Notable New Orleanians: A Tricentennial Tribute

first president of the Levee Board. By the spring of 1892, the board had built over twenty-one miles
of levees using 314,257 cubic yards of earth. All the levees along both river banks as well as the
Old and New Basin Canals were expected to be completed in 1892.
In 1896, Dreyfous turned to city politics and ran successfully for the City Council. From that
position he wrote a bill for the legislature to establish the nine-member Drainage Commission of
New Orleans with a variety of funding sources, power of expropriation, and right to use city
streets. In 1899, it became part of the new Sewerage and Water Board. No member of the new
board was to receive compensation; meetings were to be open to the public, and contracts by
sealed public bid. Its central power was the authority to compel all premises in the City of New
Orleans to connect to the Sewerage and Water system.
As president of the Levee Board Dreyfous had observed how detrimental to business the port’s
wharf leasing system had become. His campaigning led the State Legislature to step in and create
the Board of Commissioners of the Port of New Orleans (Dock Board), the public agency that has
successfully operated the docks throughout the twentieth century.
In 1891, Dreyfous helped organized the City Park Improvement Association. Felix J. Dreyfous,
the most influential of all City Park leaders, served as acting president and then president for seventeen
years. He was a member of the board for fifty-five years, from its start in 1891 until his
death in 1946. His son Julius Dreyfous served after his father for another fifty years. Dreyfous had
three children, but no grandchildren survive him.
Felix Dreyfous.
FROM THE ARCHIVES OF TOURO INFIRMARY.
1 An Act Creating a Police Board for the City of New Orleans.... No. 63, approved July 11, 1888.
2 Dreyfous files, Levee Bd.
G RACE
K ING
(1852-1932)
Grace King filtered the Southern past to produce a beautiful corpus of writings exalting her ancestors.
They were the ancestors of many in Louisiana. While King is notable as the champion of “the Lost
Cause,” a more appealing quality is an appreciation of racial harmony found in some of her works. She
contrasts with Alice Dunbar-Nelson (q.v.) whose works turned often on tragic individual conflicts.
A Protestant Anglo-Saxon, King lacked the Catholicism that animated much Creole writing. Still,
one of her two best books, Creole Families of New Orleans, is the standard introduction to Creoles of
white extraction. Following World War I African-Americans of mixed race appropriated the term
Creole since their ancestry also extended before the war. As Alcée Fortier (q.v.) has shown, the Creole
language of the blacks was quite old and was not dependent on a mixed race ancestry. In Monsieur
Motte King restricts her use of Creole to the language or to whites, as when she wrote of the school
girls’ mothers who were once, “little creoles like themselves.” In The Pleasant Ways of St. Medard King
writes …“pretty dancing Creole girls of Monsieur Pinseau’s dancing days….” 1
Grace King considered herself a Creole based entirely on her parent’s residence in New Orleans
prior to the Civil War. Her father seems to have been a stern Protestant and her mother a rather
subservient creature with a surprising fund of stories exalting the old days. That King became a
writer might be attributed to her father’s straightened post-war circumstances, but her natural
story-telling seems inevitably to have led to literature. Charles Gayarré (q.v.) was a close friend of
her father, inviting the young Grace and her sister to spend summers at his plantation. In the mid
1880s George Washington Cable’s (q.v.) accounts of mixed-race Creoles were much resented by the
white Creoles and led to the first stories collected in Monsieur Motte. Cable and King had similar
trajectories moving through the genre from local color to history. Cable left New Orleans permanently
because of his definition of Creole, while King remained exalted.
BIOGRAPHIES
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