July 2024

An 1815 Creole cottage in the Marigny, built by an extraordinary free woman of color, becomes a window into one family’s past.

– by Karen Hinton

photos by Ellis Anderson, Library of Congress and courtesy Andrew LaMar Hopkins

There’s no better city in which to ride a bicycle than New Orleans, despite the pitiful potholes and patchy pavement. Well, maybe there is a better city, but this is how I am feeling right now. 

My bike seems to steer itself sometimes, drawn past the blur of tropical and pastel hues that color the faces of our homes – a Creole cottage here, a double shotgun there, the occasional Greek revival or Queen Anne, the Creole and American townhouses.

New Orleans’ homes, like her people, come in diverse complexions and abundant variations.  And, as is often noted, you never know what lies behind a house façade here. Often, a plain face hides a vibrant interior or a misty courtyard.

The stories of the lives lived behind the shutters – present and past – are equally alluring to me. Braking for a closer look at a moldering cottage or luminous shotgun, I wonder about the hundred or two hundred years of lives concealed within. 

I approach my own home and consider the stories behind the shutters of this 1815 Creole cottage. And how a baby girl born into slavery before the Revolutionary War remade herself into one of the wealthiest women in Louisiana by the mid-1800s, building the house I now live in as part of her real estate and business empire.  

Rosette Rochon, daughter of an enslaved woman, fathered by her mother’s owner, was freed at 16 to embark on a tale with more twists and turns than a ride around the Marigny Triangle. 

One of those turns is about to end up on my doorstep.  

As I brake in front of the house, there is another woman standing right in front, staring intently at the historic plaque affixed to ancient planks of cedar covering the face of the building – now painted a pale yellow.  

The bronze marker reads: “Musee Rosette Rochon,” and similar to many found in the Marigny, contains a few lines of description about the house and its historic occupant.  

The woman notices me when I wave hello, and politely asks, “Do you live here?” 

My husband and I have found it’s not unusual to have visitors in the neighborhood ask about the house, so I don’t think anything of this question from a stranger, which in other cities might put one on their guard. “Yes, we recently bought this house.” 

She seemed lost in thought for a moment, then said, “I didn’t know anything about my connection to Rosette Rochon and this home until just the other day. My sisters and I are the great, great, great, great, great granddaughters of Rosette Rochon.”

“Wow!  That’s five “greats” right?” 

“Yes. We just discovered this. I had no idea I am a descendant of Rochon,” said the woman. “I had seen Rosette Rochon’s property before, driving around in the Marigny, but I did not know she was my ancestor until her name came up in our research. It just hit me in the face.

“When I drove by your house, I was just stunned. Just stunned.”

I learned the woman’s name was Alexi* and she had grown up in New Orleans.  Most of her family remains in the city, but her two sisters have moved away. One of them, she said, started doing ancestry research on the family.

“My sisters and I were hungry to know all about our ancestors. My sister in Atlanta started the research, but we all worked on this. We went back and forth. Back and forth. ‘What did you find today?’ I would ask. Then she would ask, ‘What did you find?’”

I invited Alexi inside, and as we walked through the house, we chatted animatedly about Rochon and her life, what we knew about the property and its history.  And Alexi shared with me her own family’s history – and the complex legacy the dive into her ancestry had uncovered. 

Rosette Rochon was born into slavery in 1767 in Mobile, Alabama.  Her father, Pierre Rochon, a Frenchman from Quebec, was a plantation owner and shipbuilder in Mobile and had six children with Rochon’s mother, Marianne Elizabeth Benoit, a woman he enslaved.

Marianne Benoit had been born in Mobile, but part of her family was from the Caribbean island of Grenada, where the French brought African slaves to work. She also was of Kaskian Illinois Native American descent.

Pierre Rochon had children with his white French wife at the same time he had children with Rosette’s mother. He later married Marianne after the French wife died. All of the mixed-race children were freed, including Rosette. 

Rosette became a “placee” – a woman of color in a civil union with a white ethnic European man – and accompanied him to Haiti.  In 1797, during the Haitian revolution, she fled to New Orleans, where she became placee to two other men.  

It's shortly after this point that she stopped being known as “daughter of” or “placee of” and made her mark, first in the Marigny – from this very house – and then in New Orleans and Louisiana. 

In 1803, after the U.S became the latest power to claim New Orleans, perched on the gateway of the Mississippi, Americans began to descend upon the city. At the same time, an influx from Haiti and the Caribbean began to swell the population of the city – doubling it by 1899. 

Bernard de Marigny – scion of a French plantation owner, gambler, playboy, and an organizer of the first Mardi Gras – saw an opportunity to pay off his mounting gambling debts by developing his plantation holdings to accommodate the growing city. It was located just downriver from the old city limits of the Vieux Carré.

One of the very first buyers of property in the area that would come to be known as “the Marigny” was Rosette – aided by Marigny’s conviction to sell only to non-English speakers, whether whites or free people of color.  

As the Preservation Resource Center writes in its excellent piece on the history of Faubourg Marigny, by 1807 the area was filled with Creole cottages, of which “A very large portion…were the homes of free women of color, a group often not recognized for the important role that they played in creating the built environment of New Orleans.”  By 1805, nineteen percent of the City’s population were free people of color like Rochon. 

The house Rochon built is considered “a perfect example of a first generation Creole cottage with its briquette entre poteaux (brick between wood post) construction.” Erected in 1815 or thereabouts Rochon made it her home until her daughter bought it from her in 1855.  

Rochon saw opportunities in the growing Marigny population and began to acquire corner lots on which she established grocery stores.  She bought property outside New Orleans and raised cattle to supply fresh meat to her stores.  She invested in lumber operations to provide materials for building construction.  And, in one of the complexities of New Orleans 18th-century life, this woman born into slavery owned enslaved persons and rented out their labor. 

Rochon had money, made money, and became a fixture in New Orleans’ social life.  Though it is believed she was illiterate, she educated her six children.  When she died in 1863 at the age of 96, she was a wealthy woman, perhaps the wealthiest in New Orleans.  Rosette Rochon was the Gayle Benson of the mid-1800s.  

As my friendship with Rochon’s descendant Alexi evolved, I began to learn more about her family story.  Rosette Rochon has been described as someone who “must have been a beauty” and has been painted as an alluring Creole woman by New Orleans artist, Andrew LaMar Hopkins in his work, “Rosette Rochon and Family.”  Alexi, Rochon’s descendent, is no different. 

Alexi described the detective work in tracing her family’s ancestry and finding her connection to Rosette.  “The research we did has been tough, slow-moving, especially in Louisiana. We found vacant [sic] records. 

“For example, my father’s mother – my grandmother;  all we have about her is her birth and death.  She grew up right outside Lafayette, where we found very little about her in records.  But St. Martinsville has a whole slew of records, and there we were able to find a lot about our ancestor, Rosette Rochon,” said Alexi.

“Churches are great sources of information. There’s a church in St. Martinsville, an old Catholic church, where they have pews with drawers. Fascinating place. Each row was designated for a particular family, and they put their personal items in the pew drawers. No Rochon pew drawer, as far as we could find.

“We never were able to find more or confirm what we had until my sister went to Utah, where the Mormons [which began collecting genealogical records in the late 1800s since ancestors are a key factor in their belief system] helped her find many, many records. Files and files and files, and the Mormons were so willing to help us.”

Alexi explained that as she and her sister delved into their mixed-race ancestry, it raised some complications with their older family members.  

“It took us a long time to decide to start the research because there was such a secrecy among our older relatives. We would ask questions, and they would say, ‘Why you want to know about that? Why you want to talk about that?’ 

“A lot of their reluctance [from] my older relatives, had to do with survival. Job survival. My father lost his job when his boss found out he was part Black. They fired him as soon as they knew. He was a welder for a New Orleans company.  Born and raised in New Orleans…

“My father’s family is from St. James Parish. My grandmother… was blonde with blue eyes. She was the illegitimate daughter of a white man. Her mother was black.”  

“It’s hard to explain to people, our ancestry, looking the way we do and having the heritage we have, and being on both sides of the equator, so to speak,” she said.

New Orleans has been likened to a gumbo of people, drawing its ingredients from Europe, African, the Caribbean and Native Americans.  The French roux, the Choctaw file, the West African okra, the Spanish chorizo.  

Rochon’s Creole cottage, the shotguns, and the courtyards of New Orleans are much the same – as is the music seeping through the shutters into the streets as I cycle by.   We are a city that lives, as Alexi put it so well about her own family, “on both sides of the equator.” 

*Alexi is not Rosette’s ancestor’s real name, at her request.  Her quotes are verbatim from the author’s interviews with Alexi.  A compendium of information about Rosette Rochon can be found here.