Where America's First Licensed Pharmacist Kept Shop

In 1804 Louisiana began requiring pharmacists to pass a licensing examination. In 1816 Louis J. Dufilho Jr., a French immigrant, passed it, and he is remembered as the first licensed pharmacist in the United States. He acquired this lot at 514 Chartres Street in 1822, and his Creole townhouse and apothecary went up in 1822 and 1823; he lived and worked here until 1855. A courtyard garden supplied some of the herbs he compounded. The building is now the New Orleans Pharmacy Museum, and the old shop is lined with hand-blown bottles, patent medicines, leech jars and surgical tools from the 1800s, among the largest collections of its kind in the country. Ghost tours add a darker story about a later owner, Dr. James Dupas, and experiments on enslaved people in the house. It rests on rumor rather than record, and is best treated as legend.