Hybrid Streetscapes: Reconsidering How Mules Shaped Postbellum New Orleans

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Beyond Meat: Animal-Human Relations in New Orleans and Louisiana", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Postbellum New Orleans witnessed significant economic and infrastructural growth and a flurry of cultural changes in music, recreation, and festivities. The one steadfast character in all of this was the Mule, a non-human animal derived from human intervention, whose hybrid vigor they became the city’s linchpin labor source. Physical and socio-cultural artifacts of the New Orleans cityscape reiterate that the human-equine dynamic was not one-sided; their needs and presence, no matter how aesthetically or economically inconvenient, affected the daily lives of locals from all backgrounds. Though the Mule's impact in New Orleans is historically significant, their role has been severely overlooked. This paper provides a brief but necessary spatial history of the rise of the Mule in postbellum New Orleans, examining how the animals affected the physical and cultural cityscape through stabling and sales locales, portage and streetcar networks, sanitation (or lack of), and Carnival parades.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2025   •
• Beyond Meat: Animal-Human Relations in New Orleans and Louisiana

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow