unearthed, 3619 Pittari, Dallas, TX (2026)

09/18/2026

New Orleans planned a canal down the middle of Canal Street, never dug it, and split the city into three separate governments over the empty ditch instead. 🚧

Congress handed New Orleans the old fortification commons above the French Quarter in 1807 on one condition: sixty feet had to stay open for a canal linking the Mississippi to Lake Pontchartrain. Surveyor Jacques Tanesse platted the right of way in 1810 at 171 feet across, room for a 59 foot channel, two 21 foot sidewalks and two 35 foot roadways.

The canal never happened. Lawsuits tangled the Orleans Navigation Company's charter for years, and city leaders eventually realized a stagnant 60 foot trench through downtown would flood every hard rain and breed disease in the heat. Ground was still unbroken in 1837. The empty right of way just sat there while the street filled in around it.

What filled in around it was a fight the canal had nothing to do with. Anglo-American migrants had poured into New Orleans since the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, and by the 1830s they had money and ambition the old Creole families couldn't match, even where they lacked the votes. Historian Joseph G. Tregle Jr.'s research on the period, cited by Atlas Obscura, describes American editor R.D. Richardson pushing the legislature to cut the city apart. In 1836 lawmakers split New Orleans into three semi-autonomous municipalities, each with its own police, schools and budget. Creole families held the First Municipality below Canal. Americans took the Second above it. The Marigny and Bywater became the Third, nicknamed the Dirty Third.

That unbuilt canal strip sat on the seam between the first two municipalities, and people started treating it like a border. On March 11, 1837, The Picayune described "the Neutral Ground" becoming "an object of deep interest," the first time in print anyone hung that name on the median, per historian Richard Campanella's research into the city's old newspapers. The phrase was borrowed from real diplomacy: Spanish and American officers had used the same term for the buffer strip between the Sabine River and the Arroyo Hondo, land under the authority of neither government, a history historian J. Villasana Haggard documented and Spain didn't formally cede until 1819.

New Orleans stayed three cities until 1852, when enough Americans had settled in to make reunification worth their while. Nobody ever came back for the canal. Every median in the city still carries the name today, on Esplanade, Poydras, Claiborne, St. Charles and Rampart, a name left over from a ditch that was never dug.

Two cities needed a border so badly they built one out of a hole in the ground that was never actually there. 🚧

Photo: Library of Congress, Detroit Publishing Company, 1907. Public domain.

09/17/2026

A village of German cabbage farmers spent eighty years building a life on the edge of Lake Pontchartrain. One September night in 1915 finished it in a few hours. 🌊

Frenier sat in St. John the Baptist Parish under a different name first. German immigrant Martin Schlosser and his brother settled the spot around 1836, descendants of the colonists who had worked the river a century earlier as part of the original German Coast, and the place carried the family name, Schlosser, before it was anglicized to Frenier. The ground along the lake was too wet for ordinary farming, so the family dug drainage trenches straight through the swamp and turned the mud into cabbage fields, a technique documented in a 2022 history of the settlement published by the St. John Parish newspaper L'Observateur.

The 1850s brought the New Orleans, Jackson and Great Northern Railroad through the parish, a line absorbed into the Illinois Central system by 1878. There was no road to Frenier, so women flagged down passing trains themselves, handing grocery lists and cash up to the engineers. Cabbage and sauerkraut went out by rail to the French Market in New Orleans and on to wholesalers in Chicago, and the product got known up and down the line simply as Frenier Sauerkraut, according to the local history site ZipNola.

By 1915 Frenier had already shrunk. The Historic New Orleans Collection's own account of the storm records that the village held just three houses by then, dwarfed by the sawmill town of Ruddock a few miles up the same rail line, which that same account puts at roughly seven hundred residents in 1910. Wayne Norwood, who runs the Louisiana Treasures Museum in Ponchatoula and wrote a full account of the disaster titled "The Day Time Stood Still," found that when the hurricane came ashore it destroyed every house in Frenier but one.

The storm that hit on September 29 was a Category 4 with winds near 145 miles an hour, at the time the strongest recorded to strike the state, the Historic New Orleans Collection's account notes, and it puts the death toll at neighboring Ruddock alone at fifty eight. Survivors combed the debris, the woods and the swamp for days afterward, according to a Heart of Louisiana report from WVUE Fox 8, and buried the dead in a mass grave outside town, a detail preserved by the local history site ZipNola.

A cabbage patch fed New Orleans and Chicago for sixty years. It took one night of wind to make sure nobody remembers the address. 🌊

09/16/2026

The government spent close to a billion dollars digging a shortcut to the Gulf, and in 2005 that shortcut aimed a hurricane straight at St. Bernard Parish. 🌊

It was called the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, though everyone in the parish just called it Mr. Go. Congress authorized it in the Rivers and Harbors Act of 1956, the Army Corps of Engineers began digging in 1958, and it opened to shipping in 1963. According to the Louisiana encyclopedia 64 Parishes, the finished channel ran seventy six miles from the inner harbor at New Orleans out to the Gulf, thirty six feet deep, a dead straight cut through the marsh of lower St. Bernard.

That marsh was the problem. Building the channel and keeping it open destroyed somewhere between twenty three thousand and sixty five thousand acres of wetland, the same 64 Parishes entry records, and saltwater pushing up the cut killed the cypress that once stood between the parish and open water. The buffer that had protected St. Bernard for generations was dredged away to save ships a few hours.

Then came the morning of August 29, 2005. Hurricane Katrina drove a wall of water up the outlet, and where the channel met the Intracoastal Waterway it worked exactly like a funnel. Engineers who studied the failure afterward found the design raised the storm surge by roughly twenty percent and pushed it through the region several feet higher and faster than it would have come on its own. Levees along the channel failed in about twenty places. Nearly every building in St. Bernard Parish went underwater, along with the Lower Ninth Ward next door.

The reversal that followed was total. The same federal government that had spent decades keeping the channel open now moved to erase it. Maritime traffic was barred on April 22, 2009, and that July the Army Corps finished a rock dam across the outlet at Bayou La Loutre, sealing the Gulf off from the cut for good.

A channel that took years to dig was closed in a single season, because a storm had finally shown everyone what it was really for. 🌊

09/16/2026

A grocer named Jean Pierre Fazende carved his father's old plantation into thirty three house lots and sold every one to people who had just stopped being property. 🌸

Fazende was a free man of color, a New Orleans grocer and an opera lover, and around 1870 he subdivided land he had inherited along a dirt road in St. Bernard Parish, right beside the old battlefield where Andrew Jackson had beaten the British in 1815. He sold the lots cheap to families just out of slavery, and the community that grew up along what became Fazendeville Road simply called itself The Village. By its later years it held roughly thirty families on those same thirty three lots, with a one room schoolhouse that turned into a dance hall after dark, Battleground Baptist Church, two benevolent societies, three bars, a grocery store and a pecan grove where kids played baseball, a picture of the place preserved in the Louisiana state encyclopedia 64 Parishes.

The park next door is what ended it. The National Park Service had wanted Fazendeville's land since the 1930s to unify Chalmette National Historical Park into one continuous battlefield, and the push finally succeeded ahead of the sesquicentennial of the Battle of New Orleans in 1965. Congress authorized the purchase, homeowners who would not sell were expropriated under eminent domain through 1963 and 1964, and Fazendeville Road was closed for good. Public radio station WWNO's oral history project on the demolition put the payout at roughly six thousand dollars a house, against a market price closer to sixteen thousand dollars for a comparable new home in St. Bernard Parish at the time. The houses came down, the pecan trees were bulldozed, and around thirty families scattered, many of them resettling in New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward, where they carried the Battleground Baptist Church name with them and started the congregation over.

For decades afterward the site was just mowed grass inside a national park, with nothing left standing to mark that anyone had ever lived there. Then in the spring of 2021, dark purple Louisiana iris and African crinum lilies turned up blooming in patches across the battlefield lawn. Gary Salathe of the Louisiana Iris Conservation Initiative traced the clusters to the exact footprints of the old house lots, flowers that Fortune and the Associated Press both reported had almost certainly been planted by Fazendeville families themselves, decades before the bulldozers ever arrived.

The government could tear down every house in Fazendeville. It could not dig up what the residents had planted in their own front yards. 🌸

Photo: Open Parks Network, Clemson University. Public domain.

09/15/2026

There is a lake on the Texas line so wide it makes its own horizon, and under it sits a schoolhouse where the children of Pine Flat once learned to read. 🌊

Toledo Bend Reservoir spreads across 186,000 acres of the Sabine River, straddling the Louisiana and Texas line. It is the largest man-made body of water in the South and the fifth largest by surface area in the entire country, wrapped in more than 1,200 miles of shoreline. To a bass fisherman it is paradise. To a few hundred families it is a cemetery with a boat ramp.

Before the water, this was dry Sabine Parish and DeSoto Parish farmland. Pine Flat was a real community of about one hundred people, roughly fifty homes, and a school. Down the river were Barlake, Richard Neck, and Kites Landing. Across on the Texas bank stood Pendleton, a port of entry into the Republic of Texas established back in 1837. All of it sat in the path of the rising lake.

The Sabine River Authority, chartered on the Louisiana side in 1950, broke ground on October 5, 1961. According to the 64 Parishes encyclopedia, the project took in 101,600 acres in Sabine and DeSoto Parishes alone, with another 80,000 acres bought up across the Texas counties. On October 3, 1966, crews closed the dam and the water began to climb. By the dedication on October 11, 1969, the whole basin was full. The bill came to roughly 70 million dollars, split down the middle by the two states.

The people were moved out first. Then, before the flood reached them, the graves were dug up and carried to higher ground, coffin by coffin, so the dead would not spend eternity underwater. What could not be moved, the foundations, the fence posts, the roadbeds, the church steps, was simply left for the river to swallow.

Every summer weekend, thousands of boats idle over that quiet country. Most of the people on them have no idea that the still water below their hulls is holding down a town.

You can drain a river into a lake. You cannot drain the memory of the people who called its bottom home. 🌊

09/15/2026

Basin Street in New Orleans is named for a harbor that no longer exists. Oyster boats used to dock exactly where the traffic idles today. ⚓

Every time a car crosses Basin Street between Canal Street and St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, it passes over ground that used to be open water. Spanish colonial governor Francisco Luis Hector de Carondelet ordered the ditch dug in June 1794, driving a channel roughly 1.6 miles back from the edge of the French Quarter and the Treme neighborhood to Bayou St. John, which in turn opened onto Lake Pontchartrain. By 1796 the waterway had a name, the Carondelet Canal, and a job: getting cargo into the back of the city without fighting the Mississippi's current the whole way upriver.

At its head sat a turning basin roughly 80,000 square feet wide, big enough for schooners to swing around and unload. That basin is where Basin Street got its name, and for well over a century boats actually used it. A photograph in the historical archive, credited to NOAA National Marine Sanctuaries and held on Wikimedia Commons, shows oyster boats waiting to discharge their catch at what the archive's own catalog note places at that same turning basin, sometime around 1890.

The canal outlived its usefulness once the newer New Basin Canal opened across town in the 1830s, and traffic drained away for the better part of a century before the city finally drained the water too. New Orleans bought the old channel outright in 1924 and started filling it the following year, a project the New Orleans Historical archive dates as running until 1938, when the last of the open water disappeared under fill dirt for good.

What the canal left behind is now the Lafitte Greenway, a 3.6 mile bike and walking path that follows the old route from City Park nearly to Armstrong Park, built to a design the city approved in 2011. Basin Street itself had already become something else entirely: a red light district by 1870, then the front edge of Storyville from 1897 until World War I, before the brothels came down and the Iberville public housing went up in their place.

Every plan drawn up for that water eventually got paved, piped, or built over. The street just kept the water's old name. ⚓

Photo: NOAA National Marine Sanctuaries via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

09/14/2026

Every fall, thousands of Saints fans tailgate on a plaza next to the Superdome, and almost none of them know they are standing on the oldest graveyard in the city. 🪦

Girod Street Cemetery opened in 1822, established by the wardens of Christ Church, and it was the oldest Protestant cemetery in New Orleans. Its ground sat between where the Superdome and the Hyatt stand today, roughly under the block that later became the New Orleans Centre mall and, after that, the Champions Square plaza where fans gather before kickoff. That location comes straight from the New Orleans Historical project maintained by the University of New Orleans.

It was not a small plot. The record historians compiled counts 2,319 wall vaults, more than a thousand family tombs, and over a hundred benevolent society tombs, some of them rising seven and eight tiers into the air. For more than a century, this was where Protestant New Orleans buried its dead, in the raised stone vaults the city is known for, because the water table sits too high to bury anyone in the ground.

Christ Church Cathedral held the cemetery, but by the 1940s it had fallen into ruin and the burials stopped. On January 4, 1957, Girod Street Cemetery was deconsecrated, and crews began breaking open the tombs to move what was inside.

According to research by the historian Leonard Huber, the removal followed racially segregated lines. White remains were carried to the Hope Mausoleum. Black remains were taken to Providence Memorial Park. The dead were divided by color in 1957 exactly as the living were.

For decades afterward, fans blamed the losing seasons on a curse, on a stadium raised over a graveyard. The truth is quieter and stranger. Reliable histories show the Superdome itself did not rise on the cemetery. The graves lay just beside it, under the block that held the New Orleans Centre, shuttered since the 2005 flood, and under the parking decks where people leave their cars today. Layer on layer, the city kept building over the same forgotten ground.

You can move a cemetery off the map. You cannot move it out from under the tailgate. 🪦

09/14/2026

The Mississippi River moved this Louisiana town twice before a chemical company finally moved it for good. 🕯️

Morrisonville grew up on a bend of the river in Iberville Parish at a spot called Australia Point, where formerly enslaved families from nearby plantations settled after the Civil War. On March 13, 1889, the Reverend Robert Morrison organized the Nazarene Baptist Church there, and the community that grew around it took his name. That founding date comes straight off the Louisiana historical marker Dow Chemical itself later erected on the site.

The river kept forcing the town to move before industry ever touched it. Federal levee construction in 1921 pushed residents inland to a tract called Graceville, named for the family that sold them the land. A decade later, after the Mississippi flooded again, the community relocated a second time, resettling behind the new flood levees next to Mayflower Plantation. Twice uprooted, Morrisonville rebuilt itself both times.

Then in 1958 the Dow Chemical Company opened a vinyl chloride plant on the plantation land next door and bought its way outward, expanding the site to roughly 1,400 acres by 1959. Through the 1980s, according to the Louisiana Environmental Action Network's community atlas, testing found vinyl chloride contamination in the groundwater under both the Dow facility and the town itself. In 1989 Dow announced it would buy every home and every lot in Morrisonville.

About twenty families refused to sell at first. By 1993, according to the history recorded in Rutgers University Press's "History and Health Policy in the United States," the town was completely empty. Residents scattered into two subdivisions built to receive them: Morrisonville Estates in Iberville Parish, and Morrisonville Acres across the line in West Baton Rouge, both named for the place they no longer had.

What is left sits on Warren Road outside Plaquemine: the graves behind the old Nazarene Baptist Church, and a small open-sided pavilion Dow built so families could still visit them. Dow put up the historical marker itself in 2004, a company writing the epitaph for the community it bought out.

A river can push a town inland twice and still leave it standing. A company only has to buy it once. 🕯️

09/13/2026

Louisiana has one tribe still living on a piece of the same ground its ancestors held, and the thing that kept them a nation was a basket. 🧺

The Chitimacha are the only federally recognized tribe in Louisiana that still occupies part of its ancestral territory. The 64 Parishes encyclopedia puts their holdings in St. Mary Parish at 963 acres today, 445 of it in federal trust, on land near the town of Charenton. They won federal recognition in 1916, and the first acres went into trust in 1919.

What they carried through all of it was a way of weaving. Chitimacha baskets are made from piya, the native river cane, Arundinaria gigantea, that once grew thick in the canebrakes along the bayous. The cane is split, peeled, dried, dyed and split again before a single strand is woven. The prized form is the double weave: two walls made at once, one basket tucked inside the skin of another, wound so tight that some of the old storage baskets could hold water.

The colors are always the same three, red, black and yellow, against the natural cane. According to the 64 Parishes entry, the old dyes came from black walnut, red willow and dock root, until commercial aniline dyes took their place by the middle of the last century.

The knowledge came within a breath of ending. Clara Darden, the encyclopedia records, was already past a hundred years old when she died in 1910, one of the last who held the full craft. It passed hand to hand through weavers like Christine Navarro Paul, and then to Ada Vilcan Thomas, born in 1924, who learned as a schoolgirl on the reservation. In 1983 the National Endowment for the Arts named Thomas a National Heritage Fellow, the highest honor this country gives a folk artist. She died in 1992.

By the count on the Chitimacha Tribe's own website today, roughly fifty traditional designs survive, made by about four weavers. When farming thinned the wild cane, the tribe replanted canebrakes on the reservation so the material would not run out before the weavers did.

A town can be drowned. A language can be silenced. It turns out a nation can be held together by the pattern in a basket. 🧺

09/13/2026

The rest of the country got carved into perfect one-mile squares. Louisiana got wedges pointed at the river, and two hundred years later nobody has ever squared them off. 🗺️

When the United States finished the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, it planned to survey the whole territory the same way it had already surveyed Ohio and would go on to survey Kansas and Iowa: a rigid grid of townships and ranges, six miles to a side, cut without any regard for the ground underneath. That system, the Public Land Survey System, is why so much of the country still looks like a checkerboard from an airplane window.

Louisiana never got the grid, at least not along its rivers and bayous. French colonists there had already been dividing land since a 1716 royal edict, using an old unit called the arpent, about 192 English feet. A typical French grant ran two to four arpents of frontage on the water by forty to sixty arpents deep, a skinny wedge running straight back from the riverbank. The Spanish, who governed the colony after the French, granted even wider strips, six to eight arpents across, but kept the same idea: every farmer got a slice of the water, however narrow the slice had to be.

When the Americans took over, they did not erase any of it. An 1807 act of Congress, followed by a second in 1811, confirmed the existing colonial land claims instead of voiding them, and surveyors kept laying out new long lots in the settled river parishes even as the American grid filled the empty ground behind them. The two systems now sit next to each other on the map, the straight lines of the townships running up against the fan of long lots along the water, in a pattern the land history journal 64 Parishes describes as looking like water spilled across graph paper.

Fly along the Mississippi through St. Charles or St. James Parish today and the property lines still fan out from the river bends the way they did under Louis XV, converging tight on the inside of a curve and spreading wide on the outside of it. It is the same colonial habit that gave Louisiana its parishes instead of counties and its civil law instead of common law: land, government, and law all inherited from the same French and Spanish hand, and never fully Americanized.

Every other state drew its lines with a ruler and a compass. Louisiana drew its lines with a river, and the river never signed off on straight lines. 🗺️

Louisana Unearthed

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