Few buildings in the United States are older than the Old Ursuline Convent, the oldest surviving building in the Mississippi River valley. The Old Ursuline Convent was completed in 1752 by French colonial authorities for the Ursuline nuns who had arrived in New Orleans in 1727 with a mission that would shape the city: they founded the first school in Louisiana, the first school for girls in what is now the United States, and the first school for Black children — both enslaved and free — in the country. The building is a remarkable survival in a city where fire, flood, and tropical humidity have destroyed almost everything older than the nineteenth century.
The French colonial architecture is severe and elegant: thick stuccoed brick walls, dormer windows in a steep hip roof, shuttered windows designed to catch the river breeze. The Ursulines educated generations of Creole women and kept meticulous records of the colony's early years; much of what historians know about colonial New Orleans comes from the convent archives. The chapel attached to the main building, Our Lady of Victory, was built in 1845 and is still an active parish.
The attic of the original convent building, sealed in the 1830s, has generated one of New Orleans' most persistent legends — that it shelters something best left undisturbed. Stand in the courtyard and consider how much this one building has witnessed.