Carrollton Cemetery: The Small-Town Graveyard Inside a Big City

Carrollton Cemetery: The Small-Town Graveyard Inside a Big City

Carrollton Cemetery is one of the most charming and least known burial grounds in New Orleans. Established in 1849—when Carrollton was still an independent town, not yet absorbed by the expanding city of New Orleans—this modest cemetery on Adams Street carries the quiet, small-town character that defined Carrollton before it became just another Uptown neighborhood. Also known as the Green Street Cemetery, it is a pocket-sized city of the dead that feels a world away from the grand necropoli along Canal Boulevard.

History

The town of Carrollton was founded in the 1830s as a residential community at the upriver terminus of the New Orleans and Carrollton Railroad. It had its own government, its own courthouse, and by 1849, its own cemetery. When New Orleans annexed Carrollton in 1874, the cemetery came with it, but it retained its small-town character—a community burial ground where the families of the old town laid their dead to rest. The cemetery also contained a potter’s field section for the indigent, reflecting the democratic mix of wealth and poverty that characterized the original town.

The Grounds

Carrollton Cemetery is compact—just a few acres tucked into the residential blocks of the Carrollton neighborhood. The tombs are modest compared to those in the grand cemeteries, with simple family crypts, wall vaults, and a scattering of in-ground burials in the potter’s field section. There are no towering obelisks or elaborate society tombs here. What you get instead is a sense of intimacy—a place where you can read the names on the tombs and imagine the families who lived in the houses just beyond the cemetery walls, walking to church on Sunday mornings and tending their family plots on weekend afternoons.

A Neighborhood Cemetery

What makes Carrollton Cemetery special is its ordinariness. In a city where cemeteries are tourist attractions, Carrollton is a neighborhood graveyard—a place that belongs to the people who live around it. It does not appear on most tourist maps. There are no guided tours, no famous residents drawing crowds. It is simply a quiet place where a small town buried its people, and where those people still rest beneath the oaks, surrounded by the neighborhood their families built. In a city that loves its dead louder than most cities love their living, Carrollton Cemetery is a reminder that not every grave needs to be a spectacle.