In the evening Mr. R and myself visited the Catholic cemetery which I consider one of the most beautiful curiosities of New Orleans. It is a perfect miniature of a handsome city, it is a city of the dead.

Joseph W. Fawcett, Journal of Jos. W. Fawcett, 1840

There is no architecture in New Orleans, except in the cemeteries. They bury their dead in vaults above ground. These vaults have a resemblance to houses--sometimes to temples; are built of marble, generally; are architecturally graceful and shapely; they face the walks and driveways of the cemetery; and when one moves through the midst of a thousand or so of them, and sees their white roofs and gables stretching into the distance on every hand, the phrase 'city of the dead' has all at once a meaning to him. Many of the cemeteries are beautiful and kept in perfect order...if those people down there would live as neatly while they were alive as they do after they are dead, they would find many advantages to it.

Of the many aspects of Creole culture that were celebrated as unique and promoted as visitor attractions, the city's above-ground cemeteries ranked among the most popular along with the French Opera House, the French Market, and Madame John's Legacy. Mark Twain was far from being the first or only visitor to these 'cities of the dead' and the obvious comparison of these necropoli with the living city did not go unnoticed, causing author and early preservationist Grace King in 1897 to remark, "[St. Louis I] is the mother cemetery, ...the Vieux Carré of the dead; as confused and closely packed a quarter as the living metropolis, whose ghastly counterpart it is."

Nearly all visitors beginning with New Yorker John Pintard in 1801, commented on the unusual mortuary customs of the city, and in particular its disposal of the dead and the associated rituals, the most notable being Toussants or All-Saints' Day. To the visiting stranger, these places and customs offered both a sentimental as well as sublime experience. Wandering among the dense maze of house-like tombs with their French and Spanish epitaphs commemorating valorous deaths by the Creole custom of the duel, or recording an untimely demise from the city's many yellow fever epidemics, the visitor was at once confronted with a vision of eternal rest quite unlike the sobriety of the eighteenth century Protestant burying ground or the contrived arcadia of the new progressive rural cemeteries. By the mid nineteenth century, cemeteries such as Père La Chaise in Paris, Mount Auburn in Boston, Greenwood in Brooklyn, and Mount Laurel in Philadelphia were conscious modern comparisons, conceived not only for the interment and commemoration of the dead, but as public parks with architecture, sculpture, and plantings for viewing and contemplation. These modern cemetery designs, derived from eighteenth century English landscape precedents, reflected a new belief in nature as a regenerative force and associated with a new imagery for religious contemplation and the commemoration of the dead.

During the first half of the nineteenth century, romantic literature reflected the intense feelings that were supposed to accompany a visit to the tomb. Already in the late eighteenth century, poets drew inspiration from cemeteries; however by the early nineteenth century such places were meant to elicit, like Wordsworth's definition of poetry itself, "a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings". For the nineteenth century visitor, these places were to be experienced through the senses rather than the intellect, through imagination instead of reason. Central to the experience of the cemetery visit was consolation and moral illumination that was to flow from remembered attachments. Such respect paid to the dead by the living was a natural sentiment that could not be denied without seriously compromising public morality. Unlike earlier medieval European practices of mass burial and exhumation, individual plot ownership and visitation not only restored the place of the individual in death, but also reinforced the family and evoked association with the ancient classical tradition of the cult of ancestor worship through family burial and tombs. Nineteenth century cemeteries became centers for family shrines and family outings and by extension the feelings of community and solidarity could be extended to the village and city or social group as a whole.

New Orleans' first extramural cemeteries with their planned layout of family and society tombs marked a significant and early departure in North America from the impersonal and macabre European traditions that the later rural cemeteries reacted so totally against. Yet the most striking characteristic of these cemeteries was the tradition of above ground burial in tomb houses of great concentration resembling a fantastic miniature city, located behind a high enclosure. Above ground burial, though uncommon in Europe and North America, was not unknown, especially among the French and Spanish elite. Individual burial, enclosure, and extramural siting--aspects of the first St. Louis Cemetery--were requirements that developed in response to the observed overcrowding of many European urban burial grounds by the mid-eighteenth century and were eventually legislated, most notably in France. While the construction of a walled precinct outside the city limits satisfied concerns about deadly cemetery emanations--the miasmes fetides or cadaverous gases associated with disease and epidemic--it also established clear and precise boundaries between the space of the living and the dead. Isolation protected the urban population from the diseases of putrefication; enclosure protected the dead from marauding animals and also made possible a special atmosphere for contemplation by those visiting loved ones, a practice that later grew in popularity during the nineteenth century. Unlike the often reported public activities in the earlier parish churchyard where markets, meetings, and other forms of social intercourse occurred, eighteenth century reformers pushed for a more differentiated burial environment enforcing a quieter contemplative mood ultimately achieved by their relocation to the outskirts of towns and cities and the enclosure and policing of these spaces.

Text adapted from Frank G. Matero, Dead Space: Defining the New Orleans' Creole Cemetery, Exhibit at Graduate School of Fine Arts, University of Pennsylvania, April 2002.