In The Flow of Time – July 6, 2024
Research.
Poking around the Library of Congress, I found the Sanborn Fire Insurance map of New Orleans. Without leaving my desk I can travel back to St. Ann Street in 1885 and see the Laveau residence as it stood at the time. Marie Laveau died in 1881. A few years after the time of this map the descendants sold the house and it was demolished. This is more built up, the story will start 75 years before this.
What we see jibes with old eyewitness accounts from the Louisiana Writers Project work (1930s). They interviewed old people who knew the family, taking oral history. The house is old. It was set back from the street, unlike all the others. It was a wood frame construction, one story tall. Probably had a shingle roof (the fire map says it’s not tile). Witnesses say the front yard was behind a fence, had banana trees, and a pomegranate. The outbuildings out back would have, at the time, included a kitchen, a privy, maybe a chicken coop.
The photos are of a Creole cottage elsewhere on St. Ann Street. This place is brick, and right on the street, which is more typical. The house Marie grew up in was older, wooden, set back. The outside was likely either stucco or cypress boards.
Her grandmother Catherine Henry bought her own freedom in 1795, then bought this lot and had the house built in 1798. Marie grew up in this house, then moved back in and lived in it for all the rest of her days, sharing it with her partner Christophe Glapion, engaging in legal shenanigans to get around racist laws so this and another property stayed in the family.
The shit you can learn, if you dig, astonishing.
