The Capital That Almost Stayed in New Orleans

For the first thirty-seven years of Louisiana statehood, the state capital was in New Orleans, which made a certain kind of sense. New Orleans was the largest city, the commercial hub, the port where the world came to do business with the interior of the continent. Running a government from there was the obvious choice.

Baton Rouge became the capital in eighteen forty-nine, which was not an obvious choice. The arguments for moving were primarily political: New Orleans had grown complex, factionalized, and expensive. The planter class of the river parishes and the north wanted a capital that felt more like theirs. Baton Rouge, smaller and more manageable and already home to a United States Army garrison, was their preference.

The move has been permanent, though New Orleans has periodically returned to the question. The state government has been in Baton Rouge through the Civil War, through the occupation, through Reconstruction, through the rise of the oil industry, through Huey Long's transformation of the state, through the civil rights era. The legislature meets in Long's tower. The governor's mansion sits a few blocks away.

Baton Rouge was incorporated as a city in January of eighteen seventeen and designated the permanent state capital in eighteen fifty. In the years since, it has grown from a small garrison town on the river bluffs to a metropolitan area of roughly eight hundred thousand people. The refinery jobs and the university and the government and the port have each drawn their own populations, and the city they have built together is more complicated than any one of those sources alone.

The river is still the oldest fact. Everything else is a decision somebody made.