"Many of the tombs are empty and falling to pieces, the tablets gone, or so worn by winter's storms and summer's heats that the inscriptions are no longer legible."

A.G. Durno, 1900

Maintenance

By the end of the nineteenth century, St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 had fallen out of favor as New Orleans residents moved out to the more fashionable cemeteries of Lafayette and Metairie. As interment activity fell, so did visitation and family maintenance activities. Grace King, the noted New Orleans historian, wrote in 1895 of a cemetery that was no longer open to visitors:

The crumbling bricks of the first resting places built there are still to be seen, ... It opens its gates only at the knock of an heir, so to speak; gives harbourage only to those who can claim a resting place by the side of an ancestor. 1

The true root cause for the deterioration results seen at St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 is a lack of cyclical maintenance and timely periodic repair. The weathering and ageing of porous building materials is to be expected. The surface finishes and stucco layers were applied as sacrificial finishes to protect the interior structural elements. Webster's unabridged dictionary defines sacrificial as "relating to sacrifice, the destruction or surrender of something for the sake of something else; giving up of some desirable thing in behalf of a higher object." In building materials, sacrificial implies impermanence, and the original intent was that the sacrificial finishes, both stucco and lime washes, would be replaced more frequently that the structural body when their effectiveness became reduced.2

Today, there is new interest in the maintenance and restoration of this historic cemetery. Family members and volunteers can all be involved.

• Limewashing
• Crack Repairs & Periodic Reapplication of Stucco
• Cleaning Marble Tablets & Sculpture
• Vegetation & Landscape Issues

Opening quote: A.G. Durno, “Old Burial Places,” Standard History of New Orleans, Henry Rightor ed. (Chicago: Lewis Publishing Co, 1900), 257.

1. Grace King, New Orleans: The Place and The People, (New York: Macmillan and Co., 1895), 401. Back

2. Judith A. Peters, "Modeling of Tomb Decay at St. Louis Cemetery No. 1: The Role of Material Properties and the Environment," Masters thesis, University of Pennsylvania, Aug. 2002, 208. Back