Isaac Delgado: The Jamaican Sugar Dealer Who Built New Orleans' Museum and College

The Jamaican Sugar Dealer Who Built New Orleans' Museum and College

Isaac Delgado was born around 1839 in Jamaica and made his way to New Orleans in the latter half of the nineteenth century. He built his fortune in the sugar trade — a business that in New Orleans was as close to royalty as commerce could get. Sugar built the plantation houses, funded the banks, and powered the economy of south Louisiana for generations. Delgado understood this world and thrived in it.

But what set Delgado apart from the dozens of other wealthy sugar men in New Orleans was what he did with the money. While others built mansions and monuments to themselves, Delgado invested in institutions that would outlast him by more than a century.

A Museum and a College

Delgado's most visible legacy is the New Orleans Museum of Art, which originally bore his name when it opened in City Park in 1911. His funding helped establish what became one of the finest art museums in the South — a place where New Orleanians could encounter world-class art without leaving the city. The museum has since grown into a sprawling campus with the Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden, but it started with Delgado's vision and his checkbook.

His other lasting gift came in 1921, when funds from his bequest were used to establish a manual trades school for young men on a fifty-seven-acre campus in City Park. That school evolved into Delgado Community College — now the largest community college in Louisiana, serving tens of thousands of students every year. Nurses, welders, chefs, IT professionals, and countless others have built their careers through an institution that exists because a Jamaican immigrant who made good in the sugar business decided that New Orleans' young people deserved a shot.

A Quiet Giant

Isaac Delgado died around 1912, leaving behind no great autobiography, no political career, no scandalous personal life. He left a museum and a college. In a city full of characters who craved attention, Delgado's legacy is that he gave New Orleans two institutions it couldn't live without and then quietly stepped aside.