Historic Louisiana

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In 1845, Captain Thomas B. Leathers
(1816-1896) launched the line of
Mississippi River steamboats named the
Natchez. He lived in prominent homes in
New Orleans. His boats established the
speed record from New Orleans to St. Louis
of 3 days, 21 hours, and 50 minutes. He
was the most famous for the steamboat
races between the Natchez VI and the
Robert E. Lee. He died after being hit by a
St. Charles Avenue streetcar.
COURTESY OF SPECIAL COLLECTIONS,
TULANE UNIVERSITY.
HISTORIC LOUISIANA
36
For the first time the Corps employed nature to
help restrain the Mississippi. In the next
century it seems clear the river will have to be
untied from its levees so that marshlands can
be reflooded to prevent south Louisiana from
sinking beneath the Gulf of Mexico.
For south Louisiana the most important
monument to the 1927 flood is the Old River
Control Structure. This dam with spillway is
designed to ensure that no more than thirty
percent of the Mississippi River water ever
flows down the Atchafalaya River. To put it
another way, it is designed to take thirty
percent of the Mississippi’s water so that water
height on the main line levees can be reduced
in flood years. It has worked for the last sixty
years, but many question how much longer.
The underlying issue is the fate of the port of
New Orleans. If the Mississippi changes its
mouth, will the port remain viable?
Another federal program that had a
dramatic effect on Louisiana was the
campaign to eradicate yellow fever. As a port,
New Orleans had attracted both immigrants
and their diseases. Throughout the nineteenth
century yellow fever had regularly devastated
Louisiana. Since the 1790s this plague of the
tropics had visited New Orleans aboard ships
coming from Martinique or Cuba. It came in
the bloodstream of sick sailors or passengers.
One mosquito bite sent the virus spiraling
across the marshes of Louisiana on the wings
of the Aedes aegypti. Epidemics in 1796, the
1820s, especially 1853 and 1854, 1878, and
1897 set back the growth of Louisiana by
killing thousands of people.
Finally experiments in Cuba following the
Spanish-American War showed that it was the
mosquito that transmitted the disease. At
experimental stations just outside Havana,
Walter Reed and his assistants James Carroll,
Aristides Agramonte, and Jesse Lazear proved
that the Aedes aegypti mosquito was the carrier
for the yellow fever virus. Their work
destroyed the popular notion that yellow
fever spread by direct contact with infected
people or “contaminated” objects and focused
the people’s efforts on the eradication of the
Aedes mosquito. The last yellow fever
epidemic hit New Orleans in 1905. The
announcement of the way to prevent the
disease sparked a general cleanup of the city
by the eradication of open pools of water, the
destruction of old cisterns, and the
introduction of the screen porch.
Even before the Federal Government had
begun the campaign against yellow fever,
Louisiana public health doctors began a
campaign to control Hansen’s Disease. In the
eighteenth century, Andres Almonaster had
funded the creation of a retreat house behind
the city where leprosy victims could live. A
century later reporter John Smith Kendall of
the New Orleans Picayune wrote a series of
articles pointing out a rise in the number
of leprosy cases. The members of the Orleans
Parish Medical Society, led by the great
dermatologist Dr. Isadore Dyer, turned their
attention to the disease. Their fundamental
public health tool was isolation, but they
determined to try it outside of the urban
pest house and in a healthful farm setting.
But they knew that isolation was not
a cure. They were determined that the
asylum should be a place of treatment and
research for a cure—not simply a place of
detention. They were humanitarians who
believed the asylum should be a place a
refuge, not of reproach.
In 1894 the state purchased a site for a new
facility that came to be known as Carville. An
order of Catholic nuns, the Daughters of
Charity, agreed to provide the staffing for