The Old Ursuline Convent and the Casket Girls

The plain, symmetrical building at 1100 Chartres Street is generally called the oldest surviving building in the Mississippi River Valley. Ursuline nuns came from Rouen in 1727 to nurse the sick and teach the colony's girls. This is their second convent on the site, designed in 1745 and finished by 1753, with Claude Joseph Villars Dubreuil as contractor. The nuns stayed until 1824, when they moved to a new convent and handed the building to the bishop; it later served as the archbishop's residence. The National Park Service calls it the finest surviving example of French colonial public architecture in the country. Tour guides like to point at the shuttered attic windows and tell of the casket girls, young Frenchwomen who arrived in the late 1720s carrying small chests, and of vampires sealed inside. The legend has no basis. The chests were far too small to hold anyone, and this building was not finished until more than two decades after the women arrived.