From New Orleans’ earliest days Mississippi River Valley trade was a steady and profitable source of commerce, but shipping from the Gulf of Mexico was hindered by natural obstacles that included treacherous sand bars at the mouth of the river and 100 miles of stiff currents that challenged sailing ships on the voyage upriver to the port of New Orleans.
“New Orleans is to the Mississippi, what Alexandria, in Egypt, is to the Nile: it is among those few points on the surface of our globe which nature has designed as great centres of commerce. The connextion of the Mississippi with Lake Pontchartrain, by adding a new outlet, will afford to New Orleans a channel through which wealth will flow from another quarter to its wharves.”
1831
In 1831 the Louisiana State Legislature granted a charter to the New Orleans Canal and Banking Company for a new commercial waterway that provided a direct route into the American uptown side of the city through Lake Pontchartrain. Opened to navigation in 1838, the canal began at a turning basin on South Rampart Street near what is now the Union Passenger Terminal then ran about six miles north across swampland to the lake.
The New Orleans Canal and Banking Company was chartered on March 5, 1831, with an authorized capital of $4 million. The primary function of this
“improvement bank” was to build the New Basin Canal, a waterway that would allow goods to be transported directly into the American side of New Orleans.
Built from 1832 to 1838, the monumental undertaking cost the lives of countless Irish immigrants who dug the sixty-foot wide, seven-foot deep canal by hand using shovels and picks.
“Laborers had to dig out the canal, spade-thrust by spade-thrust: they had to throw that dirt into wheelbarrows, and other laborers had to roll it, by hand, up the inclined boards and spill the waste on the banks. And there was more than sixmiles of this digging – half a million yards of excavation.
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CHOLERA
Work on the New Basin Canal coincided with a cholera epidemic that hit New Orleans in 1832. Six thousand deaths were recorded that year between late October and early November alone. A high percentage of the city’s cholera victims were Irish laborers who were also susceptible to malaria and yellow fever, occupational hazards for the “ditchers” who toiled from 12 to 15 hours a day in the mosquito-infested cypress swamps north of the city.
“Mr. Cameron of Lancaster, Pa., a contractor shipped to New Orleans during the fall some 180 canal diggers, mostly Irish, as a portion of his forces, to excavate a sailing vessel canal known as the New Basin Canal, between the city and Lake Pontchartrain. This cypress-swamp canal was a forerunner sample of the M. de Lesseps Panama Canal in deaths and money outlay, as the combined attack of yellow fever and cholera placed over 200 of Mr. Cameron’s workmen in untimely graves.”
Irish Canal Diggers
The 1830’s ushered in a period of significant civic improvements – canals, railroads, streets and levees – in New Orleans. The Irish, who had long played a significant role in the city’s prosperity, were heavily involved in these early 19th century public-works projects. Irish entrepreneurs were at the top rung of the organizations responsible for the building boom, while unskilled Irish occupied the bottom rung of the local labor pool. Irish laborers and not slaves - who at a cost of $500 to $1500 were considered too valuable to risk – were utilized for back-breaking jobs in unhealthy working conditions.
A popular saying of the 1800’s expressed the importance of Irish laborers on canal
excavation projects. “To dig a canal, at least four things are necessary, a shovel, a pick, a wheelbarrow, and an Irishman.”
The projected cost of the New Basin Canal was $217,551. Included in the cost analysis was a total monthly expense of $26.20 for each worker.
“The services of labourers can be procured here, provided they are fed, housed, and taken care of when sick, and during rainy weather, at per month, $20.00. The expense of feeding a number of men (not less than 50) on fresh beef twice a week, pork the other five days, with a daily supply of wheat bread, rice and molasses, corn meal, whiskey, salt, vinegar, peas or beans, with a sufficiency of soap and candles…To this must be added, the expense of cooking, baking, and furniture for the mess-room and kitchens, for which add 5 cents, making the cost of feeding a man per month $6.20.
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Work began in 1832 and for six years thousands of Irishmen dug the canal using axes and shovels to clear seventy-five acres of timber and excavate 557,401 yards of muck, hauled a wheelbarrow load at a time up wooden planks out of the ditch. Irish actor Tyrone Power visited the excavation while performing in the city and reported that the laborers were exploited by a contractor “who wrings profit from their blood” and were living “worse than the cattle of the field.”
For almost 100 years the New Basin Canal contributed to New Orleans’ trade with ship traffic carrying building materials, fruits and vegetables, seafood, cotton and other products into the growing city from the Lake Pontchartrain Basin and the Gulf Coast. A 25-foot- wide shell road along the canal provided access to the lake and helped facilitate the development of New Orleans West End as a lakeside
resort.
Advances in shipping and competition with rail and road transportation decreased the economic viability of the New Basin Canal. Filling and paving of the canal began in 1937 and by the early 1950’s the historic canal was completely filled in.
Today the Pontchartrain Expressway follows the canal’s bed from downtown New Orleans to the I-10/610 split, where the neutral ground between Pontchartrain and West End Boulevard preserves the canal’s footprint to Lake Pontchartrain. The north end of the canal is still intact and is the approach to the New Orleans Marina.
The Cross
History of the Cross
At the heart of the Hibernian Memorial Park project is the Celtic Cross monument located on the site of the New Basin Canal in West End Park. The 7-foot cross monument carved in Ireland of Kilkenny marble was dedicated by the Irish Cultural Society of New Orleans in 1990 to honor the Irish laborers who built the New Basin Canal, acknowledged as the greatest public works project of 19th century New Orleans.
“This is the only monument in New Orleans to the Irish who helped develop the city” read the flier distributed for the original dedication. Through the years the site has been visited by numerous Irish visitors and dignitaries. Now, through the efforts of the Louisiana Hibernian Charity, the simple marker will be expanded into an interpretive site devoted to the rich history of the Irish in New Orleans.