10/01/2026
These four photos illustrate how Soulard was not truly built as a French neighborhood. The first two blocks of buildings are located in France, the third in Soulard, and the fourth in the French Quarter in New Orleans. Soulard was actually built primarily by German immigrants, and the particular.block photographed was built on land owned by Newton L. Payne, and at least one of the buildings was constructed by Clemens Dierkes.
The building in New Orleans was built for the LaCroix family, and was built in a Spanish style. This is because Louisiana was under the Spanish government as a result of the Treaty of Paris in 1763, as the French gave their land holdings to Spain, a fellow Catholic nation, instead of letting the British take it. The land where Soulard now occupies was all Spanish land grants. A huge tract was owned by Jean Pierre Cabanne, and this tract was part of Cabanne’s holdings prior to its acquisition by Newton L. Payne in 1837.
The Soulard Addition to the north also consisted of undeveloped farmland, and the Soulard family actually lived at Seventh and Soulard (now Lafayette) street in 1838. It’s unclear when they moved to that location, as they lived on Second Street south of Chouteau Avenue in 1821. The Soulard farm was in fact a plantation, and Antoine Soulard himself called it a plantation on multiple occasions.
Antoine Soulard came from the Aquitaine region of France, and was born in Rochefort, near the ocean. The second photo is of a block of houses in Bordeaux, which is located a short distance away, also in the Aquitaine region. La Musée d’Aquitaine in Bordeaux is an extensive history museum that covers the 20,000 year history of the region, and has a section which talks about how a large number of the Frenchmen who enslaved Africans in the Caribbean and in Louisiana came from Aquitaine. Antoine Soulard, who was formerly a lieutenant in the French Navy, and Surveyor General of Upper Louisiana fits nicely into this narrative. However, the architecture found in this region is quite different from that of Soulard, and has a distinctive yellow appearance due to its sandstone construction. The buildings also have red tile roofs.
The first photo is on the île de Saint Louis in Paris. The buildings here represent the Parisian landscape prior to the reconstruction under Georges Haussmann from 1853-1870. The narrow medieval streets and densely packed neighborhoods were built up with many structures featuring mansard roofs during the 17th through 19th centuries. Many buildings also have neoclassical elements, as that style was popular during the 18th century. There aren’t any American equivalents of these types of buildings
