St. Louis Cemetery #1

St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, established in 1789, holds the distinction of being the oldest extant cemetery in the City of New Orleans. In 1788, the City of New Orleans suffered a number of significant setbacks including the first of two great fires and an epidemic that taxed the already full cemetery located on St. Peter Street, bounded by St. Peter, Burgundy, Toulouse, and Rampart Streets. In response to concerns from physicians about the spread of diseases, the acting government of the city ordered the earlier cemetery to be closed and a new cemetery to be established further away from the population. The Church selected a 300-square-foot parcel bordering marshy swampland outside of the confines of the fortified city, and about 40 yards from the rear garden of the then location of Charity Hospital as the site for the new cemetery. A picket fence was erected around its perimeter and burials began immediately. The cemetery was initially constructed as a temporary burial site but was soon after approved as permanent by Spanish royal decree on August 14, 1789. It can be assumed that during the 18th century interment within the new cemetery, now known as St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, took the form of in-ground burials, following the convention established in the St. Peter Street Cemetery. In 1803, a city ordinance was issued mandating that all forms of interment occur above ground in an effort to deal with the low-lying landscape of the cemetery and the constant threat of flooding. Though the mandate was not strictly followed it did prompt the style of interment we are most familiar with today in New Orleans, above-ground tombs, an aesthetic tradition of memorial architecture that we inherited from France and Spain, with the added benefit of it solving the issues associated with a very high water table. Through heavy use throughout its early years the cemetery expanded from the confines of its original footprint, eventually reaching directly up to the ramparts of the fortified city, and covering about one third of the block bordered today by Conti, Basin, Bienville, and Treme Streets. Following the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, and the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1804, the demographics of New Orleans’ population shifted dramatically. Americans from the Northern states flooded the city and brought Protestantism with them, and thousands of refugees from Haiti arrived with a mixture of Catholic, Caribbean and West-African-based religious beliefs. The cemetery was enlarged to accommodate this influx, with an additional parcel of land added at the rear of the original footprint for use as a Protestant burial ground, and adjacent to it a space allotted for the burials of African-Americans and people of color. In 1805, the city granted the newly established Episcopal congregation of Christ Church ownership of the Protestant burial ground, which they managed from that point until 1822 when the city offered their growing congregation a tract of land on Faubourg Street, at the head of Girod Street, for the building of a new Protestant cemetery, which would later be known as the Girod Street Cemetery. In June of 1832, the New Orleans City Council set upon a plan to extend Conti, Treme, and Basin streets, in a way to cross the land occupied by St. Louis Cemetery No. 1. The Church Wardens and City Surveyor Joseph Pilie supervised the work to transfer the burials within the way of the extensions to within the smaller planned footprint of the cemetery. The current main entrance gate dates to this road project. In the years that followed, Treme Street was laid out, bisecting the Protestant parcel and separating it, and the space set aside for the burials of African-Americans and people of color, from the rest of the cemetery. By 1838, the majority of the remains in the Protestant section had been relocated to the Girod Street Cemetery, and in 1840 what was left of the section on the west side of Treme Street was sold as building lots. Today, only a small strip of the Protestant section remains bordering Treme and Conti Streets and is now under the care of New Orleans Catholic Cemeteries. In 1847, the Board of Church Wardens of the St. Louis Cathedral agreed to reliquinsh a portion of the cemetery bordering St. Louis Street to the First Municipality of the City of New Orleans so that improvements could be made in that area. Between 1847 and 1852 the remains of those interred within that portion of the cemetery were relocated to newly built vaults on Basin and Conti Streets as well as to private family tombs. In 1975, St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 was listed on the National Register of Historic Places as having a national level of significance in the areas of art and architecture. It was later listed as part of the African American Heritage Trail by the State of Louisiana in 2008 due to the large number of historically and culturally significant African Americans interred within the cemetery. The movie Easy Rider was filmed here. \n\n