HISTORY
Bring Forth the Fiery, Untamed Steeds THE LOST MULE MARKET DISTRICT OF NEW ORLEANS
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By Charlotte Jones shine light on the city’s geography of horse and mule stables. As early as 1822, the Circus Street Livery Stables operated on today’s South Rampart and Common Street in what was then the Faubourg St. Mary, today’s Central Business District. Two blocks down were the Eclipse Stables at Union and Phillippa. Today’s O’Keefe Street boasted auctions of 150 horses and mules. In “Mule teams and the levee, New Orleans, Louisiana,” published between 1900-1910 by Detroit Publishing Co. Library of Congress. subsequent d e c a d e s , competitors would also set up shop in this conven iently centralized vicinity, forming something of a cluster by 1860, when it extended to Gravier Street with W.K. Spearing Stables. Around the corner, Maxwell & Leonard’s Stable on Baronne Street became the largest advertised equine dealer in Louisiana. Equines, like
wharves. Breeders experimented with jackstock and horses to develop mules preferable for purchase. Categorized by size, smaller cotton mules, ranging from eight hundred to one thousand pounds, likely became the preferred beast for most urban drayage needs. Vendors, truck farmers, and merchants needed an animal to transport their goods for sale and deliveries, but one that wasn’t expensive to own and keep. Sugar mules hauled cane, streetcars and heavier materials. Draft mules, the largest of the three, plowed Louisiana’s thick soil and worked in forestry, lugging cypress or pine from the state’s ample woodlands. By 1875, the decades-old agglomeration of stables in the heart of New Orleans developed into a bona fide industry district, known generally as the “mule market.” George Engelhardt observed in 1904, “in the greater cities everywhere, concerns akin assemble together. Thus the grocery and provision lines, the import coffee trade, the iron works, the printing and publishing houses, the horse and mule markets have each their own special locality somewhere in or about this particular quarter of trade.” Indeed, it centered along the 300 to 500 blocks of Baronne Street between Common and Lafayette streets, the city’s “population centroid,” that theoretical point around which residents are evenly distributed,
ountless photos of New Orleans’ bygone days reminisce of men flaunting daring mustaches and women pulling up hems to dodge gutter filth—coaches and wagons clogging the streets. They give pause to otherwise hectic moments, full of hustle and bustle, hawking and chimes. For every dozen
a sort of blue-collar beast of Louisiana’s cotton and sugar industries, and a silent side player in the Queen City of the South, as it stewarded trade between global markets and the vast Mississippi River Valley. Where did these draft animals come from? Louisiana farmers and planters did not typically breed draft
or so pedestrians, there’s an equine. Horses, considered the noblest steed, pulled coaches and cabs for the gentry, raced at the Fairgrounds, and performed heroic feats alongside firefighters. Mules, the long-eared horse-donkey hybrid— often perceived as dumb, lazy, and famously stubborn—worked the dirty jobs, pulling massive wagons, towing boats along canals, and lugging large cypress logs out of the swamp. Despite stereotypes, mules dominated Southern roads and farms, including urban streets, for nearly a century as the preferred draft animal over horses or oxen. Farmers and planters concluded that humble mules could out-muscle a horse and tolerate the Louisiana heat better, while in New Orleans, merchants and retailers made deliveries, collected laundry, and sold produce from mule-drawn wagons. Eclipsing horses in numbers and dutifully employed, the mule became
animals; instead, they THE MULE BECAME A SORT OF BLUE-COLLAR BEAST purchased equine raised OF LOUISIANA’S COTTON AND SUGAR INDUSTRIES, in the interior South—in AND A SILENT SIDE PLAYER IN THE QUEEN CITY OF Tennessee, Missouri, and Kentucky—or to the west THE SOUTH, AS IT STEWARDED TRADE BETWEEN in Texas. Auctioneers GLOBAL MARKETS AND THE VAST MISSISSIPPI RIVER and dealers purchased VALLEY. substantial ‘heads’ of horses and mules from the Bluegrass Basin region and drove men, went to war during 1861-1865, as geographer and Tulane University them overland, shipped on water or leaving the streets of New Orleans with Professor Richard Campanella points rail to markets in Louisiana. Though fewer beasts of burden during the chaos out. Where there were people, port plenty of New Orleanians owned their of the Civil War. Yet afterwards, mules activity, and industry, there was a equine and stabled them near home, would ascend in the South, becoming demand for mules, be it for pulling most were company-owned, kept in its predominant draft animal for over streetcars, garbage wagons, cotton large purpose-built stables, and simply half a century. As cotton and sugar floats, or construction bricks. For stable rented out. To supply the incessant prices rose, so did the need for mules. and livery proprietors, collocating by demand for cheap draft power, As additional acres were cleared or other commercial districts also meant entrepreneurs opened large barns and drained for new crops, so expanded further convenience to potential clients. liveries in New Orleans in patterns the mules’ distribution. As more So long as downtown land values did of spatial convenience, unfettered by commodities needed to get to market, not rise too high or neighbors complain so increased the number of mules on about the nuisances, market forces ordinances or zoning codes. Early newspaper advertisements country roads, city streets, and port drove the mule market to be situated in // A U G 2 0
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