The New Orleans Cotton Exchange was founded in 1871. Its constitution, adopted on January 24 of that year, stated the organization's purposes as:

"...to provide and maintain suitable rooms for a "Cotton Exchange" in the City of New Orleans; to adjust controversies between members; to establish just and equitable principles, uniform usages, rules and regulations, and standards for classification, which shall govern all transactions connected with the cotton trade: to acquire, preserve and disseminate information connected therewith; to decrease the risks incident thereto; and generally to promote the interests of the trade, and increase the facilities and the amount of the cotton business in the City of New Orleans."

To further these goals, the Exchange had, in addition to its board of directors and officers, several committees, each devoted to a particular aspect of the institution's overall activities. These committees dealt with membership, information & statistics, trade, classification & quotations, finance, credits, and books.

By the early 1960s the Exchange was suffering from the decline in volume in trading of cotton futures. This, coupled with changes in the regulation of trading by the federal government, led to closure of the institution on July 9, 1964. An effort to revive the business as the New Orleans Cotton and Commodity Exchange in the mid-1970s did not succeed.

The Cotton Exchange occupied three successive buildings at the corner of Carondelet and Gravier Streets in the New Orleans Central Business District. While the last of these structures, built in 1920, remains standing and is known as the Cotton Exchange Building, it passed out of the hands of the Exchange in 1962.