Public provision in Spanish New Orleans: the crown school of 1772, the lepers' hospital, and the relief after the fire of 1788

Spain sent four salaried teachers from Madrid to open a free school in a colony it had governed for three years, built a hospital for lepers at the council's expense, and after the fire of Good Friday 1788 fed about seven hundred people on the king's account. The governor's own despatch, quoted at length by a Louisiana historian in 1854, also records that almost nobody came to the school: never more than thirty pupils, often six, and not one for the Latin class.