Enjoy free admission every day. Visit the museum and shop or conduct research at the Williams Research Center.
Immerse yourself in America’s fight for independence in this new exhibition experience designed and produced by French technology firm Histovery. On view until January 17, 2027.
On Friday, May 8, bring your dancing shoes and enjoy classic tunes from the Great American Songbook, including hits by Louis Prima, in HNOC’s historic courtyard at 520 Royal Street.
Dive into the Collection’s holdings with image-rich previews of treasures from New Orleans history.
June 8–12, Curator Camp is a weeklong summer program for teens who get excited by history, artifacts, and storytelling! Daily hands-on workshops and experiences introduce skills that bring history and museums to life.
Captivating true stories that surprise and inspire, written and published by HNOC staff and special guest authors.
On October 29, join us in celebrating six decades of preserving, collecting, and making history. Save the date for music, memories, and more at what is sure to be a fantastic night out in the French Quarter.
In the six decades prior to the Civil War, roughly one million people were forcibly removed from their homes and families and sent to labor in the cotton and sugar fields of the Deep South. They came by steamboat and sail, stagecoach and railcar, but mostly they came on foot. For those bound for the New Orleans market, the overland journey often spanned many weeks and hundreds of miles. Chained together day and night, enslaved men led the coffle. Women and children followed, with the entire group of what might be hundreds of enslaved people overseen by slave drivers on horseback.
“The boat took on board, at Hannibal, a drove of slaves, bound for the New Orleans market. They numbered from fixty to sixty, consisting of men and women from eighteen to forty years of age. A drove of slaves on a southern steamboat, bound for the cotton or sugar regions, is an occurrence so common, that no one, not even the passengers, appear to notice it, though they clank their chains at every step.”
William Wells Brown, from Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave, 1847
For the more than seventy thousand people who traveled to New Orleans from Alexandria, Baltimore, Petersburg, Mobile, Richmond, Norfolk, Galveston, and other ports, the voyage has been likened to a second Middle Passage. Slave traders with operations based in coastal communities (such as Hope Hull Slatter, who was based in Baltimore) sometimes allotted less space per person belowdecks than captains of vessels that had made the transatlantic crossing from Africa in centuries past.
