Old Ursuline Convent

The Old Ursuline Convent is the oldest building in the Mississippi Valley and the only surviving example of French Colonial architecture in the French Quarter — which makes it the only building in the 'French' Quarter that is actually French. Everything else was rebuilt in Spanish Colonial style after the great fires of 1788 and 1794. The convent, completed in 1745, survived both fires and stands as the physical link between New Orleans and its original French identity.

The Ursuline nuns who occupied this building from 1745 to 1824 ran the first school for girls in what would become the United States, the first school for African-American girls, and the first orphanage in the Louisiana colony. They also served as nurses during epidemics and were, by most accounts, the most competent administrators in colonial New Orleans — a city whose male leadership was consistently chaotic. The convent's formal garden, visible through the gates on Chartres Street, is a peaceful courtyard that provides a rare glimpse of 18th-century convent life.

The building's interior, now part of the Archdiocese of New Orleans, is open for guided tours that explain both the architecture and the nuns' extraordinary role in the city's history. The cypress-beam construction, the hand-forged hardware, and the thick walls designed to withstand Gulf hurricanes are all original, and standing inside a building that was old when the American Revolution started gives you a sense of New Orleans' deep history that no reconstruction can provide.