I finally visited the Old Ursuline Convent museum on Chartres Street. The Ursuline Convent is the oldest building in not just New Orleans, but the entire Mississippi River Valley, and the only remaining example of French colonial architecture that was completed during the French regime.1 It’s a brick between posts style construction covered in stucco on the outside and plaster on the inside. The first floor features the original exposed cypress beams.
Altar of St. Mary’s Catholic Church
The museum requires a guided tour with your visit, and the tour is not available every day. The tour explored a three rooms on the first floor and the church. It lasted about 40 minutes. They allow photos.
After the tour, you can wander around and into the courtyard for the rest of the hour, but the building was shut exactly at the hour. There are five rooms with displays — history of the Ursulines in New Orleans, important sites of Catholicism in New Orleans, the mourning practices of Creoles, cemetery traditions, and relics.
The rooms explain the history of the Ursuline nuns sent to New Orleans to educate young women and run the hospital. There are also artifacts from this history. I was impressed with the depth of history the guide shared and pleased that it aligns with the history I share on tours. I was most impressed by the artifacts recovered from the St. Peter St. Cemetery on display.
Artifacts recovered from St. Peter Street Cemetery
The tour even discussed Piccolo Palermo and the influence of Italian immigration on the French Quarter and explained why we bury above ground. There was unfortunately no mention of the Casket Girls on the tour, and I didn’t think to ask…
Overall, this was an affordable and thorough introduction to the history of New Orleans through the lens of the Ursuline nuns. If you’re visiting on a weekend and want a quick overview of how things went down, this is an excellent guided option.
Want to know how the Ursuline nuns factor into the history of New Orleans Voodoo? Watch my video to learn more.
The two other examples of French colonial architecture, Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop and Madame John’s Legacy, were built in the 1770s and 1788 respectively, during the Spanish regime. ↩︎
Newspaper Articles — New Orleans Revolt and Duels!
These are all of the newspaper articles I reference regarding duels, the New Orleans Revolt of 1768, and Pirates Alley in my video, The Ghosts of the Alleys.
I never expected how competitive tour guiding is in a laid back city like New Orleans, or how willingly so many lie because they think the false story is better. I want to correct the narrative by using the stories of buildings and people that aren’t widely shared to refine our historical framework of both New Orleans and the United States. I have yet to come across a story where the truth is less interesting that the bland lies typically shared by tour guides — complex stories somehow summed up neatly with a bow in 2-5 minutes with very little to challenge your preconceptions.
My tour guiding inspiration is Rick Steves and his public television show1. This is why I freely share information I learn. He democratizes traveling Europe for the United States, providing free tours and deep looks into historical spots that some may never be able to visit.
New Orleans has just under 400,000 people and about 350,000 of them claim to be some kind of tour guide. That may be a slight exaggeration (a tour guiding term I’ve learned to hide lies), but the industry of “tourism”, or restaurants and hotels according to the Data Center who counted 207,863 total workers in New Orleans in 2018, employed 14,804 and 11,647 people respectively, according to their 2018 study2. This 26,451 total (or 12.7% of all workers in New Orleans) doesn’t include a single tour guide! In contrast, the Port of New Orleans supported 21,700 jobs statewide in a 2019 report by the American Journal of Ground Transportation3.
“In 2022, we welcomed 17.53 million visitors who spent $9.1 billion. In 2019, that number was 19.75 million visitors, with $10 billion of spending,” Rich Collins wrote in a 2023 article for Biz New Orleans4. In this article, tour guides are included in a 75,000 count for individuals employed by tourism in New Orleans, or about 36% of workers in 2019. This number is nearly three times the Data Center’s estimate and probably a bit of an exaggeration, but I have also seen estimates that claim 80,000-100,000 people are employed in the tourism sector.
The products of the ports may be the biggest industry in Louisiana, but by many measures tourism outpaces other industries in the city of New Orleans. You’d think there would be plenty to share as a result. Even at the upper estimates of tourism jobs, 100,000, and the lower estimate for tourism spending in 2022 ($9,100,000,000), that works out to $91,000 per person, or plenty to share.
I still have not yet gone on a tour where some bit of untruth was shared, including my own. Not because I intended to lie but because my shallow understanding hadn’t yet connected some pieces. I am quite sure this is true for many tour guides who accidentally spread false information, but I’m not sure how many tour guides are following up to learn more and correct their own narrative. My work with NOLA VIP Services spawned in part from Albee’s desire to get the stories right by taking continuing education courses to learn more, where we met.
Our visitors come from around the world, each with their own personal taste. My tours will not be satisfying to some. I want visitors to have a fantastic experience on the tour that will please them the most. If that is a ghost tour of the mythical creatures that haunt New Orleans, then I am not the tour guide for them. I will burst all those bubbles. However! I would love to recommend an amazing tour guide who could satisfy that desire for those visitors, which gives me time to tour the folks who will enjoy my tour and challenge my (inadvertent?) tour guide lies.
Some Lies I’ve Told as a Tour Guide
I like challenges on my tours so I can grow. When someone questions something I say, I have an opportunity to learn something new or teach them something new. I try to question everything that seems unusual and look for sources to explain it, but some things do not seem unusual to me like they do to people from other places or who grew up in a different time.
Once someone questioned why St. Patrick’s Church claims in its tour brochure that the Irish immigrants wanted a place where God spoke English as French was spoken in St. Louis Cathedral.
“Didn’t they speak Latin?”
Wait…didn’t they? Did I just do a tour guide lie?? Turns out the Liturgical Movement started around the time that St. Patrick’s was built with the aim of helping congregations better understand the scriptures by speaking the vernacular languages in churches5. The movement culminated with Vatican II in the 1960s. The emphasis on Latin in churches was de rigueur in the first half of the 20th century, but apparently they spoke vernacular languages commonly before that6. I learned a lot because of this question, and now I can share that info and its sources with others.
I also once mistakenly claimed that Gallier Hall was city hall for a different city (lie) and that the third Jackson statue was in Virginia (it’s in Nashville). Actually that last one I did over and over until I was recently questioned! I’ve also said that O’Reilly hung the Frenchmen (they were shot).
The Pennsylvania Gazette, Philadelphia, Thursday, December 21, 1769. Page 3.
I welcome pushback because that’s the only way I’ll get better and stop telling the lies. I’ll never know it all. To quote Dr. Crow, a speaker in my History of Voodoo in New Orleans class at Loyola University, “We are all still learning.” But I can try to absorb the knowledge I brush against and disperse it to strangers as I wrap my soul wider and tighter around the sticky mud and shimmering sweat in the crescent cushioned by the Mississippi, simultaneously the most American city and the most interesting city in America, my home — New Orleans.
If you have a tour guide tale you’d like help verifying like Romeo Spikes and Fire Marks, let me know. Maybe we can solve it together.
