Architecture of the New Orleans Sarcophagus Tomb

How were some of New Orleans' most beautiful tombs designed, and why?

Detail of the Barelli tomb, St. Louis Cemetery No. 2 (Photo by Emily Ford)

The architecture of New Orleans cemeteries is as diverse and varied as the neighborhoods in which the cemeteries are set.  On one end of town, St. Vincent de Paul Cemetery grew from a peaceful field in the 1830s into a florid, tightly-packed garden cemetery full of Spanish and Italian inscriptions by the 1860s.  Far uptown, the Americans built Lafayette Cemetery No. 1 from a below-ground graveyard into a little city of stone tombs in the same period.  Between the two of them, the French-Creole cemeteries St. Louis No. 1 housed several generations of architecture within its walls decades before either Lafayette No. 1 nor St. Vincent de Paul were even conceived of.[1]
 
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 Benjamin Toledano tomb, built around 1860, Lafayette Cemetery No. 1 (Photo by Emily Ford)

Classical Origins
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.  

An ancient Greek sarcophagus (Wikimedia Commons)

Greco-Roman sarcophagi were richly adorned with carvings or paintings of the deceased’s life, mythology, or epic stories.  In this way, they were meant for public display in burial grounds, funereal avenues, and even public places.  They were a means through which the living interacted with the dead, and they had the aesthetics to prove it.

Sarcophagus tomb of Caius Vibius Marianus, often mistakenly referred to as "Nero's tomb," ancient Rome. From a print in an 1815 book on Roman architecture. (Wikimedia Commons)

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.

Rediscovering Classical Design
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.

Sixteenth-century tomb of Sir John Salusbury, St. Marcella's Church, Denbigh, Wales (Wikimedia Commons)

The revival of the Classical Greco-Roman sarcophagus was spurred not only by a new desire to create beauty in cemetery landscapes.  It was kindled by the rediscovery of its original form.  In the late 18th and early 19th century, a renewed interest in Greek and Roman design led architects, artists, and historians back to their source.  In the 1750s, the original Greek ornamental orders were rediscovered and published by two architects, one Scottish and one British.  Half a century later, the Napoleonic Wars would both bring heightened understanding of Classical art on the continent and, conversely, stymie its spread to artists and architects outside France.  These new discoveries led to the rise of Neoclassical architecture: an architectural period in which the designs and order of ancient Greece and Rome were repeated in public and private architecture on both sides of the Atlantic.[5]

​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] 

Le monument Aux victimes de juin 1848, Pere Lachaise Cemetery (Wikimedia Commons)

On the other side of the country, New Orleans was even more newly American.  Incorporated into the United States with the Louisiana Purchase in 1806 and ratified into statehood in 1812, Louisiana remained deeply French in its culture.  It was the divide between French and American that would create two distinct sarcophagus tomb styles in the cities of the dead.

"Harvard Hill" at Mount Auburn Cemetery, from an 1847 print (Harvard University Library)

Tomb of Joseph Lewis, built around 1836, Laurel Hill Cemetery (Historic American Building Survey)

Two Sides of Town
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. 

The Foucher tomb (foreground), designed around 1836 by J.N.B. de Pouilly, St. Louis Cemetery No. 2 (Photo by Emily Ford)

From these origins came the sarcophagus tomb in two separate varieties – the French-Creole and the Anglo-American, primarily built between the 1840s and the 1860s.  Unlike the “false” sarcophagi of European cemeteries and churches, the New Orleans sarcophagus tomb functions in the same manner as any other New Orleans tomb.  It receives human remains through a frontal opening which holds one or two vaults.  The remains are interred above ground within the walls of the tomb and enclosed by a stone (usually marble) tablet.  In this way, the sarcophagus has travelled through the centuries to return to its original function.
 
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.

Jaquet family tomb, built around 1854 (unknown builder), St. Louis Cemetery No. 2 (Photo by Emily Ford)

Vernacular tombs constructed in the 1860s with a stylized, implied acroteria shape, Lafayette Cemetery No. 1 (Photo by Emily Ford)

Compared to Anglo-American sarcophagus tombs, French-Creole sarcophagus tombs were Continental, somewhat exotic, and slightly more creative in the license taken with ornament, sculpture, and even the general silhouette the tomb cast on the cemetery.  This could be cultural in nature, a result of the enormous body of influential work brought to New Orleans be de Pouilly, or simply a matter of aesthetics. 
 
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.  

van Benthuysen tomb, built in the 1860s by James Hagan, Lafayette Cemetery No. 1 (Photo by Emily Ford)

While French-Creole sarcophagus tombs are found in the cemeteries that correspond to their Franco-Catholic community (mostly St. Louis Cemetery No. 2 and St. Louis Cemetery No. 3), Anglo-American sarcophagus tombs likewise followed their own ilk.  They are found in Cypress Grove Cemetery, the first true garden-style rural cemetery in New Orleans.  They are found in Lafayette Cemetery No. 1 in their own variations.  And they were well-represented in the Protestant Girod Street Cemetery, which was demolished in 1957.  

Stearns family tomb, built around 1863 by Birchmeier & Simpson, Lafayette Cemetery No. 1 (Photo by Emily Ford)

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.

If French-Creole sarcophagus tombs are denoted by their acroteria, Anglo-American sarcophagus tombs can be identified by their dentils.  This may be a derivation from the dentil-rich Federalist architecture many of their creators may have known in the northern United States.  The tendency of Anglo-American sarcophagus tombs to be both repeated and rich with dentils is beautifully highlighted by three near-identical tombs in three separate New Orleans cemeteries.  

Aisle in Girod Street Cemetery in 1942 (State Library of Louisiana)

Garner, Schinkel, and Walker-Behan
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.

Garner tomb, Lafayette Cemetery No. 1 (Photo by Emily Ford)

Schinkel tomb, St. Louis Cemetery No. 3 (Photo by Emily Ford)

Approximately two miles away, it was once possible to see a third sister in this group of triplets.  The Walker-Behan tomb’s dentils, scored marble cladding, and draped urn sculpture once sat at the end of an aisle in Greenwood Cemetery.  It is possible that it had the same builder as the Garner and Schinkel tombs – it was likely built in 1871.  However, its collapse in recent years has made such a determination unlikely.

Walker-Behan tomb, Greenwood Cemetery (Photo by Firemen's Charitable Benevolent Association)

These three tombs are a remarkable insight into the work and career of J. Frederick Birchmeier (1833-1889), but he has yet to be studied in-depth.  In this context, the repeated function of the sarcophagus tomb, especially in its versatile Anglo-American variety, is well-highlighted in the case of these three.  They cause one to wonder how many more were once present in the New Orleans landscape.
 
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:

View in Girod Street Cemetery with tomb in foreground, around 1864. McPherson, Oliver & Co., photographers (LSU Special Collections)

John Davidson tomb, Cypress Grove Cemetery (Photo by Emily Ford)

Tomb of Pascalis de la Barre, built around 1844 by P.H. Monsseaux, St. Louis Cemetery No. 2 (Photo by Emily Ford)

Sumpter-Turner tomb, built around 1867, Lafayette Cemetery No. 1 (Photo by Emily Ford)

Tomb of Francois Joseph Lefebvre, died 1820, Pere Lachaise Cemetery, Paris (Wikimedia Commons)

Sewell Tomb, built 1860s, Lafayette Cemetery No. 1 (Photo by Emily Ford)

Felix de Armas tomb, built around 1839, St. Louis Cemetery No. 2 (Photo by Emily Ford)

Perkins family tomb, built around 1861 by George Stroud, Cypress Grove Cemetery (Photo by Emily Ford)

Avery family tomb, built 1840s by John Stroud & Co., Cypress Grove Cemetery (Photo by Emily Ford)

Dufour (foreground) and Schinkel (background) tombs, St. Louis Cemetery No. 3 (Photo by Emily Ford)

​[1] Special thanks to Jonathan Kewley for his advice regarding English cemetery architecture and helping to shape this article.
​[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.