St. Peter Street Cemetery: Where New Orleans First Buried Its Dead

Before there were cities of the dead, before the above-ground tombs became the signature of New Orleans burial culture, there was the St. Peter Street Cemetery—the original public burial ground of the city, established in the early 1700s when New Orleans was little more than a muddy outpost on the Mississippi River. The cemetery no longer exists in any visible form, but its story is the beginning of one of the most distinctive funerary traditions in the world.

History

The St. Peter Street Cemetery was established in the earliest days of the French colony, sometime in the first decades after the city’s founding in 1718. Located within or very near the original city grid of the Vieux Carré, it served as the primary burial ground for all of colonial New Orleans—French soldiers, colonists, enslaved Africans, Native Americans, and the various other souls who found themselves in this improbable settlement on the edge of the swamp. The cemetery was Catholic, as required by the French colonial charter, which excluded all non-Catholics from the colony.

The Problem of Water

From the very beginning, burying the dead in New Orleans was a challenge. The water table sits just inches below the surface in much of the city, and early colonists discovered quickly that coffins buried in the ground had a tendency to resurface during floods and heavy rains. The sight of coffins floating through the streets was a recurring horror in colonial New Orleans and one of the driving factors behind the eventual adoption of above-ground burial. The St. Peter Street Cemetery experienced these problems firsthand, and by the late 1700s, it was clear that a new approach was needed.

Closure and Legacy

The St. Peter Street Cemetery was closed around 1800, by which time St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 had been established as the new primary burial ground. The old cemetery was eventually built over as the French Quarter expanded and developed. Today, no visible trace of the cemetery remains above ground, though archaeological investigations have periodically uncovered human remains in the area, reminders that the dead lie beneath the streets and buildings of the Quarter. The exact boundaries of the cemetery are a matter of scholarly debate, but it is believed to have occupied a site near the present-day intersection of St. Peter and Burgundy Streets.

The First Chapter

The St. Peter Street Cemetery is the first chapter in the remarkable story of death in New Orleans—a story that would eventually produce some of the most distinctive funerary architecture, burial practices, and cultural traditions in the world. The jazz funeral, the above-ground tomb, the society tomb, the cemetery as tourist attraction—all of these grew out of the practical and cultural challenges that began when the first colonists tried to bury their dead in the soggy ground of the Vieux Carré. The St. Peter Street Cemetery is gone, but its legacy lives on in every whitewashed tomb and brass-band procession in the city.