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1820 |
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| Previous Hispanola: Christophe commits suicide.
Jean Pierre Boyer, mulatto successor to Pétin brings the country together.
Next South America & Caribbean:Jamaica’s population includes over 300,000 african slaves. |
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| North America:James Monroe is re-elected. Maine becomes the 23rd state of the Union. The Missouri Compromise alllows Missouri to enter the union as a slave state and Main to enter as a free state. The rest of the Louisiana Purchase will be free of slavery. Indianapolis and Indiana University are established. Quinine sulfate, effective against malaria is discovered. Washington Irving. A new land law allows a man to buy a farm for $100 and no additional payments. The 80 acres at $1.25 per acre is very popular. The Nebraska is explored and declared a desert. In the past 20 years the population west of the Alleghenies has risen from one million to almost three million. |
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| Europe: England’s George III dies and the heir to France’s throne is assassinated. Spain’s Ferdinand VII is forced to restore the constitution of 1812. He also ends the Spanish Inquisition begun by Isabella in 1478. Naples and Portugal also feel the sting of revolt. Walter Scott, Shelley, Blake | |||||||||||
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January 1820
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February 1820
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March 1820
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April 1820
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May 1820
May 14 Joseph Rouffignac replaces August McCarthy as mayor of New Orleans. |
June 1820
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July 1820
Thomas Bolling Robertson wins the race for governor with a plurality and a then unanimous selection by the legislature. His opponents are Abner L. Duncan, from the Florida Parishes, and P A C Bourguignon Derbigny. Derbigny is a French immigrant who is unfamiliar even to the Creole population. Julien Poydras is again elected president of the state senate. |
August 1820
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September 1820
Sept. 3 Benjamin Henry Latrobe, the architect who supervised the reconstruction of the U. S. Capitol building dies in New Orleans from yellow fever. He is here to design and install the city’s first steam waterworks. |
October 1820
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November 1820
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December 1820
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| During Governor Thomas Bolling Robertsons term the Pearl River and Red River are opened to navigation and a part of the National Road is begun between Madisonville, on the Northshore of of Lake Pontchartrain, and Natchez where it picked up the Natchez Trace to Nashville. |
During the 1820s Prince Charles Louis Napoleon Achille Murat, a dead ringer for his famed uncle the Emperor, comes to America to escape the Bourbons. He is by turns a writer, lawyer and planter and moves from New Jersey to Florida to Baton Rouge to New Orleans and back again, but never for very long. His wife is Catherine Daingerfield Willis Gray, a grandniece of George Washington. While in Louisiana he is named president of the Texas Land Company and settles in New Orleans where he sets up a law office in Exchange Alley. He buys a house at 919 Esplanade Ave. and a sugar plantation, Magnolia Mound in Baton Rouge. They entertained frequently. He liked to experiment with foods serving Alligator tail soup, turkey buzzard stew, boiled owls and stewed cows ears. While experimenting with cane sugar he was inspecting a vat of cooling syrup and fell in. Because of this misfortune he had to take a bath, a scientific exercise in which he rarely indulged. Within two years he lost the house and the plantation as well as property in Florida. Fortunately for him he had not paid any of his own money for the land. His death in 1847, in Florida occurred one year before his Uncle Louis Napoleon (Napoleon III) rose to power in France that would have given Murat the status he had always assumed. |
Elizabeth Magnus Cohen (1820-1921) is born in New York City in 1820. Her father built the Great Eastern, the ship that laid the first Atlantic cable. She married Aaron Cohen also from New York. They had five children and from the death of her young son from measles she determined to become a doctor. In 1853 her husband left the family to study surgery in New Orleans and Elizabeth enrolled in the Philadelphia College of Medicine, the first medical school for women in the United States. In an era when woman professionals were looked down upon Aaron Cohen supported his wife s medical career. Four years later she graduated fifth in a class of 36 and joined her husband in New Orleans. Elizabeth Cohen was the 14th doctor, and the first woman, to practice medicine in Louisiana. Her male compatriots welcomed her with and eagerness possibly born of desperation since Yellow fever was to strike New Orleans with a vengeance in 1858. She must have faced some complications. In 1867 and 1868 the New Orleans City Directory ignored her medical qualifications and listed her as a midwife and in 1869 as a doctress. By 1876 she appeared as Mrs. Elizabeth Cohen, physician. She survived her husband and all of her children and in 1887 she retired from active practice and moved into a home for the aged. |
Informal racecourse near present-day St. Charles Ave. and Washington Ave. laid out by François Livaudais. St. Louis Cemetery No. 2 is established. Olivier Plantation house built for Daniel Olivier is one of the finest down river in suburban New Orleans. In 1840 the Catholic Orphan’s Association of New Orleans purchases the building for St. Mary’s Orphan Asylum and extensive additions are designed by architect Henry Howard. Efforts to prevent the destruction of the buildings in 1949 leads to the formation of the Louisiana Landmarks Society. |
Some claim that the Creoles were naturally immune to Yellow Fever, doctors advocated bleeding, purges and dunking in cold water as well as massive doses of quinine and calomel. |
Built about 1820 and remodeled twenty years later St. Joseph Plantation house will be purchased in 1858 by Alexis Ferry and his wife Josephine, a daughter of Valcour Aime who lives nearby. They enlarge the home, a raised West India cottage and call it Josephine House. Today it is a private residence. Old Hickory Plantation, built circa 1820 by Zenon Ledoux family near LaCour in Pointe Coupee Parish. Is an excellent example of a Creole raised plantation house. Ovide LaCour owned the house and the nearby LaCour Store. Entered into the National Register of Historic Places in 1979. The Hypolite Bordelon house is typical of the Creole dwellings of early Avoyelles Parish families. The Bordelon family, who build the house, is one of the parish’s pioneer families. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980. Henry Watkins Allen Etienne de Boré |
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