In the fall of 1850, in a bedroom on the third floor of the LaRue mansion on Esplanade Avenue, a woman was about to disappear from the world without a trace. The only record the parish registry would ever carry of Harriet LaRue was a single cryptic line, entered with a clergyman’s trembling hand: “Departed this earthly world by unknown means, October 11, 1850. God have mercy. ”
For nearly two decades, that brief religious notation was the only formal acknowledgment of her vanishing.
But before the story could be buried, it would pull in a journalist, a freed servant, a builder’s discovery, and a confession written too late to ever be sent. The mansion where it all happened was a monument to the prosperity that had made mid-century New Orleans one of the richest cities in America. A three-story Greek Revival structure with Italianate flourishes, its towering columns and ornate ironwork balconies dominated its corner lot. It was a visible statement of power in a city built on cotton, sugar, and human bondage.
Samuel LaRue had arrived from Virginia in 1838, sensing that the Deep South’s endless demand for enslaved labor offered a profitable opportunity. By 1850 he was one of New Orleans’ most successful slave dealers, operating from an office on Gravier Street, the city’s bustling slave-trade hub. His wife, Caroline Bennett LaRue, was the daughter of a wealthy Charleston merchant who had brought a substantial dowry to their marriage. They had three children: two sons, William and James, and a daughter, Elizabeth.
But it was Samuel’s younger sister, Harriet, who would become the central figure in what the newspapers later called one of the strangest disappearances in New Orleans history. She had come from Richmond after their parents’ deaths and was initially welcomed as a governess for the LaRue children. Testimony recorded years later from household servants described her as a well-educated woman of twenty-six, with refined manners but a strange intensity in her gaze that made many uncomfortable. In the carefully kept records of St.
Louis Parish, now preserved in the Historic New Orleans Collection, her entry carried that unusual notation alongside the standard registrations of births, deaths, and marriages. The story of what happened that October evening had to be pieced together from family ledgers, personal correspondence, newspaper accounts, and court records that emerged during a long legal battle over the LaRue estate in the 1860s. These documents, many now held in the New Orleans Notarial Archives, painted a picture of a troubled household and a woman who may have known more than was safe to know. The evening of October 10 began as an ordinary formal dinner party.
The LaRues had invited several prominent merchants and their wives, many of them connected to the slave trade. As was customary, Harriet oversaw the arrangements, directing the household servants as they set the dining room and ensuring everything was perfectly in place. Amelia Wilson, whose husband was a business associate of Samuel, later recalled in a letter to her sister that Harriet seemed unusually distracted that evening—withdrawing repeatedly and speaking very little during the meal. What we know for certain is that shortly after the guests departed, around eleven o’clock, a heated argument broke out between Harriet and her brother.
Metropolitan police investigators eventually confirmed this through multiple testimonies from the household’s enslaved servants, gathered years later. According to those accounts, the quarrel began in Samuel’s study over certain financial documents Harriet had discovered while organizing the house papers. A house servant named Martha Washington, who had been with the family since their arrival in New Orleans, provided the most detailed account. In a sworn statement recorded in 1867, Martha described how the argument grew progressively more heated, with Harriet accusing her brother of crimes she said were beyond Christian forgiveness.
Martha had been ordered to prepare Harriet’s room for the night, but worried by the unusual intensity of the quarrel, she waited outside the study door. According to her account, Samuel finally ordered his sister back to her room and threatened to have her committed to an asylum if she persisted in what he called her groundless accusations. Harriet replied that she would see justice done, even at the cost of the LaRue family’s reputation. Martha then heard Harriet climbing the stairs to her third-floor bedroom.
Moments later, Samuel appeared and instructed Martha to bring a pot of tea to Harriet’s room in thirty minutes. When Martha delivered the tea, she found the bedroom door slightly ajar and the room empty. Harriet’s bed was undisturbed. Her nightclothes were laid out as if she were preparing for sleep.
Nothing in the room suggested a hasty departure. Her jewelry box sat intact on the dressing table, still holding several valuable pieces given to her by her late parents. Her traveling suitcase remained in the wardrobe. The only conspicuous absence was a leather-bound diary that Martha knew Harriet kept by her bedside.
Martha immediately informed Samuel of his sister’s absence. His reaction, she testified, was strangely restrained. He ordered her to search the rest of the house but forbade her from telling anyone outside. No search was conducted that night.
By morning, when Harriet still had not appeared, Samuel informed his wife and children that Harriet had decided to return to Virginia, leaving during the night to avoid an emotional farewell. He claimed to have arranged her transport and given her money for the journey. The family maintained this story for nearly a week. Caroline LaRue later confessed in a deposition during the inheritance dispute that although she found her husband’s explanation unconvincing, she raised no questions due to what she described as “wifely deference.
” Only when an expected letter confirming Harriet’s safe arrival in Richmond failed to come did Caroline begin pressing her husband for the truth. Harriet LaRue’s absence might have remained a private family matter, had Samuel not died unexpectedly less than a month later. On November 7, 1850, he was found dead in his Gravier Street office, apparently struck down by an apoplectic fit. His sudden death at forty-two caused a minor sensation in New Orleans business circles, where he was known as a man of robust health and careful disposition.
Settling his estate raised the question of Harriet’s whereabouts more sharply. In his will of 1849, Samuel had made provision for his sister—a modest annual income and the use of a small property outside Richmond. When the will’s executor, a fellow slave dealer named Jonathan Hayes, went to locate Harriet to inform her of the bequest, inconsistencies in the family’s account began to emerge. No passenger matching Harriet’s description had boarded any steamboat that left New Orleans on the night of October 10 or the following morning.
No stagecoach service had carried her north. The captain of the coastal vessel Samuel had claimed to have arranged for her journey had no record and no memory of such a passenger. It was as if Harriet LaRue had vanished from the face of the earth. Caroline LaRue, now a widow responsible for her three children and the family business, continued to maintain that her sister-in-law had returned to Virginia.
But in private correspondence with her own sister in Boston, portions of which are preserved in the Massachusetts Historical Society archives, she expressed growing unease about Harriet’s departure and her husband’s subsequent death. In a letter written in January 1851, she wrote, “I cannot shake the feeling that Samuel carried a terrible secret to his grave, one that may yet cast a shadow over us all. ”
The mystery might have been buried altogether, had it not captured the curiosity of a journalist named Thomas Pearce. Working for the New Orleans Daily Crescent, Pearce covered Samuel LaRue’s death and the substantial estate he left behind.
Something about the family’s account of Harriet’s departure struck him as suspicious, especially the timing—her disappearance so shortly before her brother’s death. In March 1851, Pearce published the first in a series of essays titled “The Disappearance of Miss LaRue,” laying out what was publicly known about her vanishing and raising pointed questions about the family’s shifting explanations. He noted that Caroline LaRue had first told friends that Harriet had gone to nurse a sick relative in Virginia, but when pressed had reverted to the claim that Harriet had simply wanted to return to her old home. Pearce’s investigation took a critical turn when he located a former LaRue slave named Daniel Robinson, who had been sold to a plantation in St.
Charles Parish shortly after Harriet’s disappearance. Robinson, who had worked in the LaRue stables and grounds, claimed to have witnessed something unusual on the night Harriet vanished. According to his account, recorded in Pearce’s articles, he was returning to the slave quarters when he noticed odd activity near the garden shed at the back of the property. In the dim light of a lantern, he saw Samuel LaRue and another man, whom he identified as Samuel’s business partner Jeremiah Wilson, carrying a heavy trunk from the house toward a waiting carriage.
Robinson, fearing punishment for being outside the quarters after hours, hid behind a magnolia tree and overheard LaRue telling the driver to head toward the swamp and await further instructions. Robinson’s testimony caused a minor sensation in New Orleans society. Jeremiah Wilson publicly denied any involvement and threatened legal action against the newspaper for defamation. Caroline LaRue retreated further from public view, refusing to comment on the allegations.
The city authorities, heavily influenced by commercial interests that profited from the slave trade, showed little interest in pursuing the matter thoroughly. The story might have faded from public memory entirely, had it not been for a gruesome discovery in December 1852. About four miles from the LaRue residence, along Bayou St. John, a surveying crew working on a proposed canal expansion found human remains.
The skeleton was identified as that of a woman, with fragments of an expensive linen nightgown still clinging to the bones. The city coroner, Dr. E. Francis Hackett, concluded that the woman had died at least one year and possibly as many as three years earlier.
More significantly, he noted signs of blunt force trauma to the skull, indicating death by violence at the hands of a person or persons unknown. The discovery reignited interest in the LaRue case. Thomas Pearce, who had continued investigating the disappearance intermittently, published a bold article suggesting the remains might be Harriet’s. He called for a formal inquiry and a reexamination of Samuel LaRue’s business affairs, hinting that Harriet’s disappearance might be connected to financial irregularities or other criminal activity.
Caroline LaRue, who by then had sold the Esplanade Avenue family home and moved with her children to a smaller house in the Garden District, responded through her lawyer. She categorically denied any connection between the body and her sister-in-law and reiterated that Harriet had returned to Virginia. As proof, she produced a letter supposedly written by Harriet dated January 1851, expressing satisfaction at being back in her childhood home. Handwriting experts examined the letter at Pearce’s request and expressed doubts about its authenticity.
The handwriting resembled surviving samples of Harriet’s script, but it showed unusual hesitation and inconsistencies in the formation of certain letters. More damning was the discovery that the paper bore a manufacturer’s watermark that had not been in use before April 1851—three months after the letter was supposedly written. Despite these inconsistencies, official interest remained tepid. New Orleans in the 1850s was experiencing unprecedented economic growth, driven by the cotton and sugar industries and the slave trade that sustained them.
The city’s commercial and political elite, many of whom had connections to the LaRue family through business or social ties, seemed reluctant to pursue a matter that might cast a shadow on any of their own. The case drifted. Nearly nine years after Harriet’s disappearance, in 1859, a significant development occurred. Construction workers excavating foundations for an expansion of the St.
Louis Hotel discovered a leather-bound diary wedged in a wall cavity. The hotel housed one of the city’s most notorious slave auction venues. The diary was water-damaged but largely legible, with Harriet LaRue’s name inscribed inside the cover. It came into the hands of a police department clerk named Edward Blanchard.
Recognizing its importance, Blanchard contacted Thomas Pearce, now editor of the Daily Crescent, and together they examined its contents—which proved both sensational and alarming. Written from Harriet’s arrival in New Orleans in 1846 through the day before her disappearance, October 9, 1850, the entries chronicled her growing horror at her brother’s business activities. Although Harriet had been aware of Samuel’s involvement in the slave trade, the diary revealed that she had only gradually come to understand the full scope of his operations. Particularly disturbing were entries from September 1850, describing financial documents Harriet had discovered that suggested Samuel and his business partners were involved in the illegal importation of enslaved Africans.
The international slave trade had been prohibited in the United States since 1808, but Harriet’s diary indicated Samuel was part of a network that continued bringing enslaved Africans into Louisiana through an elaborate system of coastal transfers and forged documents. The final entry, dated October 9, read: “I confronted Samuel with what I know. At first he denied everything, then tried to justify his actions as mere business. When I threatened to take what I had learned to the authorities, his manner changed completely.
I saw a coldness in his eyes I have never seen before. I fear what may come, but I cannot remain silent in the face of such wrong. I will speak with Mr. Hayes tomorrow and present the evidence I have gathered.
God give me strength. ”
The discovery of the diary provided a compelling motive for Harriet’s disappearance and presumed murder. It implicated not only Samuel LaRue but potentially several other prominent New Orleans merchants in criminal activity. Pearce published a careful account of the diary’s contents, omitting specific names other than the LaRues.
The response, as the authorities reviewed the evidence, was swift and unexpected. The night after the article appeared, the Daily Crescent offices were vandalized. Thomas Pearce was attacked by unidentified assailants as he walked home and warned to drop the matter. Most disturbingly, Edward Blanchard was found dead at his residence, apparently a suicide, though no suicide note was found and friends reported he had been in good spirits in the days before his death.
The diary disappeared from police custody and was officially recorded as misplaced during inventory. The investigation into Harriet LaRue’s disappearance was officially closed in January 1860. No charges were filed, and no formal conclusion was ever reached about her fate. The city stood on the brink of civil war, and authorities absorbed in the growing sectional crisis had little concern for matters a decade old.
Caroline LaRue, who had continued to insist on her innocence through the intermittent investigations, died of yellow fever during the epidemic of 1853. Her children were raised by relatives in Charleston and inherited their father’s considerable estate when they came of age. In the years before the Civil War, the LaRue family’s business interests, including several slave-holding facilities and auction rooms, were sold. The proceeds were invested in Confederate bonds that ultimately proved worthless.
In the years after Caroline’s departure, the Esplanade Avenue mansion passed through several owners. By 1867 it had been converted into a boarding house for merchants and travelers doing business in the nearby French Quarter. It was in this incarnation that the house acquired a reputation for being haunted, as residents reported strange noises coming from the third floor, particularly from what had once been Harriet LaRue’s room. Frederick Schmidt, a German immigrant who ran the boarding house from 1867 to 1872, kept meticulous records of the phenomena.
His files, preserved in the city archives, described sobbing, the sound of pacing in an empty room, and most unsettlingly, the sensation of being watched by invisible eyes. Several guests refused to stay in the third-floor rooms, and at least one, a cotton merchant from Memphis, fled in the middle of the night, claiming he had seen a woman in a nightdress standing at the foot of his bed, her face a mask of terror. In 1871, a former slave named Martha Washington, by then an elderly woman living in Tremé, came forward with additional information about the night of Harriet’s disappearance. In a statement to an agent of the Freedmen’s Bureau, which was investigating pre-war crimes against enslaved and freed people, Martha revealed that she had not told the whole truth in her earlier testimony.
In this new account, Martha said that when she delivered the tea, she had actually entered Harriet’s room and found Samuel LaRue standing over a trunk. She claimed that before Samuel ordered her out, she saw what appeared to be a woman’s hand protruding from beneath the trunk’s lid. Terrified, she fled to the kitchen and did not speak of what she had seen for nearly a year after Samuel’s death, still fearing reprisal. Martha’s revised testimony was recorded but never officially acted upon.
She died the following winter, her death noticed only by members of her church congregation. The agent who had taken her statement was transferred to Mississippi shortly afterward, and his file joined thousands of others in the archives. As Reconstruction came to an end, the LaRue case might have become just another unsolved mystery in a city that had no shortage of them, had it not been for an unusual discovery in 1894 during renovations of the old mansion. Workers removing a section of flooring in what had once been Harriet’s bedroom found items hidden in the space between the floorboards and the ceiling below: a cameo brooch, a folded piece of paper containing a lock of black hair, and a small key.
The property’s owner at the time, a retired physician named William Grant, recognized the items’ possible historical significance and donated them to the Louisiana Historical Society. The brooch was identified, through comparison with a portrait of Harriet LaRue held by distant relatives in Virginia, as one she had frequently worn. The key remained a mystery, matching no known lock in the house. But the piece of paper proved the most intriguing.
When a curator carefully unfolded it, it revealed itself to be not merely a wrapper for the hair but a hastily written note. The ink had faded considerably, but under proper light the writing became legible: “If I am silenced, know that the evidence lies within the secret compartment of this writing table. They traffick not only in those born into bondage but in souls stolen from Africa’s shore. The profits of this illicit trade have corrupted half the merchants of New Orleans and at least three officials in the customs office.
God forgive them, for I cannot. ”
The note bore no signature, but handwriting experts who compared it to Harriet’s known penmanship concluded it was almost certainly hers. The writing table it referenced was believed to have been a writing desk among Harriet’s effects. Its location, however, remained unknown, as it had been sold or otherwise removed along with much of the LaRue family furniture after Caroline’s departure from the Esplanade Avenue home.
In 1909, an article titled “The LaRue Mystery Revisited” appeared in the Times-Picayune, written by a journalist named Edward Collins. Collins had become interested in the case while researching another story and discovering Thomas Pearce’s original articles. His investigation led him to a curious footnote in the records of the Bank of Louisiana: an entry indicating that on the day of Harriet’s disappearance, Samuel LaRue had withdrawn an unusually large sum of $5,000 in cash—a substantial amount in the context of 1850. Collins also located correspondence between Samuel LaRue and Jeremiah Wilson from 1849 to 1850, containing veiled references to “a special shipment from friends across the sea”—almost certainly, in the context of the time, references to the illegal importation of enslaved Africans.
The letters, confiscated as part of Wilson’s business records during the Union occupation of New Orleans, had been filed in the National Archives and escaped the attention of earlier investigators. Most significantly, Collins tracked down the daughter of Daniel Robinson, the former LaRue slave who had claimed to witness unusual activity on the night of Harriet’s disappearance. Anna Robinson Bradford, who ran a small dressmaking business in Tremé, shared additional details her father had passed on before his death in 1884. According to Anna, her father had actually followed the carriage that left the LaRue property that night.
Staying in the shadows and keeping a careful distance, he traced the carriage not to Bayou St. John, as overheard instructions had suggested, but to a small dock on Lake Pontchartrain. There, the trunk was transferred to a waiting boat, which immediately departed across the lake. Unable to follow further and fearing discovery, Daniel Robinson had returned to the LaRue property, only to be sold to a plantation in St.
Charles Parish the very next day—an act he always believed was intended to remove a potential witness. Collins’s article revived interest in the LaRue case but also generated resistance. He received anonymous threats warning him to let the old lie rest, and the newspaper’s editor reported that several prominent New Orleans families were pressuring the paper to stop the series. After the third installment, the articles abruptly ended, with the paper citing space constraints.
The final significant development in the LaRue mystery came in 1927, when an elderly man named Thomas Wilson, son of Jeremiah Wilson, approached the Louisiana Historical Society. He claimed that his father, on his deathbed, had made a confession—recorded in a letter addressed to Thomas but never sent. That letter, dated August 1869, contained a detailed account of the events of October 10 and 11, 1850. According to Wilson’s letter, Harriet LaRue had indeed discovered proof of his and Samuel’s involvement in the illegal slave trade.
On the evening of October 10, after the dinner, she confronted Samuel and threatened to expose the operation to federal authorities. Alarmed, Samuel summoned Wilson to the house. When Wilson arrived, he found Samuel in Harriet’s bedroom. She had been rendered unconscious—though whether by violence or through drugged tea, the letter did not specify.
Together, the two men placed her body in a trunk, loaded it onto a carriage, and transported it to a prearranged meeting point on the shore of Lake Pontchartrain. There, they transferred the trunk to a small boat captained by a smuggler known only as Frenchie, who had assisted them in their illicit activities before. The boat carried them across Lake Pontchartrain, where Harriet’s body was buried in an unmarked grave. The letter did not clarify whether Harriet had been dead or merely unconscious when placed in the trunk, leaving the direct cause of death uncertain.
Wilson expressed profound remorse for his role, writing, “Miss LaRue’s face has haunted my dreams these nineteen years, her eyes wide with the knowledge of our betrayal. ”
The letter concluded with a reference to Samuel LaRue’s death, less than a month after Harriet’s disappearance. Though the official cause was recorded as an apoplectic fit, Wilson’s account suggested something far more sinister. He wrote: “In the weeks that followed, Samuel’s nerves were entirely shattered.
He became convinced that Harriet’s spirit was haunting him. He claimed to see her standing at the foot of his bed at night, or glimpsed her in the street, only to find no one there when he looked again. In his final days, he spoke of making amends, of confessing everything. I could not allow that, for his confession would have been mine as well.
Arsenic was easily obtained and administered gradually over several days. The doctors, seeing a robust man suddenly taken ill, suspected nothing. ”
Since the letter’s discovery, historians have debated its authenticity. Some have questioned why Jeremiah Wilson would compose such a self-incriminating document even if he never sent it.
Others have noted inconsistencies in certain details when compared to the known facts of the case. Yet the letter aligns with most of what was independently known about Harriet LaRue’s disappearance, and it offered explanations for previously mysterious elements. The LaRue mansion was demolished in 1938 to make way for commercial development. Witnesses to the demolition reported that workers discovered a small room hidden behind a false wall in Samuel LaRue’s study.
The space contained a writing desk—possibly the one referenced in Harriet’s note—but if any documents had been concealed within it, they had long since disappeared before the discovery. The desk was taken by the property development firm and subsequently lost to history. The site where Harriet LaRue was believed to have been buried was never definitively identified. The eastern shore of Lake Pontchartrain has undergone significant development since the mid-nineteenth century, and any unmarked grave from that era would by now likely have been covered or otherwise obscured by construction.
The skeletal remains discovered along Bayou St. John in 1852, once thought to be Harriet’s, were buried in an unmarked grave in St. Louis Cemetery No. 2 after the inquest.
What remains undisputed is that Harriet LaRue disappeared on the night of October 10, 1850, and was never seen again. The most credible explanation, supported by the preponderance of historical evidence, is that she was murdered to prevent her from exposing her brother’s involvement in the illegal slave trade. The subsequent deaths of Samuel LaRue, Edward Blanchard, and possibly others suggest a conspiracy that extended beyond a single act of violence—a deliberately planned cover-up in which multiple parties had an interest in maintaining the secrets of New Orleans’ slave trade. Harriet LaRue’s story endures because it speaks to something larger.
In a city where the past never fully recedes, where the archives hold faded newspaper accounts and the oral traditions carry memories across generations, the mystery of what happened that October night continues to haunt the collective memory. Tour guides in the French Quarter sometimes mention the LaRue case in their accounts of the city’s darker history, though over the years the details have often been embellished and mixed with other historical events or local legends. Some old residents of the neighborhood where the mansion once stood claim that on particularly quiet October nights, when the humidity hangs heavy in the air and the city’s noise momentarily subsides, a faint sound of a woman weeping can be heard. Others report glimpsing a woman in nineteenth-century dress from the corner of their eye, who vanishes when faced directly.
These may be merely the embellishments of a city with a complicated relationship with its dead—or they may be something more, an echo of a long-delayed and perhaps never-to-be-realized justice.
