Historic Louisiana

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Above: Bernardo de Gálvez (1746-1786)
was a military leader akin to Pierre Le
Moyne d’Iberville. His lasting importance to
Louisiana was a result of his three successful
military campaigns during the
Revolutionary War in which Gálvez’s
Spanish forces drove British troops from
forts at Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Mobile,
Alabama; and Pensacola, Florida. These
Spanish territories would later fall into the
waiting lap of America instead of remaining
British outposts whose importance would
have greatly magnified the danger to New
Orleans in 1815. Gálvez married a Creole
widow who named the Feliciana parishes.
COURTESY OF THE HISTORIC NEW ORLEANS
COLLECTION, 1991.34.15.
water’s edge. Soon after 1770, Bordeaux shipbuilder
Arnold Magnon opened a yard on the
riverbank adjacent to the Ursuline Convent.
In 1780 when Bernardo de Gálvez planned
his attack on Pensacola, he needed a flotilla of
thirty-two vessels. Magnon worked on many
of them. He successfully kept his shipyard
operating in front of the city until 1819,
employing as many as twenty-six slaves.
Another early shipbuilder just down river
from Magnon was Andre Seguin. With the
onset of the embargo of 1808, the U.S. Navy
presence in New Orleans dramatically
increased. The local commander, David
Porter, received three hundred feet along the
river front between Dumaine and St. Philip
Streets to use as a navy dockyard.
In 1819 the city council evicted
shipbuilding from the New Orleans side, so
shipbuilders moved across the river to Algiers.
That very year the owner of Algiers point,
Bernard Duverjé, began subdividing his tract
of land. The first shipbuilder to move was
Seguin. By 1842 half the population of Algiers
was in the shipbuilding business. The greatest
antebellum shipbuilder was Peter Marcey. Dry
docks were a staple of the ship repair business,
and the earliest dry docks appeared at Algiers
by 1840. Eleven different dry docks lined the
Algiers river front before 1860. The largest was
the Pelican Dry Dock, which could lift a vessel
four hundred feet in length. There were eight
shipbuilding firms in Algiers by 1850. The
Confederate abandonment of New Orleans led
to the destruction of some shipbuilding
property, but the presence of the Union
fleet insured much work for the duration of
the war.
After the Civil War shipbuilding
transformed itself from a branch of carpentry
to a branch of metallurgy. In 1903 the Algiers
Iron Works and Dry Docks appeared just
upstream from the Canal Street ferry. A dry
dock remains at this site to this day. At the
turn of the century, Lewis Johnson moved
his ironworks across the river. The firm was
one of the largest in the city, and it went
into ship repair. In the 1950s it became the
Right: In 1820, New Orleans banned
shipbuilding from the east bank.
Shipbuilding was then moved to Algiers. In
the 1930s, a new shipbuilder opened on the
west bank at Avondale Plantation. By the
1980s, Avondale was one of the largest
industries in the state. Drydocks can still be
found at Algiers.
COURTESY OF THE LOUISIANA STATE MUSEUM.
HISTORIC LOUISIANA
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