Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, General Research and Reference Division

Edward King, The Great South (Hartford, Conn.: American Publishing Co., 1874)

The New Orleans French Market, located on the Mississippi River, began as a complex of centralized market facilities constructed between 1779 and 1784 during the Spanish period. They were rebuilt numerous times to achieve their present form. The large influx of Haitian émigrés in 1809 reinforced the market's multiethnic character. Anglo-American visitor Benjamin H. Latrobe disapproved of the riverfront market's extraordinary mixture of people and products when he landed in 1819 at the city wharf. He observed, "Everything had an odd look." On the levee, at least five hundred "white men and women, and of all hues of brown, and of all classes of faces, from round Yankees, to grisly and lean Spaniards, black negroes and negresses, filthy Indians half naked, mulattoes, curly and straight-haired, quarteroons of all shades, long haired and frizzled, the women dressed in the most flaring yellow and scarlet gowns, the men capped and hatted" had their wares "of as many kinds as their faces" spread on the ground "on a piece of canvas, or a parcel of Palmetto leaves." Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Impressions respecting New Orleans: Diary & Sketches, 1818-20.