New Orleans, the Founding Era places city’s birth on view at HNOC

26th March 2018   ·   0 Comments

By Fritz Esker
Contributing Writer

As a part of New Orleans’ tricentennial celebrations, the Historic New Orleans Collection is exploring the wide variety of cultures that helped give birth to the Crescent City in “New Orleans, the Founding Era.”

The display, which has been open to the public since February 27, features diaries, letters and manuscripts, archeological artifacts, scientific and religious instruments, paintings and maps and charts. The exhibition will focus not just on the famous historical figures involved in New Orleans’ birth, such as Jean Baptiste Le Moyne, sieur de Bienville, but also on the disparate group of individuals who settled in the area.

“The exhibition will offer visitors an opportunity to reflect on the complicated and often messy nature of New Orleans’ birth and early years,” said Erin M. Greenwald, historian and exhibition curator. “It examines the lived experiences of the settlement’s earliest inhabitants, a majority of whom – including French and Canadian soldiers, French convicts and enslaved Africans – were unwilling participants in France’s colonization of the lower Mississippi Valley.”

While many of the objects on display are from the Historic New Orleans Collection’s holdings, over 75 pieces are on loan from organizations in Spain, France, Canada and elsewhere in the United States. Loaned items include a pair of 18th-century Native American bear-paw moccasins from the Musee du quai Branly in Paris and pieces of 15th-century Mississippian pottery from the University of Mississippi. Both items rarely travel from their homes.

Visitors can also see a mortar and pestle used by Sister Francois Xavier Hebert in an early New Orleans hospital, as well as early 18th-century artifacts recovered from 21st-century archaeological digs in the French Quarter.

“I know it’s a cliché to say, but this really is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see all of these objects together in one place,” said John Lawrence, director of Museum Programs at the Historic New Orleans Collection. “It’s a chance to see how varied the objects of history are… It’s not just words on paper.”

Digital and interactive displays are also an important part of the exhibition. There is an interactive map of archeological digs in the French Quarter, a digitized 1731 inventory of enslaved Africans on a West Bank plantation, and a series of short films narrating the experiences of early residents. These residents include a soldier, a Native-American, an African woman, an enslaved woodsman and a novice nun.

There is also a quiz visitors can take testing their knowledge on the supplies needed to build a new home at the settlement.

“When you got here, there was nothing,” said Lawrence. “You had to bring everything with you and build on site. It was a total wilderness… New Orleans wasn’t a blank slate, it was a slate covered by a forest.”

The exhibition includes a lecture series. The remaining lectures include:

“Arriving Africans and a Changing New Orleans” on March 27 at 6 p.m., which focuses on the formative role Africans played in New Orleans’ cultural, economic and physical development.

“The Tunica-Biloxi and the Rise of Louisiana” will be on April 24 at 6 p.m. and will explore the rich history of the Tunica-Biloxi Tribe of Louisiana.

“Traditional Herbal Remedies” will be on May 12 at 1 p.m. and feature an outdoor demonstration on traditional herbs and medicines as used by generations of African Americans.

The final lecture, “The Early French Mapping of Louisiana,” will take place on May 22 at 6 p.m., and discuss how French mapping led to the founding of New Orleans.

There is also a companion catalog written in English and French featuring essays describing the different populations who lived in New Orleans and its surrounding environs, as well as the forces that drove the settlement’s growth. Gerard Araud, France’s ambassador to the United States, wrote the book’s foreword.

The Historic New Orleans Collection is located at 533 Royal Street. “New Orleans, the Founding Era” will be open to the public through May 27 on Tuesdays-Saturdays from 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., and on Sundays from 10:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Admission is free. For more details, visit the website at www.hnoc.org.

This article originally published in the March 26, 2018 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.