Each tomb’s design in each cemetery is an adaptation of myriad influences, determined through the eye and imagination of mostly vernacular builders. Yet as is the case in all cemeteries, the appearance of the present is determined by what came before. In this blog post, we examine how a single influence gained a dual life in the form of the New Orleans sarcophagus tomb.
Although definitions vary, the sarcophagus tomb is described by some New Orleans cemetery researchers as a tomb with four sides (often with canting walls), and clad in stone paneling (mostly marble but sometimes granite).[2] Sarcophagus tombs frequently have corner pilasters, sometimes with carved adornments like inverted torches, floral ornament, and others. Sarcophagus tombs often bear pediments or parapets – sometimes Classical, sometimes geometric, sometimes sculptural. A researcher in the 1959 once referred to a specific group of sarcophagus tombs in as having “wicket-shaped” parapets, for their resemblance to croquet wickets (like the Toledano tomb, pictured here).[3] The sarcophagus design of these New Orleans tombs came to the Crescent City by a journey that spanned centuries and continents. As with so many nineteenth-century buildings, the sarcophagus tomb was born in the ancient world. But its journey would split in two before arriving in Louisiana – one form traveled through France’s Pere la Chaise Cemetery before arriving; another traversed from England to the American Northeast where it gestated in the Anglo-American cemeteries of Pennsylvania and New England before it found itself in New Orleans. These two versions of the same basic tomb shape would flourish in their own respective cemeteries, one in the French-Creole St. Louis Cemeteries, the other in the American-Protestant influenced cemeteries of Cypress Grove, Lafayette No. 1, and Girod Street. |
The word “sarcophagus” derives from the Greek words meaning “flesh” and “to eat,” translating roughly to “flesh-eating,” although there is debate on whether this name originates from folklore. In ancient Greece and Rome, the sarcophagus was a stone, clay, or metal vessel meant for the interment of a deceased body.
Sarcophagus burial likely came to Greece via the Phoenicians by the 500 BCE. Over the centuries, simple burial sarcophagi gained architectural traits common of Greek architecture itself, namely relief sculpture and acroteria. By 300 BCE, Romans had adapted the sarcophagi of the Etruscans into richly-carved funereal monuments as well. Like in Greece, Romans placed sarcophagi in public spaces for veneration and display, in squares and along funereal avenues like the Appian Way. The sarcophagus survived the fall of Rome by adapting to early Christian traditions. While it was wasn’t always used to actually house a deceased body within its boxy walls, it instead became a piece of mortuary sculpture.[4] Sculptural sarcophagi (known as “false” sarcophagi because they do not actually house remains) adorned the walls of cathedrals and churches from the Duomo in Florence, Italy to Westminster Abbey in England. The sarcophagus became a different form of fine art, adorned with figures and effigies of the dead. |
A general shift in the way Western culture understood death took place toward the end of the 1700s. Before this time, the sanctity and identity of a deceased body was reserved mostly for the wealthy, powerful, or sainted. By 1790, cultural changes brought by scientific advancement, industrialization, urbanization, and the Enlightenment, gave birth to the modern concept of the cemetery. In France, this shift was noted by the closure of the Cimetière des Saints-Innocents (Cemetery of the Holy Innocents) and the opening of the cemeteries of Pere Lachaise and Montmartre. In France, the sarcophagus gained new life.
Pere Lachaise Cemetery was founded in 1804. The cemetery quickly filled with cemetery monuments in the Neoclassical style – some directly copied from ancient tombs, some amalgamations of borrowed details from Greece and Rome. Over the next two decades, the influences that birthed Pere Lachaise (shift in death culture, rising urbanism, and bourgeoning Neoclassicism) reached far beyond France. Other communities began to follow suit. Pere Lachaise Cemetery was founded in 1804. The cemetery quickly filled with cemetery monuments in the Neoclassical style – some directly copied from ancient tombs, some amalgamations of borrowed details from Greece and Rome. Over the next two decades, the influences that birthed Pere Lachaise (shift in death culture, rising urbanism, and bourgeoning Neoclassicism) reached far beyond France. Other communities began to follow suit. Coming to America In the young United States, specifically in Pennsylvania, Boston, and later New York, the model of the cemetery as ex-urban, garden-like, and sculptural was repeated first in Cambridge, Massachusett’s Mount Auburn Cemetery in 1831, then in Philadelphia’s Laurel Hill Cemetery in 1836. These were the first American garden cemeteries, and they flourished. Both cemeteries by the adopted sarcophagus-style tombs, mostly of the “false” sarcophagus variety.[6] |
New Orleans first above-ground cemetery was St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, established in 1789. It was a Catholic cemetery used by primarily French Creole New Orleanians (a small parcel at the rear was reserved for Protestant citizens). St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 replaced the St. Peter Street Cemetery, a below-ground graveyard which was quickly built-over. Yet St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 developed relatively haphazardly, with no specific plan or aisles, and was first populated by small tombs built in vernacular designs.
By 1822, however, the layout of New Orleans cemeteries became more refined in two ways. First, the concepts of garden-type cemetery design arrived in New Orleans, and cemeteries were planned with aisles and even some vegetation (architectural historian Dell Upton has mused on the odd ways New Orleans both followed and did not follow the garden cemetery tradition). Second, the Catholics and Protestants established separate cemeteries. On one side of Canal Street, St. Louis Cemetery No. 2 was established. On the other side, the American side, the Protestant cemetery on Girod Street was built.
Finally, in the 1830s, French architect Jacques Nicolas Bussiere de Pouilly (1804-1875) arrived in New Orleans. His work, based on pattern books from Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, created in St. Louis Cemetery No. 2 a remarkable menagerie of tomb architecture.[7] This architecture was copied, adapted, and altered by vernacular builders for generations.
While similar in construction and often playing upon one another, specific traits can be noted in each variety of sarcophagus tomb, French-Creole and Anglo-American.
The French-Creole Sarcophagus Tomb The French-Creole New Orleans sarcophagus tomb was birthed in St. Louis Cemetery No. 2 by J.N.B. de Pouilly. Or, rather, it was birthed by de Pouilly but conceived by the French by way of the Greeks and Romans. Its lineage is long. The French-Creole sarcophagus tomb is clad in marble with canted sides. Its marble walls often bear details like pilasters, ashlar-type scoring, and sculptural relief carvings of iconography like inverted torches. Its roof is often a monolithic cross-gable. But what truly distinguishes the French-Creole sarcophagus tomb is its acroteria. Nearly every example of sarcophagus tomb carved and built by a French-Creole stonecutter is distinguished by its Neoclassical acanthus-leaf acroteria. The shape became so iconic that it was repeated by some vernacular tomb builders into shapes in brick and stucco. French-Creole sarcophagus tombs were built by craftsmen like Paul Hyppolyte Monsseaux and Florville Foy. They were designed by J.N.B. de Pouilly and, in one case, Italian-born Pietro Gualdi. For French-Creole families upriver from New Orleans, they were built by Charles Crampon. |
A curious exception of this divide is the van Benthuysen tomb in Lafayette Cemetery No. 1. Built around 1866 by Irish-born James Hagan, the tomb is a remarkably ornate structure filled with ornamental letter-work, interlocking geometric designs on the pediments of its cross-gable roof, and striking relief-carved inverted torches – all built by a non-French stonecutter in a primarily non-French cemetery.
The Anglo-American Sarcophagus Tomb The French-Creole variety of New Orleans sarcophagus tomb has been studied by scholars and admired by visitors. The Anglo-American variety, however, tends to gain less attention. Almost never adorned with acroteria, the Anglo-American New Orleans sarcophagus tomb appears much as if a New England chest tomb were stretched upward and elongated to allow for above-ground burial. Anglo-American sarcophagus tombs, like their French sisters, are typically clad in marble. These marble panels are often ornamented with recessed and bordered rectangular fields, or alternatively scored to resemble stacked stone or ashlar. Their roofs are nearly always flat and often support a base for an ornamental sculpture – a draped urn or a symbolic figure like Faith or Grief. |
These sarcophagus tombs were built by stonecutters who had roots in either American New Orleans culture or the Northeast United States. They were built by Anthony Barret (1803-1873), a German-born stonecutter who started his career in Albany, New York. They were built by D.F. Simpson, a stonecutter and builder who had strong business ties to New England.[8] They were built by James Hagan, father-and-son builders John and George Stroud, Horace Blakesley, and J. Frederick Birchmeier. All of these builders were either American by birth or otherwise non-French-extracted (Irish in Hagan’s case, German in Birchmeier’s). They played off of one another and off of the basic prototype of the New Orleans sarcophagus tomb (and its predecessor, the English-extracted chest tomb). For Barret and Lafayette Cemetery No. 1’s first sexton Phil Harty, it meant placing “wicket-shaped” acroteria on their monumental parapets. For the Strouds, it was much more a matter of adapting the general shape of a New England-style box tomb to suit above-ground burial. And yet as each gained his own style, they still managed to copy one another. |
A visitor to Lafayette Cemetery No. 1 will likely remember the Garner tomb. It stands on a quadruple lot at the end of an aisle and rises to nearly twenty feet tall. It is entirely clad in marble with ashlar-scored walls, a Classical cornice with dentils, and acanthus-leaf cornicework. Its roof is flat. Atop this roof rises a rectangular base ornamented with a floral swag and a draped urn sculpture. The tomb, most likely built around 1868, is signed by its carvers: Birchmeier & Simpson.
Across town in St. Louis Cemetery No. 3, a visitor may round the corner to find themselves seeing double. The Schinkel tomb, likely built around 1869, is nearly identical. Its dentils, scored sides, and draped urn are exactly the same. The Schinkel tomb, however, bears a cross on its urn base and has the additional lovely ornamentation of sculptural panels on its primary façade. It’s signer: J. Frederick Birchmeier.
Reading the New Orleans Cemetery Landscape
The New Orleans sarcophagus tomb was most prominent in New Orleans cemeteries from the 1830s to around 1870. After the Civil War, new American architectural styles found their way into the cities of the dead: Gothic Revival, Italianate, and varieties of late-19th century Neoclassicism. The time of the sarcophagus had come and gone and left its mark.
Like any study of larger elements in New Orleans cemetery landscapes, a closer look at the sarcophagus tomb brings to mind so many important undercurrents. The nature of the cemetery to be built upon, lot by lot, tomb by tomb, in each community in its own specific way means not only that each tomb is important to the cemetery’s history, but also that repeated motifs and styles like the sarcophagus tomb are significant as a group.
The loss of Girod Street Cemetery was not only one massive loss of a single cemetery, but also an injury to the significance of cemeteries like Cypress Grove, in which similar architecture thrived in different ways. The loss of the Walker-Behan tomb is a loss to the Garner and Schinkel tombs because that significant aspect of their importance is wiped away. The landscape of each cemetery has its own language with myriad translations and a great deal of static that must be cleared away to properly understand them for what they are. In that spirit, we close with a gallery of so many other tombs that bear relationships to one another that may be overlooked:
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[2] Ann Merritt Masson, “The Mortuary Architecture of Jacques Nicolas Bussiere de Pouilly,” Tulane University Thesis, 1992, 48-49.
[3] Maxine T. Wachenheim, “The Stylistic Development of Tombs in the Cemeteries of New Orleans,” Southwestern Louisiana Journal 3 (Fall 1959), 264-266.
[4] Philippe Aries, The Hour of Our Death (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981), 203-206. In his chapter “Tombs and Epitaphs,” Aries discusses the separation of the body from the tomb itself and its relationship to levels of anonymity in death. He points out a shift in which the “cultural unity” of the tomb and the body was destroyed by the thirteenth century and interprets this shift as a replacement of the sarcophagus with the coffin.
[5] Frederick E. Winter, “The Study of Greek Architecture,” American Journal of Archaeology
Vol. 88, No. 2 (Apr., 1984), 103.
[6] David Charles Sloane, The Last Great Necessity: Cemeteries in American History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 49.
[7] Masson, 16.
[8] “Rockland Lime,” Times-Picayune, November 22, 1866, 5.