Audubon Park

Audubon Park's guide in New Orleans opens on this ground in 1795, at a sugar house where a chemist named Antoine Morin, a free man from Saint-Domingue, is trying to solve a problem that had beaten every planter on the Mississippi: turning Louisiana cane into sugar crystals worth selling. The plantation belonged to Étienne de Boré, a struggling indigo farmer who had staked his family's future on this one harvest. You'll hear how fast word of the result traveled down the river, and how the credit for it settled on one name rather than the man who did the chemistry. The park's live oaks nearby predate all of it.