Notable New Orleanians: A Tricentennial Tribute

his death in 1846. One of his greatest works was to design and draw specifications for a multi-level
steamboat wharf that could function when the river was at high or low water.
The City Surveyor’s chief responsibility was to provide for the municipality’s orderly physical
growth. He was the city architect, engineer, and health and safety official. He surveyed and marked
lot lines, issued building permits, inspected theaters, walls, sidewalks and encroachments, laid out
streets and supervised their construction, and designed and let contracts for market buildings, firehouses,
asylums, prisons, courthouses, wharves, school houses, and other public facilities. An
expert on the growth of the city and its property titles, the Surveyor was usually the expert witness
in boundary dispute cases.
The elder Pilié came to New Orleans with his family as a refugee child. In 1805, the sixteenyear-old
entered into a contract with Barthelemy Lafon (q.v.) to learn the surveying business. He
became a draftsman in the office, one of his assignments being to make a property-owners’ map of
the Vieux Carre that was issued in 1809. Before the Battle of New Orleans, General Wilkinson
appointed him “to survey the lakes near the city and establish forts from Bayou St. John to
Mobile.” 1 Appointed City Surveyor for Orleans Parish in late 1818, Pilié began to make drawings
that appear in notarial records the following year. Many are small in scale with lot lines only; a large
number, however, are “indications,” depicting the footprint of every structure on a lot with convincing,
shaded roof shapes that explicate the building’s massing. Pilié’s last known drawing dates
to 1846.
Joseph Pilié sent his son Louis Henry to study at Janin’s College in St. Louis. At the age of fifteen
he joined his father’s private firm. At twenty-two (1843) he received an appointment as deputy surveyor
of the First Municipality, becoming City Surveyor after the reunion of the three municipal
subdivisions in 1852. He worked steadily in that capacity until the Civil War. One of his great
achievements from 1858 until 1861 was to survey and make oversized water color auction drawings
of the vast stock of property in Orleans and surrounding parishes owned by John McDonogh
and left to the city. Louis Pilié’s drawings for the McDonogh auctions fill entire plan books of the
Notarial Archives Division. His painting style and graphics were straightforward—clean and softly
colorful, without a great deal of linear detail.
In 1862, Union General Benjamin Butler had Louis Pilié seized and thrown into jail in the federal
Customhouse on a spurious charge. In 1865, Pilié sued the city over the extortion of money
and Butler’s false imprisonment, and won his case in both district and the Louisiana State Supreme
Court when Louisiana was still under federal control. 2 Louis H. Pilié went on to serve the City of
New Orleans for another twenty years.
—Sally K. Reeves
1. Deposition, Louis H. Pilié, “New Orleans Canal and Banking Co. vs. the United States,” USDC No.28; April 14, 1874.
2 Louis H. Pilié vs. City of New Orleans, 19 LA Annual Reports 274 appeal from 5DC No. 15070.
T HEODORE C LAPP (1792-1866) AND
B ENJAMIN M ORGAN P ALMER (1818-1902)
Unitarian Dr. Theodore Clapp and Presbyterian Reverend B. M. Palmer were the most popular
white sermonizers of New Orleans history, although their Protestantism varied. Clapp began as a
Presbyterian, and then rejected Calvinism a few years after becoming the preacher at First Presbyterian
Church. His followers became the First Congregational Unitarian Society, a church that revolved
around only Parson Clapp. The parson’s oratory made Clapp a minor tourist attraction, as visitors to
the city were persuaded to hear him preach in such numbers that his church became known colloquially
as the “Strangers” church. An audience of a thousand was not unusual, especially since the church
BIOGRAPHIES
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