Scenes like this cotton wharf 1914 photo explain New Orleans.
Cotton Wharf, 1914
Photo from a pamphlet, “New Orleans Old and New,” published by the Convention and Tourist Bureau of the New Orleans Association of Commerce, 1914. Wm. Allen was the group’s manager. This pamphlet promotes New Orleans tourism at the time of the completion of the Panama Canal. City leaders appealed to folks on the West Coast to cruise to New Orleans, rather than ride trains like the Sunset Limited for three days. New Orleans’ European (read that “non-British”) roots always drew visitors.
Additionally, promotional material like this touted the importance of the Port of New Orleans. Local businessmen believed it important to regularly remind the rest of the country of the port’s significance. While ocean-going ships improved dramatically in the latter part of the 19th Century, classic steamboats remained the primary method of transportation in the middle of the country.
Cotton still King
We see five steamboats “angle-parked” along the cotton wharf. On my French Quarter Walking Tours, we often hear the calliope of the Riverboat Natchez. Riverboat Natchez docks along the River at Woldenberg Park. I encourage guests to imagine the sounds of dozens of steamboats whistles and calliopes, announcing their arrivals and departures. The cotton seen here arrives from plantations upriver. By 1914, those farms operated with sharecroppers rather than enslaved workers. Even though sharecroppers were free, they were paid poorly for their labor. That continued cotton as a profitable cash crop.
Once off the steamboats, dock workers loaded these bales on mule-drawn wagons. They transported them to the large cotton press facilities just off the riverfront. There, steam presses smashed the cotton down, pushing air out, reducing their size dramatically. Pressed cotton was transferred to ocean-going ships. Those ships transported the cotton up the East Coast, or to Europe.
Sugar
Sugar also remained an important cash crop in the economic equation of New Orleans. Refining advanced greatly since granulation became common in the late 1790s. Basics at the farm/plantation level remained the same, though. Someone had to harvest the sugar cane stalks. After granulation, barrels of sugar traveled down the river to New Orleans. By this 1914 photo, the process was an established operation.
Color!
We’re experimenting with colorizing, so both the original images and the color are included here.
Four Ways to Support NOLA History Guy
Buy my books! Edward Branley is the author of six books on New Orleans history. They’re available from local booksellers and all the usual online suspects.
Buy me a coffee on Ko-fi dot com. I just love this concept as a way to say thank you/tip creators you enjoy. Our idea of monetization is buying books and having us come to speak. If you see me at a coffee shop, stop and say hi. Otherwise, I’ll raise coffee cup to you if you treat me.
Become a patron. Yes, we’re on Patreon. A lot of creators use the platform for direct monetization, and that’s great for them. We don’t have “exclusive content” for patrons. Still, if you think our history stuff is worth a dollar a month, go join!
Podcast 44 features a Boyd Cruise painting of “The Levee” on the Mississippi River.
“The Levee” by Boyd Cruise
Alvik Boyd Cruise painted this exciting and busy waterfront scene in 1959. While THNOC dates the setting as 1859 (probably a typo from the actual date the artist created it), the inclusion of the Steamboat Fashion puts it at 1865-1866. While so many of Cruise’s paintings focus on particular homes and buildings, this one casts a wider net. Instead of capturing the feel of a particular building in time for a Historic American Building Survey, the artist re-creates the activity in the port, mid-19th century.
This painting shows activity in the second-largest port in the US in the 1800s. What’s particularly interesting is that Cruise details the port after the Civil War. When we think of 1865, images of the destruction and horrors of war often come to mind. Many forget that the direct participation of New Orleans in the war ended in 1862. By 1865, the Mississippi was open to riverboat activity from Vicksburg to New Orleans. With the war over, investors contracted shipbuilders to get more boats in the water that would transport cotton from plantations to the port for export.
Cotton
Bales of cotton stand on the dock. They await loading onto ocean-going ships for export. These steamboats brought “raw” cotton from plantations to New Orleans. Those big bales were too bulky for export. So, cotton factors purchased the bales from ship captains. They transported the cotton to industrial pressing plants. Think of a trash compactor in a home kitchen, but on a much larger scale. They returned the compressed bales seen in the painting to the dock. Ocean-going vessels transported those bales up the Atlantic coast and to Europe.
The Canal Street Zone is the transit hub of the city.
Canal Street Zone
At the peak of my streetcar riding, in the mid-late 1970s, transfer slips always said, “Good on any connecting line or any line in the Canal Street Zone.” That concept goes back over a century now. The Canal Street Zone morphed into an (almost) all-bus concept in 1964, with the conversion of the Canal (Cemeteries) line to buses. This ad in the Times-Picayune on 15-August-1964 announces the roll-out of bus service in the Canal Street neutral ground:
Canal Street Buses Start Operating on Downtown Neutral Ground Sunday as Major Construction Nears End.”
Cemeteries line service continued with buses immediately after the electric overhead wires vanished at the end of May, 1964. While most streetcar infrastructure moved slowly, NOPSI and the city moved quickly to ensure the change stuck. No going back, similar to the move of passenger rail service to Union Passenger Terminal in 1954. Buses operated in the automobile lanes for the entire length of the line while city crews ripped up the tracks.
Return to the neutral ground
by August, 1964, the city cleared the streetcar tracks on Canal from Claiborne to Liberty Place. For the first time since 1861, no streetcars operated in the neutral ground. Only the one-block loop track for the St. Charles Line (Carondelet-Canal-St. Charles) remained. This is huge. At their peak levels of operation, streetcars ran on four tracks in the neutral ground. Uptown and Downtown lines approached Canal, looped for one or more blocks on the outside pair of tracks, then proceeded on their outbound runs.
So, that one-block loop was all there was from 1964 until the upgrade of the Riverfront line in 1997. While Riverfront opened in 1988, it did not connect to St. Charles. The New Orleans Regional Transit Authority (NORTA, which took over from NOPSI in 1984) used the old L&N/Seaboard Coast Line (now-CSX) track. Riverfront grew in popularity to the point where NORTA expanded the line to two-track operation. They ripped up the standard-gauge track, replacing it with two wide-gauge (streetcar) tracks. Additionally, they built a connector from Riverfront to St. Charles. Now the “red ladies” could return to Carrollton Station under their own power.
Street-to-neutral ground
The photos in this ad show how the bus zone operated. Buses for all three Canal lines ran from City Park Avenue to Claiborne in the auto lanes. At Claiborne, they shifted to the inside (left) lane, entering the bus zone. They ran down to the river, turned around, and headed outbound. At Claiborne, they exited the zone, continuing in the auto lanes.
Direct service
The ad states, “Direct service between the river and the lake, with no transferring, is now offered for the same 10-cent fare for local and 15-cent for express.” Prior to all-bus operation on Canal, riders living in Lakeview took the West End bus to City Park Avenue. They transferred to the streetcar at that point. This! This right here is why it was so easy to sell discontinuing streetcar service on Canal. If you lived in Lakeshore or Lake Vista, you could board the extended lines, Canal-Lakeshore via Pontchartrain Blvd, or Canal-Lake Vista via Canal Blvd., by your house and ride into town without transferring. In air-conditioning. At a time when working downtown meant men wore suits and women wore dresses and hose, this was a Big. Deal.
The last remaining roundhouse in New Orleans stands on Tchoupitoulas Street.
NOTE: this post is an update of one from 2018.
Unidentified man stands next to NOPB locomotive #22
NOPB Roundhouse on the riverfront
Franck Studios photo of a Baldwin 0-6-0 switcher. NOPB received the engine new in Jan. 1921. It bore construction number 54415 from Baldwin, and its NOPB road number was 22. The engine was retired May 1957. The photo shows the engine coming off the turntable and entering roundhouse stall 5.
NOPB operations
New Orleans Public Belt 1941 – Baldwin 0-6-0 switcher at the Tchoupitoulas terminal (courtesy NOPB)
The New Orleans Public Belt Railroad is a “short line” railroad. It operates along the Mississippi River in Metro New Orleans. The city created NOPB in 1908. They fixed the issue of railroad congestion along the riverfront. The Class I railroad wanted their own tracks and terminals along the wharves and warehouses. So, the city created a Class III railroad, the NOPB, to connect them.
A state agency manages the NOPB. It is the Public Belt Railroad Commission. The commission also maintains the Huey P. Long Bridge, since it services both railroad and automobile traffic.
The following railroads travel over NOPB tracks:
BNSF Railway
CSX Transportation
Canadian National/Illinois Central
Kansas City Southern
Norfolk Southern
Union Pacific
Amtrak
Engine Terminal
Google Earth image of the NOPB Tchoupitoulas terminal.
NOPB services its engines at the roundhouse on Tchoupitoulas. While turntable/roundhouse facilities were common prior to World War II, they became less common as diesel locomotives entered wider service. Diesel locomotives operate easily in either direction. Steam locomotives have a clear “front” and “back.” Turntables enabled the service facility to easily reverse the direction of the steam equipment. For diesels, crews just engaged the engines in reverse.
The image above is a Google Earth shot of the Tchoupitoulas facility today. Engines enter the facility from a siding track connected to the riverfront “main line.” The turntable directs equipment onto seven sidings. Depending on what’s required, an engine may simply park outside the roundhouse, or enter the stall. The tracks to the left of the circle appear to be a separate building for heavy maintenance tasks.
Dating the Photo
The photo was commissioned by the NOPB. So, it is part of the Franck Studios archive at the Historic New Orleans Collection (HNOC). HNOC dates the photo 29-October-1941, but there are dozens of photos with that date. It’s possible they were all processed by Franck Studios then. Therefore, it’s not clear just when the picture was taken. Since the engine was in service until 1957, it’s possible that the photo is indeed from 1941.
Mystery Man
We haven’t been able to identify the man in the white suite in the photo. Given that he’s dressed in a white suit, it’s more likely he is either a NOPB commissioner or a city or state official. We’ve contacted NOPB in the hopes they know who he is.
The New Orleans Public Belt runs along the riverfront.
Streetcars and trains along the Riverfront
Infrogmation photo (2013) of three New Orleans Public Belt (NOPB) locomotives passing the Ursuline Street station for the New Orleans Regional Transit Authority (NORTA). From right to left: NOPB 3001, an EMD GP40, NOPB 3003, a GP40-2, and NOPB 2008, a Motive Power Industries (MPI) 1500D. All three locomotives bear the red NOPB livery used at that time.
New Orleans Public Belt
The City of New Orleans created the NOPB in 1908. From the railroad’s Wikipedia entry:
The impetus for the NOPB came at the start of the 20th century era when multiple railroads terminating locally created both congestion at the Port of New Orleans and safety problems on city streets. The railroad began operation in 1908 with the intention of giving the major railroads “uniform and impartial” access to the port.
So, the NOPB regularly operates along the riverfront. Additionally, the NOPB “owns” the Huey P. Long bridge, which connects about one-third of the nation’s east-west railroad traffic. From the Industrial Canal to Jefferson, Louisiana, NOPB horns can be heard.
Streetcars
Portion of the route map for NORTA’s UPT-Riverfront line.
While there are no streetcars in this photo, the Ursuline Station is a stop on the NORTA UPT-Riverfront line, Route 49. It’s the second-to-last stop as the outbound streetcars approach the French Market terminal. Hopping off the Von Dullen and 400-series arch roofs at Ursuline puts the rider at Latrobe Park. This snippet of NORTA’s map for Route 49 shows the various railroad tracks in this part of the port. While the first incarnation of the Riverfront line operated on “standard gauge” tracks, the line switched to “streetcar gauge” in 1997.
Red to Blue
NOPB locos in blue livery passing Jackson Square, February 2023. Mussi Katz photo.
NOPB adopted a blue livery for their locomotive fleet in 2019. The blue paint scheme distinguishes them from the streetcars on Route 49. The locomotives use horns, where the streetcar operators clang the traditional trolley bell.
The Louisville and Nashville operated the Humming Bird train.
The Humming Bird
“The Humming Bird crossing Biloxi Bay – Louisville and Nashville R. R.” – Linen postcard printed in the late 1940s. L&N operated the Humming Bird (the two-word name is correct) between Cincinnati and New Orleans, from 1947 to 1969. While the route originally ran as a no-frills train, L&N added Pullman sleepers by 1953.
Like the other L&N passenger trains, the train operated out of the railroad’s terminal at the end of Canal Street (where the Aquarium of the Americas stands now). They moved to Union Passenger Terminal in 1954, along with all the other railroads.
Blue Humming Bird
The train’s cars originally had a stainless-steel sheathing. After a few years, the railroad removed the stainless because of corrosion issues underneath it. They then painted the cars blue. L&N re-shot the stainless-steel version of the postcard, updating it for the blue cars. These postcards were available on the train for passengers.
Consist
When it first rolled in 1947, the train consisted of 7 cars: five coaches, a tavern-lounge car, and a diner. American Car Foundry delivered 48 cars to L&N. The ran two sets of seven on the Humming Bird. Additionally, cars from that ACF order ran on the Georgian.
While the route’s popularity was in its speed and simplicity, L&N expanded the consist in 1953. They added sleepers, “6-6-4” cars from Pullman. The cars contained six open births (“sections”), six “roomettes,” and four double bedrooms. The sections were open areas. You had your bed and that was that. The roomettes were walled rooms containing one bed. Section and roomette passengers used communal toilets and sinks. Bedrooms included en suite toilet and sink.
New Orleans Stations
Humming Bird departing the L&N terminal on Canal Street, 1947
Humming Bird operated in and out of the L&N terminal from 1947 to 1954. Operations moved to Union Passenger Terminal in 1954. The city demolished the Canal Street terminal after UPT opened. This photo shows the Humming Bird departing the Canal Street terminal.
End of an era
L&N discontinued the train in 1969, saying it was no longer profitable. This was two years before the creation of the national passenger rail corporation, AMTRAK.
We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you continue to use this site we will assume that you are happy with it.
Recent Comments