Local Archeology: Digging the Quarter
915/917 St. Ann Street, where the recent French Quarter archeology dig took place, photo by Ellis Anderson
June 2025The search to uncover more about this historic French Quarter home’s past gets down to earth with Dr. Ryan Gray and his team.
-by Jane Lowrance-Neal
This column is underwritten in part by Lucy Burnett
French Quarter preservationists often consider every angle of the buildings and grounds they love and protect.
What are the distinctive architectural styles? Are the courtyards landscaped? Who lived here before and what were their lives like?
For Dr. Ryan Gray, those questions only scratch the surface. Gray, the Richard Wallen Boebel Professor of Anthropology at the University of New Orleans and Associate Director of the Midlo Center for New Orleans studies, looks beneath the surface. Underground, he has found thousands of historic and aesthetic treasures in the French Quarter.
Most recently, he and his team have mucked through excavation sites – two outhouses and a well – at 915/917 St. Ann Street, where the backyard has proven to be an archaeology gold mine. Dr. Gray, UNO students, and dig site volunteers have unearthed items including intact leather boots, plates, knives, wax-sealed whiskey jugs and children’s toys. The weeks of excavations have brought forth several hundreds of items to take to UNO’s lab to be cleaned, processed, dated and documented.
Dr. Ryan Gray has conducted many French Quarter archeological digs through the years, including Madame John’s on Dumaine Street, in 2023. Click here to read the story. Photo by Ellis Anderson
Dr. Ryan Gray and writer Jane Lowrance-Neal examine artifacts at the 915 St. Ann dig. Photo by Peter Neal
Gray said the resident yards are particularly rich with artifacts.
“Inside buildings, you usually don't find as much material culture, because they were cleaned out. It's the yards where you actually find these sorts of time capsule features.”
Gray explained the outhouses and well functioned as dumpsters during a life change. When the house sold and a new family moved in, or when someone died, the privies became catch-alls. The St. Ann privies indicate one large deposit rather than a slow accumulation, and the finds are exceptionally abundant.
Dr. Gray’s team sifting through material taken from the ground at 915 St. Ann, photo by Peter Neal
“Sometimes wells just get filled in with construction debris,” Gray said. “This one was unique and there was interesting material all the way from top to bottom.”
Archaeology volunteer Alice Blackwell agrees that the St. Ann site is extraordinary.
“It might have ruined me for future sites just because of the sheer volume of super cool stuff. It’s buckets, boxes! You should see the lab artifacts,” Blackwell said.
A few of the finds that Blackwell has documented, photos by Alice Blackwell
Blackwell is also the creator of a TikTok account, Snarkeology. The account has garnered more than 52K likes and highlights the finds from the St. Ann Street set to funky, irreverent music mixes. The videos boast a variety of finds: a 1810-20s intact clay pipe, a pig’s tooth, English and French pottery, a fine-toothed comb made of bone, a shard of Native American pottery, a tiny turquoise heart.
Gray said the 915 St. Ann residence, now owned by Trey Trahan, was built in 1824 for Raymond Gaillard, a free man of color born to an enslaved mother and a French father. It is unclear whether Gaillard, a veteran of the War of 1812 and a charter member of the Association for Colored Veterans, resided there himself.
Gray said Gaillard may have had the house built to use as a rental property. “We’re wondering if there's actually a period in which he might've used the house himself, or if his widow might've used it after he died,” Gray said.
915/917 St. Ann Street, built in 1824 for Raymond Gaillard, a free man of color. Photograph, THNOC, 1977.266
Gray is cautiously optimistic about a particular find linked to Guillard.
“There are some artifacts that we're still researching. Once we have it all done, we'll look at the big picture. But there was a button that seemed to be War of 1812-era. We don't want to jump the gun too much, but it would be really exciting if it was associated with Gaillard.”
As Gray used gloved hands to hold mud-smeared blue and white pottery shards unearthed hours earlier, he explained their origins.
Dr. Ryan Gray holds a piece of pottery found in the 915 St. Ann dig, photo by Peter Neal
Dr. Ryan Gray holds a piece of pottery found in the 915 St. Ann dig, photo by Peter Neal
“Most of the pottery [found] would've been manufactured in England. There are a few French pieces. There are things that were probably old when they were thrown away but from the same deposit as everything else,” he said.
“Most of this is English pottery from what we call English pearlware, made between 1795 and 1830.” Gray, a pottery specialist, said much of the English pottery mimics Chinese porcelain, whose designs were popular throughout England.
Gray said the house’s finds also tell stories of the working people who rented it. Wooden clothes pins, clothing irons, and a hand-painted “room to rent” sign reveal everyday life in the late 19th-century French Quarter.
If the material coming up from the backyard could be timestamped, Gray said the oldest finds appear around 1790, predating the house. The later materials from the pits date around 1910, at which point the outhouses were completely filled and the house was hooked up to city water.
Moving into the 20th century, 915 St. Ann became associated with the artist and historian Alvyk Boyd Cruise (1909 - 1988). As a young artist, Cruise painted hundreds of watercolors of historic Louisiana buildings using photographs taken by architects Richard Koch and Samuel Wilson. The team was working as part of a federal historic documentation program for the Works Progress Administration (WPA).
A lifelong preservationist, Cruise later became the first director of The Historic New Orleans Collection. He also served as director of the organization’s Vieux Carré Survey, which collected all the photographs, documentation and chains of title for every building in the French Quarter’s 100+ blocks.
Boyd Cruise, photographed between 1950 - 1959, photo courtesy THNOC, 1989.79.336
The exterior of Boyd Cruise’s studio at 915/917 St. Ann, painted by Boyd Cruise in 1952, THNOC 1952.30
So it seems fitting that the property is now in the hands of another owner, Trey Trahan, who’s passionate about historic preservation. Gray says Trahan has been an ideal excavation partner.
“He has long-term plans about interpreting the property. He's really interested in coming up with a way to incorporate the finds into some sort of exhibition or permanent interpretation,” Gray said. “He's very eager to document every step of the process so that it can serve as a model of a historically informed restoration.”
Trey Trahan, founder of Trahan Architects, said he’d been looking for a significant historic property in the French Quarter for several years, with the goal of restoring it at the highest levels. Although Trahan’s firm focuses on large-scale contemporary projects, he noted that they begin every project with research about a site’s watershed, soil, history and culture, using that information to help contextualize the design. He’s applying those same principles to this personal project.
“These artifacts reveal everyday life and in some way tell a beautiful story about Raymond Gaillard and his family,” Trahan said. “It helps inform this contemporary intervention so we can be respectful of the past and this building’s history.”
One of the privy digs in the back corner of the courtyard, photo by Peter Neal
This ladder gives the viewer a sense of the well’s depth. Photo by Trey Trahan
Former UNO student and volunteer Chelsea Nelson marveled that, despite no city mandate, the archeology team has found a homeowner enthusiastic to know about the artifacts underneath the house.
“I’m so impressed they [the Trahans] are allowing us to do this,” Nelson said.
As the team wraps up the dig, the second leg of intensive work begins in the lab, sorting and documenting.
“We've had a couple of what we call our puzzle parties at the lab,” Gray said, “where we get out all the material that's been processed and then put it out on big tables and try to match up all the different vessels.”
Gray emphasized UNO’s programs, which act as a public service for the city, and stand alone in this role.
“There are private companies that do archeological work, but they usually do the compliance-based work or are operating on strict timelines and budgets and all these constraints.
“UNO has a unique place in the history of the city for doing this kind of public-facing work and for involving volunteers and students,” Gray said.
“We're training students. We're letting members of the public engage with this and involving people in as many different ways as we can.”
Gray would love to see city-supported archeology.
“I think if we can support good, common sense archeological preservation policies that can be instituted at the city level, I think that could be really important for the future,” he said. “We have all these people who think about the built environment, and in the case of the VCC (Vieux Carré Commission) actually have enforcement authority about it, but rarely think about what's below ground.”
Like Blackwell, you can find Chelsea Nelson and other volunteers poring over shards in buckets, ankle-deep in mud. While the work is tedious, the results are winning.
“All these stories come together through the artifacts,” Blackwell said. “It’s really gratifying. I'm having a blast.”
“It’s a New Orleans appreciation,” Nelson said. “It speaks to the culture of appreciating everything that came before.”
Photo by Peter Neal