The Cabildo and Louisiana Purchase Historic Portal

Why is it significant?

Step beneath the massive limestone arches of The Cabildo, the monumental government palace of Spanish colonial Louisiana.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Step beneath the massive limestone arches of The Cabildo, the monumental government palace of Spanish colonial Louisiana. Erected between 1795 and 1799 under the architectural direction of Gilberto Guillemard following the catastrophic city fire of 1794, this imposing building was the seat of the Spanish municipal council, or cabildo, which governed the vast territory of Louisiana under King Charles IV of Spain.

Ascend to the second-floor Sala Capitular, or Grand Council Chamber: inside this dignified hall on December 20, 1803, world history pivoted when American commissioners William C.C. Claiborne and James Wilkinson signed the final treaty papers for the Louisiana Purchase. For fifteen million dollars, President Thomas Jefferson acquired eight hundred and twenty-eight thousand square miles from Napoleon Bonaparte, doubling the territorial size of the United States overnight.

The architecture of The Cabildo is a magnificent blend of Spanish Baroque arches and neoclassical symmetry, topped by a graceful French mansard roof added in 1847 by architect Louis Pilié. The massive exterior colonnade features rusticated stone piers supporting semicircular arches that reflect classical Spanish Renaissance public palaces. Within the preserved council chambers, museum displays showcase rare maps, colonial Spanish land grants, and artifacts documenting the diverse free people of color who formed Louisiana unique Creole society. Within its museum galleries rests the original bronze death mask of Napoleon Bonaparte, cast by his personal physician Dr. François Antommarchi on the South Atlantic island of Saint Helena just days after the emperor's death in 1821. Later in the nineteenth century, the building housed the Supreme Court of Louisiana, where the landmark civil rights case Plessy v. Ferguson originated in 1892 when Homer Plessy challenged racial segregation on Louisiana railway cars.

Touching the cool stuccoed walls of the Sala Capitular, you stand in the very room where an imperial colony was transformed into fourteen future American states. The solemn dignity of this stone chamber echoes with the monumental geopolitical transactions that reshaped the North American continent.

Walk north along the flagstone walkway to the historic entrance of Pirates Alley.