Bustling with labor and commerce, this vivid stereoview captures a sprawling cotton dock along the New Orleans riverfront, where stevedores haul massive cotton bales from a recently docked steamboat. The scene is identified as “No. 229. Trucking Cotton, From Steamboat” and was photographed by Theodore Lilienthal’s successor, George Mugnier, from his Exchange Place studio in New Orleans. Dozens of African American laborers, many likely freedmen or formerly enslaved individuals, move in tight formation along plank pathways and among dense rows of stacked cotton, barrels, and crates.

Prominent signage across the buildings in the background advertises the Louisiana Steam Sugar Refinery and various freight depots, rooting the scene in the industrial might of postbellum New Orleans. With its sharp detail, layered composition, and dynamic portrayal of labor and infrastructure, the image offers a powerful document of Reconstruction-era riverfront commerce. A compelling record of the Southern economy in transition, photographed by one of the city's foremost 19th-century documentarians.