The Historic New Orleans Collection
Colonial counting house turned museum, tracing three centuries of French Quarter fortunes.
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About this audio guide
This guide to The Historic New Orleans Collection traces the two-story building where Jean Francois Merieult once weighed profit and loss for a trading empire that bought and sold enslaved Africans on this ground between 1792 and 1812. You'll follow the room through the Lizardi Brothers' banking makeover in 1832, and then to a cypress lumber baron nicknamed the Cypress King whose fortune multiplied when oil turned up on his cut-over land. His son and daughter-in-law, Kemper and Leila Williams, bought the old counting house in 1938 and began filling it, room by room, with what's on display around you. Notice how each era just converted its money into another case of objects rather than erasing the last one.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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