[Illustration: House as it appears today, with galleries, ironwork added in 1870's.]
Strangely, these distinguished writers and authors went back to their offices in the East and proceeded to turn out bales of copy about New Orleans but with only side references to the Garden District. Passing mention was made of the luxury and beauty of the homes of this area, but the French Quarter was the subject of all the sketches and engraved illustrations. Rare is the surviving sketch, tintype or glass plate photo of amateur or professional.
Yet the district captivated the earliest of many visitors who put their sentiments down for posterity. The Rev. Theodore Clapp, beloved parson of the mid-nineteenth century, wrote of his arrival in 1822, before Lafayette was so named:
"On a beautiful morning near the close of February we were landed at Lafayette where the boat stopped to discharge a part of her cargo, about three miles above New Orleans. The passengers, impatient of delay, concluded to walk to the city. Leaving the levee, we took a circuitous route through unenclosed fields, which a few years before had belonged to a large sugar plantation. They were adorned with a carpet of green grass, where herds and flocks grazed in common. Here and there we passed a farm house in the midst of gardens, luxuriant shrubbery and orange groves.... The air was cool, inspiring and scented with the flowers of early spring. The music of the thrush and various other species of singing birds, saluted our ears with their sweetest notes. All things, so far as our eyes could reach, seemed like a paradise. These suburbs, then so radiant with rural charms, are now the site of a large portion of the buildings belonging to New Orleans."
Walt Whitman, a writer for the _New Orleans Crescent_ in 1848, living on Washington Street near the river and travelling to and from his desk in New Orleans by omnibus, must have been impressed by the large live oak trees in Lafayette City. In a later edition of "Leaves of Grass", he refers to the live oak as "rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of myself."
Commenting on the ways one kept cool in summer, Julian Ralph, in _Dixie, or Southern Scenes and Sketches_, related: