David Lingle wants his great-grandfather’s historic memorabilia back. A letter from Thomas Jefferson to George Washington, documents from the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, an 1856 portfolio of Audubon prints and other treasures are worth something like $2 million, Lingle claims.
The trouble is, his grandfather’s collection is in limbo, misplaced by the museum meant to care for it, or gone, he said.
About 120 years ago, Lingle’s great-grandfather Gaspar Cusachs lent all of his precious papers and artifacts to the Louisiana State Museum. In 2016, the museum returned hundreds of items to Lingle and the Cusachs family. But, Lingle said, his ancestor had lent the museum a lot more stuff, which they haven’t yet returned.
So Lingle’s suing the museum, an assortment of folks associated with the museum, the lieutenant governor, who oversees the museum, and the state of Louisiana.
He wants the artifacts, or a cash settlement.
Historian and collector Gaspar Cusachs circa 1903, from a Louisiana Historical Society publication
Eminent amateur antiquarian
Born to a prominent New Orleans family in 1855, Cusachs spent his childhood in Europe, returning to his hometown with his family after the Civil War. As an adult, he made a fortune building an electric railroad and waterworks in Texas, enough to buy a mansion on Esplanade Avenue at the edge of the French Quarter and relax into the good life.
Cusachs was fascinated by New Orleans’ past. He served as the president of the Louisiana Historical Society and was a member of the board of directors of the Louisiana State Museum, acquiring artifacts whenever possible. In a 1903 Times-Picayune story, he was described as “one of the eminent amateur archaeologists and antiquarians and bibliophiles of the South.”
According to Lingle, great-grandpa’s collection went on display in New Orleans in 1903, celebrating the anniversary of the Louisiana Purchase, then at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904. Cusachs subsequently lent it to the State Museum at the Cabildo. It was displayed in a section of the museum known as the Cusachs Room.
A drum once owned by Batlle of New Orleans veteran Jordan Bankston Noble and an Andrew Jackson presentation flag celebrating the victory at the battle were among the items returned to the heirs of Gaspar Cusachs by the Louisiana State Museum in 2016
‘We’d done a service’
And there it stayed, through the many decades, until 2015. In Lingle’s telling, Gaspar’s 26 grandchildren and great-grandchildren had become restless. The generations were aging, and some direct descendants came to see the Cusachs collection as their inheritance.
“More than a century of holding onto something is plenty enough,” Lingle wrote in an email, “and having 26-plus people trying to have a say about things makes my cup (and everyone else’s involved) runneth over.”
In the end, Lingle said, the heirs “felt like we’d done a service” by leaving the artifacts in the state’s hands for so long.
So the family asked to get them back. The state museum dutifully returned 600 pieces, including a snare drum once owned by Battle of New Orleans veteran Jordan Nobel, a flag presented to General Andrew Jackson by the women of New Orleans, and early maps of the Mississippi River valley by George Henri Collot.
The family promptly sold off the objects, through the Neal auction company and elsewhere. Lingle said the sale raised roughly $250,000.
But Lingle believes the trove of 600 historic objects was less than a third of what Gasper Cusachs gave the museum in the first place. So the heirs wanted the museum to turn over the rest. But the museum management only returned a few more objects.
John James Audubon's quadraped prints, like this one photographed at the home of David Longwood and Jon Green, which use to be the artist/naturalist's French Quarter studio, are among the items David Lingle says he'd like the Louisiana State Museum to return to the Cusachs family.
'The little people'
Lingle, a retired corporate consultant who lives outside of Louisiana, suspects they just didn’t have all of great-granddad’s stuff anymore or couldn’t find it.
So, Lingle wrote a 55-page lawsuit that he filed with the Orleans Parish Civil District Court, without benefit of a law degree, demanding that the museum either produce his great-grandfather’s loaned property, or compensate the heirs for its loss.
Lingle said that the museum has filed court papers that claim he has no legal right to file the lawsuit. Lingle said he has diligently offered rebuttal in court papers of his own.
Lingle sees his struggle with the State Museum in David and Goliath terms.
“We’re no longer a prominent family in New Orleans, like in the time of Gaspar Cusachs,” Lingle wrote. “We admit, we’re ‘the little people’ of society at this point … and, I think, that makes the acts of the State and its attorneys even more unscrupulous and unfair.”
Whatever happened, happened a long time ago
Lingle said his feelings about the matter are mixed. He wants his family to have what’s rightfully theirs. But he doesn’t want to diminish Gaspar Cusach’s legacy or unjustly blame the current museum staff for the disappearance of part of his collection.
“I do think whatever happened to all the artifacts of the collection happened a long time ago,” he wrote via email, and that the Louisiana State Museum’s “systems and people are far more advanced now.”
But, he said, he doesn’t believe that “the complicated nature and level of difficulty of their task should allow them to ignore law and unfairly damage people, like the Cusachs family.”
A representative of Lt. Gov. Billy Nungesser’s office, which oversees the State Museum, declined to comment on the litigation.
Correction: In the first version of this story, the date of an historic document was incorrect and has been removed.
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