Tremé

Claude Tremé was born in Sauvigny, Burgundy, France, in 1765, and arrived in New Orleans sometime in the 1780s. He worked as a hatmaker, a skilled trade that gave him enough capital to purchase land north of the original French colonial grid. His property sat just beyond the ramparts bounding the Vieux Carré, on what had been plantation ground at the edge of the city.

In 1810, Tremé subdivided his land and began selling lots, creating one of the earliest planned neighborhoods outside the original city. Free people of color — gens de couleur libres — were among the first buyers and builders, and by the 1820s the district was already the center of New Orleans' free Black community. Congo Square, where enslaved people gathered on Sundays to play music and trade, sat at the neighborhood's edge.

The family name Tremé is French in form and likely derives from a small place in France, following the French naming pattern in which a family's surname recorded where their ancestors had lived. Surnames of this shape are common in Brittany and Normandy, where Celtic and Latin place-names were compressed into French syllables over centuries. Claude Tremé's name thus carries two layers of geography: his own Burgundian origin and the older toponym his family had carried from some earlier village.

When HBO filmed its 2010 series 'Treme' about the neighborhood's recovery after Hurricane Katrina, the spelling shifted in American usage. The accent mark was often dropped, and outsiders began pronouncing the word with a flat American vowel where locals kept the French lilt. The neighborhood's name had quietly become a test: those who got the pronunciation right — roughly 'TREH-may' — showed they knew the place from the inside.