Notable New Orleanians: A Tricentennial Tribute

J AMES
H. CALDWELL
(1793-1863)
James H. Caldwell pioneered English-speaking opera and drama in New Orleans, built the city’s
most magnificent theatre, and founded the gas manufacturing company needed for lighting its
immense arena. Promoting the growth of his American Sector, he served as alderman and aldermanic
board president as well as a member of the Louisiana House of Representatives. With other investors,
he organized the New Basin Canal, the New Orleans and Nashville Railroad Company, the New
Orleans Water Works, and the Verandah and St. Charles hotels. His contemporaries Samuel J. Peters
(q.v.) and James Robb (q.v.) collaborated in their efforts to achieve social prominence in American New
Orleans. A thoroughly Anglo-American entrepreneur, he was in modern parlance a developer who
injected cultural and economic energy into the New Orleans business community (albeit on the
American side of Canal Street).
An English actor who made his American debut at Charleston in 1816, Caldwell moved to
Washington, D. C. in 1817, and began a managerial career. The following year he built a theatre in
Petersburg, Virginia, but by 1820 had brought his theatrical company to New Orleans. There it
opened at the St. Philip Street theatre (Théâtre St. Philippe). Within months Caldwell had transferred
to the Orleans Theatre (Théâtre Orléans), sharing it with a resident French-speaking company.
Recognizing greener pastures and a market void, Caldwell moved in 1835 to the American side
of town. That year he opened the opulent St. Charles theatre at a cost of $350,000. The building
seated an astounding 4,100 and was lighted by a gas chandelier twelve feet high with 250 gas jets
and 23,200 crystal drops. Seven years into the venture the theater burned in a spectacular fire, a
common fate for theatres of the time. Caldwell was nevertheless “the Pioneer of the Drama in the
South,” according to a study of theatrical management. 1
In 1833, Caldwell founded the New Orleans Gas Light and Banking Company pursuant to a
Legislative charter. It began operations in 1834, with a thirty-year contract to light the city of New
Orleans. In 1835 he sold his interest to the newly-incorporated New Orleans Gas Light and Banking
Company, which would evolve in time into New Orleans Public Service, Inc., now Entergy.
As the Civil War began, Caldwell moved with his wife Josephine Rome to Cincinnati and then
to New York where he died in 1863. 2
James A. Caldwell.
LOUISIANA IMAGE COLLECTION, LOUISIANA RESEARCH
COLLECTION, TULANE UNIVERSITY.
1 Sol Smith, Theatrical Management in the West and South for Thirty Years (New York, 1868), 153, cited in Arthur
Henry Moehlenbrock, “The German Drama on the New Orleans Stage,” Louisiana Historical Quarterly XXVI April
1943, 370.
2 Louisiana Wills and Probate Records 1756-1868, Orleans wills 1860-1865, p. 481-7, New Orleans Public Library.
D E A RMAS F AMILY OF N EW O RLEANS
Since just after 1800, the multi-talented de Armas family of New Orleans has produced notaries
and artists over numerous generations, producing a vast record of the Early American, Antebellum,
and even Post Civil War city. The oldest known public figure was Christoval Loubis de Armas y
Arcila, an Isleño born in Santa Cruz on the volcanic Canary Island of Palma. Christoval practiced as
a notary only later in life (from 1815 until his death in 1828), having lived earlier in Baton Rouge,
and probably he was involved in some earlier legal disputes. He emigrated to Louisiana before 1783,
when he married Amiraud Duplessis of New Orleans. The couple had seventeen children, of whom
seven survived to adulthood. Christoval’s acts reflect the old Spanish and French Creole populations
of the city during its Early American years. 1 Never wealthy, he and his wife Amiraud resided in a
small rental cottage in the 400 block of Bourbon. His library was small, his inventory nevertheless
identifying a notarial press and the books a notary should have: the indispensable Parfait Notaire;
BIOGRAPHIES
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