[Illustration: Tomb of members of Jefferson Fire Company No. 22 in Lafayette Cemetery. "Ready at the First Sound" was motto. Relief shows 1832 engine.]
Despite these earmarks of a brewing donnybrook, one couldn't exactly blame the owners of the fine gardens for objecting to "the great numbers of horses and mules running at large, particularly at night, occupying the sidewalks to the danger of the passers-by and racing up and down streets, disturbing the rest of the families." Not only horses and mules, but goats, too! "If a gate is left open for a minute, choice rose bushes suffer and the rare plants of the most careful training are ruined. Our feed stores are compelled to keep an extra clerk to protect the corn sacks and bales of hay from these bold plunderers." At least there was a law passed in 1841 which prohibited the keeping of bears in Lafayette City.
[Illustration: One of Garden District's great houses was the Stauffer mansion on Jackson, corner of Prytania, shown in Archives drawing dated 1870.]
In the early days of Lafayette and the Garden District, "the war" referred only to the very real and fresh memories of Jackson's battle with the British at Chalmette hardly twenty years previously. In the Forties, it referred to the War with Mexico, in which many Lafayette citizens took part. Troops were encamped and trained on some of the vacant lots. The Rev. Jerome Twichell held Presbyterian services for them, and a government warehouse near the river on Washington dispensed supplies to troops coming down the Mississippi for Mexican service.
Then, in 1861, "the war" took on a present and terrifying meaning. Although no actual fighting was reported in or around the Garden District, the coming and going of troops, the warships passing on the river, the shortages because of the blockade, the restrictions of the occupation, the loss of sons, brothers, husbands and fathers, the surrender of proud homes for quartering of Union officers--these and other tangible evidences left deep scars.
Perhaps the Garden District's most distinguished and colorful figure to wear the gray uniform was Bishop Leonidas Polk, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Louisiana and rector of Trinity Church. A West Point graduate, he answered the call to the priesthood in 1831. When war came, after repeated urgings from his former West Point classmate, Jefferson Davis, he "buckled the sword over the gown", as he phrased it, and accepted a commission as major general. In June, 1864, while he was reconnoitering near Etowah, Ga., this gallant figure was stilled by a cannon ball, leaving memories at Trinity which persist to this day.