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Claude Giroux January 19, 1850
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This front-gabled shotgun with gallery, two rooms, rear cabinets, and detached service building behind a picket fence in 1st District, Square 395, was built between 1845 and 1849 for George Chigoy. Chigoy bought the bare lot on Locust Street, now South Robertson, in 1845. Chigoy may have been a bricklayer, because the 1849 city directory lists a bricklayer by that name at 23 Elysian Fields. He may have built the house speculatively, because he sold the house in January 1850 and continued to have an Elysian Fields address in the 1850 directory. In May 1845, Chigoy paid $375 for Lot 268 and improvements in Faubourg Delord (Bernard Philips, 5/21/1845) and then took a $600 mortgage on the lot and buldings in September 1849. In January 1850, he sold the lot with buildings and improvements at a public auction for $1,360 to Pierre F. LeRond. (Edward Barnett, 1/28/1850) Claude Giroux’s plan, dated Jan. 19, 1850, and deposited in T.O. Stark’s office, was most likely created for that sale, although the 1850 act does not mention it. First mention of the Giroux plan is in an act dated April 18, 1851, when LeRond sold the property to Agnes Chandler for $1,200 before T.O. Stark. The Giroux plan continued to be cited until 1908, when William E. Edenborn of New York sold the lot to Louisiana Railway and Navigation Company, a Shreveport company. Two plans other than Giroux’s are cited in the records. An earlier plan, deposited in the office of G.R. Stringer, was first cited in a July 16, 1841 act of sale before W.Y. Lewis. Unfortunately, Stringer’s records from 1823 to 1842, presumably including the early plan, were destroyed by fire. Real Estate Office records also cite a later survey by Gerald B. Dunn but do not give its location. Agnes Chandler, a “free woman of color,” marked her X to buy the Locust Street property for $1,200 – half down, half a one-year loan at 8 percent interest – in an act of sale on 4/8/1851 before T.O. Stark. She was living there and ailing 10 years later, in July 1861, when she made her last will and testament. (Hugh Madden, 7/12/1861) Chandler, a native of Prince William County, Virginia, was “about 54” years old at the time of her will. Her parents were dead, she had “no living husband,” and she had one son, Charles. Charles was 29 years old and had served in the Confederate army. She listed him as her sole heir. Agnes Chandler died soon thereafter, and an inventory of her property was conducted by the notary Hugh Madden on Sept. 9, 1861. The house and lot were valued at $1,000, and the contents of a front room, back room, cabinets, and kitchen were judged to be worth $189.50. This illiterate woman’s front room contained books and a bookcase. In March 1862, the Succession of Agnes Chandler sold the one-story cottage house, back buildings, two-story kitchens, and three cisterns at public auction to James Timony, who offered the highest bid of $2,220. (Madden, 3/28/1862) Named Lot 268 of Faubourg Delord when bare, the Locust Street lot with buildings remained undesignated until 1903, when it became Lot 10. (F.J. Dreyfous, 2/25/1903) By then Locust Street had become South Robertson. The lot’s municipal address in 1898 was 725. S. Robertson St. The property’s proximity to the New Basin Canal must have made it attractive to Margaret Lafranz Boehm, wife of William Boehm, captain of the schooner J.W. Frost, whose family was the last to live in the house. She bought the house in 1888 for $1,000. (Andrew Hero, Jr., 2/20/1888) Appraised at the same price in 1902, the home remained in the Boehm family’s possession after Margaret’s death in November 1901. William Boehm and their two daughters sold the property in 1903 to William Edenborn for $1,800. The pre-1850 shotgun was probably removed or torn down sometime between Edenborn’s purchase in February 1903 and his sale to the Shreveport railroad company in April 1908. Today, the lot is owned by Louisiana & Arkansas Railway Co., is designated Lot 10 and forms part of the Union Terminal railroad yard. Timeline of property values cited in notarial acts
Notarial documents used to trace history of shotgun dwelling depicted in Plan Book 019.001
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