Old Ursuline Convent

The oldest building in the Mississippi Valley is a convent built for the women who civilized New Orleans. The Ursuline nuns arrived in 1727 — the first order of nuns in what would become the United States — to educate the colony's girls, including the filles à la cassette, the 'casket girls' shipped from France with their belongings in small chests to marry colonists. The convent standing today was commissioned by Louis XV in 1745 and finished in 1752; it survived the fire of 1788, the fire of 1794, the transfer to Spain, the transfer to America, and two centuries of everything else.

The casket girls are where the vampire legend starts. The story New Orleans tells is that the pale girls arrived with their strange little coffin-shaped trunks, that the convent's third-floor shutters have been nailed shut ever since to keep something in, and that the vampires of the French Quarter descend from the girls the nuns took in. It's nonsense — the trunks were luggage, the shutters are hurricane hardware — but the legend is a century old and the convent's third floor is still off-limits, which is all the legend needs.

The building has been a convent, a school, an archbishop's residence, the seat of the Louisiana legislature, and a museum. Our Lady of Prompt Succor — the Ursulines' patron — is still invoked every hurricane season; the nuns prayed to her during the Battle of New Orleans and credited her for the victory. The vampire story is the fun version; the real one is a building that taught the colony's women for three hundred years.