Excerpt from Illustrated Visitors' Guide to New Orleans

The first overflow that we find recorded, occurred in 1719, one year after the settlement was planned. The river rose to an' extraordinary height, and as the Company was as yet unable to protect themselves by dykes, the place was for a time deserted.

The principal offices and establishments of the province were removed from Biloxi to New Orleans, in November, 1722. In the following year, we are told by Charlevoix, who came from Canada by way of the river, that the city then con sisted of one hundred cabins, very irregularly placed, a large wooden warehouse, two or three dwellings, a poor store-house, which was also used as' a chapel, a shed being converted into the house of prayer. The population did not exceed two hundred persons.

Historians mention as an important fact, that in this year, 1723, a party of emigrants from Germany, who had crossed the ocean to settle on lands in Arkansas, granted to them by the celebrated Law, being disappointed in their original intention, descended the river to New Orleans, hopin g to obtain a passage back to France. This the government was unable to furnish, but small tracts of land were given to them on both sides of the river about thirty miles above New Orleans, at what is known as the German Coast, where they settled and engaged in agricultural pursuits, supplying the city with vegetables and garden products. This was the commencement of the German element in the population of our city, and the descendants of these early settlers, augmented by thousands of others from the Fatherland, make one of the most industrious, reliable, prosperous and honor able classes of our miscellaneous community. In the fall of this year the town was Visited by a terrific cyclone, which swept before it the church, hospital, and about one-third of the residences of the inhabitants. This disaster, which was also very destructive to the crops, seriously inclined many of the people to abandon the settlement.

The Jesuit Fathers first arrived in the summer of 1727, and located on a tract of land in the Faubourg St. Mary, now known as the First District, in which they made great improvements erecting imposing and valuable buildings.

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