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Tales from the Crypts
New digital resource to compile information about New Orleans cemeteries
The Collection is giving New Orleans’s oldest cemeteries a 21st-century boost. Earlier this year, staff curator Howard Margot and Williams Research Center intern Sofia Papastamkou started digitizing a detailed survey of nine of the city’s historic cemeteries, which The Collection and the nonprofit Save Our Cemeteries originally conducted from 1981 to 1985. The project will make information about each burial-ground tomb or crypt—names and life dates of the “residents,” materials used, condition reports, lists of decorative or architectural details, and more—accessible to anyone online or in person at the Williams Research Center.
The project doubles as a masters thesis for Papastamkou, a French graduate student who designed the Web-readv database during her WRC internship, from April through June, and is still working on the project remotely from France. Assisting in the digitization is Save Our Cemeteries, whose volunteers are performing the tedious but necessary task of data entry—taking index cards from the original survey and entering the information into the database. The project is still in its pilot form, focusing only on survey data from St. Louis No. 1, but in time, all nine cemeteries will be brought into the digital fold. The Collection hopes to have the pilot version of the survey available for public perusal later this year.
These cemeteries date as far back as the late 18th century—the oldest still extant, St. Louis No. 1, was established in 1789, and the second oldest, St. Louis No. 2, is from 1823—and, for the most part, served the wealthy and the poor, the slave and the free, the immigrant and the native. The tombs are among the city’s most significant architectural monuments, reflecting the influence of French and Spanish cultural traditions on the city, the physical realities of the south Louisiana
environment, and the artistry of some of the city’s most important architects, sculptors, and craftsmen.
The cemeteries’ picturesque qualities, although long cherished by visitors, are partly due to their deterioration: constant exposure to the elements, the sensitivity of the materials (marble, wrought iron, and soft, local brick), and susceptibility to theft all affect the historic burial grounds’ long-term sustainability. The protection and conservation of the cemeteries has been a concern of paramount importance to New Orleans preservationists since the city’s preservation movement—one of the very earliest in the country—got its start in the first quarter of the 20th century.
General L. Kemper Williams, founder ofThe Historic New Orleans Collection and an important early preservationist, was involved with efforts in the 1940s and ’50s to save the city’s first Anglican cemetery,
Girod Cemetery, founded in 1822. These efforts eventually failed, and Girod Cemetery was bulldozed to make way for urban development.
Later, in the 1970s, threats to the Catholic burial grounds of St. Louis Nos. 1 and 2 led to the creation of
Save Our Cemeteries, one of the oldest such preservation organizations in the United States. The group fought successfully to halt massive demolition in these cemeteries and paved the way for continued preservation advocacy.
The Collection’s original cemetery survey targeted grounds whose continued existence was, at the time, very much in doubt: St. Louis Nos. 1 and 2, Lafayette Nos. 1 and 2, St. Joseph Nos.
1 and 2, Odd Fellows Rest, Greenwood, and Cypress Grove. By documenting the structures of these centuries-old burial grounds, the architects of the original survey took a crucial step in preventing city-sanctioned demolition to some of New Orleans’s most historically significant sites. However, in the 28 years that have since passed, environmental and manmade disruption has led to a remarkable loss of material and information. Countless closure tablets—the square or rectangular slabs that cap sealed tombs and often list names and life dates—have been stolen, destroyed, or lost to environmental deterioration.
The new digital survey preserves the information from the lost tablets and makes it more accessible than ever. Users can search for information bv lot
8 Volume XXX, Number 4 — Fall 2013