Building Antebellum New Orleans

Here, finally, is a book-length scholarly work wholly devoted to the role of free people of color in the building of New Orleans. Unlike countless other sources which passingly allude to this community’s architectural contributions, Tara Dudley’s research gives them names, lives, skill sets, accomplishments, and social and cultural context, focusing on members of the Dolliole and Soulié families. This important book will be of interest to scholars and general readers interested in architecture, urbanism, vernacular building, New Orleans and Louisiana history, Creole culture, and African American topics.

— Richard Campanella, Tulane University, author of The West Bank of Greater New Orleans: A Historical Geography

Building Antebellum New Orleans is a masterfully written book and the first to conceptualize the contributions of free people of color in the architectural and infrastructural history of New Orleans. Yet this book is so much more. It uncovers the complicated and fascinating histories of two prominent Creole families, the Dollioles and Souliés, placing them at the height of racial politics in the city as they skillfully navigate the gray areas of race, business, and building. This is undoubtedly an important book that will enhance the historical scholarship on pre-Civil War New Orleans.

— Sharlene Sinegal-DeCuir, Xavier University of Louisiana

Tara Dudley breaks new ground in this engaging study, demonstrating how economics and politics informed the built environment of New Orleans in the antebellum era. Her innovative research reveals the complex personal and financial relations between two families of color, the Dolliole and Soulié families, which allowed them to thrive as entrepreneurs in antebellum New Orleans. As New Orleans Americanized and modernized, these builders found themselves marginalized, yet Dudley shows that their financial clout allowed them to play an entrepreneurial role well into the antebellum era.

— Kenneth Hafertepe, Baylor University, author of The Material Culture of German Texans

Building Antebellum New Orleans is a meticulous account of the architectural contributions of free people of color to the city, and of the cultural landscape they worked within and acted on.

— ANTIGRAVITY Magazine

Rendering life in serene prose from an arrangement of discrete data points is part of Tara A. Dudley’s art in Building Antebellum New Orleans. It is a consummate work of social, genealogical, and architectural history...This is a book of impeccable calculation and comprehensive accounting...Dudley’s investment in the 'significance of African Americans’ place' in the American landscape documents the untold and telling efforts of both free and unfree people of African descent to bear the long-contested dispossession built into the fabric of the colonial American experiment.

— ARRIS: The Journal of the Southeast Chapter of Architectural Historians

To refer to this book as an architectural history of New Orleans after statehood would describe only a fraction of its scholarly importance. Beyond the material culture that is manifest in the built environment and the building types that gens de couleur libres builders preferred, the reader gets many glimpses of the unique social and economic position of this mixed-race class and the racial politics they negotiated...Building Antebellum New Orleans reveals the rich and complicated social landscape created by free people of color in New Orleans and the privileges that came with belonging to old Francophone families.

— Journal of Southern History

Dudley demonstrates the control gens de couleur libres (free people of color) exerted on the city's architecture and urban design, and she convincingly asserts the importance the built environment had for their families and community, thereby expanding our understanding of gens de couleur libres material strategies and New Orleans's built environment...Dudley recovers a sizeable group of builders obscured by scholars' focus on the city's European and Anglo-American professional architects, and she offers a nuanced analysis of her subjects' complex racial identities, acknowledging some family members' role as enslavers. Her study resonates with questions emerging across architectural history and material culture studies about the importance of enslaved and free Black craftspeople's expertise and labor in building trades across the South.

— Journal of American History

For readers across disciplines, this book is a fascinating insight into the Creolization of New Orleans while looking at a tumultuous, contentious political era in Louisiana’s history. For emerging scholars in similar disciplines, it gives an apt roadmap to follow—to try and lend voice to people who are seldom written about, like the women of the families, and to connect the dots not just through a paper trail but also a trail of emotions.

— E3W

In Building Antebellum New Orleans, Tara A. Dudley offers a well-illustrated and carefully researched study of how building traditions and enterprises among families of color contributed to the architectural heritage of the city. . . . Dudley showcases an amazing array of antebellum architecture that attests to the talent, experimentation, and success of free people of color. As a study in architectural history, a study of antebellum business practices, and a study of gens de couleur and their cultural legacy, this book is a welcomed addition to New Orleans’s complex history.

— Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association

Building Antebellum New Orleans sets out to include within the historical record the important contributions of the gens de couleur libres to the built landscape of New Orleans, focusing upon their unique stories and patronage as responses to the changing trends around them, rather than as passive participants. This work is a crucial contribution to growing scholarship that seeks to re-center underrepresented communities and individuals by using standard tools of interpretation and narration, but also by incorporating primary sources and documents not typically considered ‘architectural.’

— Buildings and Landscapes