Cemeteries in New Orleans

As you know, I’ve been to a lot of cemeteries, so I’ve been looking forward to seeing the ones here in New Orleans.  The worst part is that we’ve been warned that they can be dangerous unless you are with a tour, especially Cemetery No. 1 with Voodoo Queen Marie Laveau.  Others say that it’s just fine.  We’re still deciding if we’ll visit that one.  Instead we stopped at a couple of the cemeteries farther away from the French Quarter and mostly drove through the grounds with just a few stops.

There are a lot of cemeteries in New Orleans.  Some of them have names and some just numbers.  All of them have vaults above ground.  Some say the graves are above ground because the water table is so high.  The story is that a casket would rise up over time since the air and gases inside would sort of “pop” them to the surface.  Others say it’s just a French and Spanish tradition.  Given that the water table is lower due to pumps and levees, it’s more tradition now.

The tombs have multiple names of the front and can be a family tomb or an organization like the Elks.  The story is that the heat within the tombs slowly cremates the body so that after a year only bones are left.  Those bones are pushed back into a hole in the floor and another body can be placed in the vault.  Kinda creepy but also more sustainable since not as much ground is needed per person.

Greenwood Cemetery was partly built because of the yellow fever epidemic of 1853 (http://tandtrv.blogspot.com/2012/11/yellow-fever-epidemics.html).   There were somewhere between 8,000 – 11,000 people from New Orleans who died in this epidemic.  This cemetery has about 20,500 lots with many of them family or society types.  In the front are several monuments including a Confederate monument marking the grave of 600 Confederate soldiers, the Firemen’s Monument sits atop a five foot mound (foreground of the picture above), and the Elks’ tomb with an elk above it (background).

St. Louis Cemetery No. 3 was started soon after (1854) on the site of an old leper colony. This cemetery has mausoleums, wall vaults, family tombs, and society tombs.  It’s more active and well-kept than many of the cemeteries since people are still being buried here today.  Interesting places to visit.