519 Barracks St.

Inventory of the Succession of Mme. Lise Forstall Poeyfarre (or, widow Jean Baptiste Poeyfarre).

517 [513-515] Barracks Street

Erected: largely vacant
Architect: unknown
Builder: unknown

This large, irregularly shaped lot has a somewhat vaguer record than the Esplanade property. Records tend to be meager; families went back to France; explanations are less precise. All this leads to the conclusion that there has been some covering of tracks, or else there was a complete indifference to their American holdings on the part of the European heirs.

The earliest record of ownership here, a survey by Carlos Trudeau, of 1792, lists this property as belonging to a Miguel Dulas. Next acquisition was in two portions, part in 1804 and part in 1806---curiously enough before it was actually sold to the city---while the land was technically part of the line of fortifications and the property of the United States. But it is a known fact that people had established themselves outside Fort. St. Charles before the case was settled in Washington, undoubtedly taking their chances that their purchases would be verified.

In 1806, Louis Mestre bought one piece of land from Mme. Francoise Laforest Grasse, widow of Frederick Grasse, who had purchased the land perhaps from Miguel Dulas. The records state that Mme. Grasse erected buildings on this site. The adjacent property was purchased by Louis Mestre in 1804 from Louis Rousseau, an agent, but the transaction does not say on whose behalf he was acting, if any.

Louise Mestre died in 1828, and he left this land to his heirs, Panquette and Mary Mestre. About them the records tell us nothing. No Mlles. were used before their names, and nothing follows to identify or classify them. In 1863 Panquette Mestre died, and her inventory describes the land as "enclosed" and said that it belonged to the heirs of Louis Mestre, "who, himself, was always in possession of said ground."

This large lot was inherited by Lewis Jerrison, alias John M. Jerrison. He was the "universal legatee of said Panquette Mestre, his natural mother." This Lewis Jerrison, along with his cousin, Marie Leocadie Amos, daughter of Mary Mestre, had long since gone back to France to live. Jerrison died in France in 1884; his widow and cousin inherited the property, and in 1907 they sold their New Orleans holdings to Pierre Montagnet.

Four years later, in 1911, the Seidels bought this deep lot and added it to their furniture-making empire located across the street and in the lot adjacent to this. The land remained in the Seidel estate until the current year when it was purchased by the Recile interests.

It is apparent from the records that there were some early buildings on this land, but while the land was owned by the Jerrisons in France the records were exceedingly sparse. By 1876 the Sanborn Insurance map shows this to have been a great open lot with four little one-story buildings and a long shed in the depth. By 1895 the little buildings have been replaced by a long shed, and the property is labeled "wood yard." It may have served some such function most of the time, for the Mestre-Jerrisons seem not to have bothered much about it throughout their 103 year ownership of this lot.

After the Seidel purchase still another set of small buildings and a wood shed were erected, all of one story; but it continued, in the main, to be an open lot, undoubtedly servicing the big factory building next door and across the street. Though there is no way of knowing what the original buildings may have been like on this site, there has been nothing of consequence, within recent memory, here.