JULIUS FREYHAN IN NEW ORLEANS
Excerpted from the book THREE GENEROUS GENERATIONS by Anne Butler

In the late 1880s, Julius Freyhan removed himself and his family from St. Francisville. He divested himself of his extensive landholdings and business interests, turning most of his West Feliciana Parish property over to his brothers-in-law, Morris and Emanuel Wolf. But he remained closely in touch with the little community where he had prospered, helping to establish St. Francisville’s Jewish cemetery called Hebrew Rest and donating the organ for the Temple Sinai, which was constructed in late 1902 and dedicated in March 1903, its dedication sermon preached by Dr. Max Heller of New Orleans.

Once established in New Orleans, the Freyhan family—Julius, his wife Sarah and four daughters—attended Rabbi Dr. Heller’s Temple Sinai on St. Charles Avenue. They occupied a huge Victorian home right on that same boulevard, at 5225 St. Charles Avenue, three stories with a red roof and a tower, bays and rambling covered porches.

In the late 1800s, there was a great influx of Jewish residents from the countryside to the city, where the post-war economy and culture held greater promise. Scholar Elliott Ashkenazi estimated that by 1880, about two-thirds of Louisiana’s Jewish residents lived in the Crescent City. In New Orleans Freyhan was a member of the Harmony Club, a group designed to maintain cohesion among German Jews in a community.

He belonged to the Cotton Exchange and served for most of his 16 years’ residence in New Orleans as president of Lane Cotton Mills, a growing textile mill that had been operated by Lehman, Abraham & Co. following the Civil War and which his son-in-law Sigmund Odenheimer would considerably expand after he succeeded Freyhan as head of the mill.

When Julius Freyhan died on October 11, 1904, at the age of 72, he was interred in the first space in the large family plot in the beautiful old Metairie Cemetery among friends and relatives from some of the city’s most influential Jewish families, the Adlers and Sterns and Goudchaux, Besthoffs and Delgados, Odenheimers and others. He had suffered an apoplectic stroke in New York, where he was attended by the well-known New Orleans surgeon Dr. J.D. Bloom, who advised that the patient be returned home by special train as speedily as possible, but to no avail.

The New Orleans Jewish Ledger called him one of the city’s most prominent citizens and related that “a large concourse of friends assembled to pay the last tribute of respect to the deceased, who had occupied a most prominent position in commercial and social circles.” The Times-Picayune obituary said, “Mr. Freyhan did not shirk any of his business responsibilities, and whatever he did was done with that rare grasp of mind which made him all of his life so successful in business affairs.”

His widow, the former Sarah Wolf, would continue to occupy the commodious family home on St. Charles Avenue with her daughter Pauline, son-in-law Sigmund Odenheimer, and their children. She would visit Europe annually and would not follow her husband to the grave for another 28 years, living long enough to see her daughters grown and well married: Pauline to prominent business leader and philanthropist Sigmund Odenheimer of New Orleans, Juliet to Rabbi William S. Friedman of Denver, Beatrice to George Seeman of Pittsburgh, and Irma to Rudolf Lowbeer and then, widowed, to international banker Alexander Weiner of Vienna.