The Canal Street Cemeteries: A Landscape History, Part Three

Sunset behind tombs in Greenwood Cemetery. Photo by Emily Ford.

​This is Part Three in a multi-part blog series examining the landscape history of what is now the intersection of Canal Street and City Park Avenue.  From July to November 2017, construction will take place at this intersection to connect the Canal Streetcar to Canal Boulevard.  Find Part One here and Part Two here.
 
1852:  Greenwood Cemetery
By 1850 the terminus of Canal Street remained mostly undeveloped.  On each side of Canal approaching Bayou Metairie were the predominantly belowground Dispersed of Judah, St. Patrick’s, and Charity Hospital Cemeteries, each likely bounded by wooden fences.  Improvements like the Halfway House, the Toll House, and the walls of Odd Fellows Rest modestly framed the monumental entryway to Cypress Grove Cemetery.  Cypress Grove itself was more than a decade old and flourishing as a garden cemetery full of trees and landscape features – despite a fire in 1848 that destroyed many plantings.[1]
 
The Firemen’s Charitable Association had been quite successful in developing Cypress Grove, so much so that demand for lots overran supply.  In 1852, the FCA opened Greenwood Cemetery across Bayou Metairie from both Odd Fellows and Cypress Grove.  Its eastern boundary would adjoin Cypress Grove Cemetery No. 2, also known as Charity Hospital No. 2.
 
In some ways, Greenwood Cemetery would be a continuation of Cypress Grove – dedicated to the memorial of fallen firemen and stylistically influenced by Anglo-Protestant aesthetics over those of Creole New Orleaneans.  In fact, it’s likely no accident that Greenwood Cemetery shared its name with a famous garden cemetery in New York, founded in 1838. 

Detail of a 1851 bird's eye drawing of New Orleans by John Bachmann. The tree-lined street at the center of the image is Canal Street. As it extends toward Lake Pontchartrain, the rural character of the cemeteries area is evident. Image via Library of Congress.

However, Greenwood would not accommodate the landscape features and lofty architecture so well fostered by Cypress Grove.  Instead, the new Firemen’s cemetery would be organized in compact, neat rows that mirrored the kind of order seen in contemporary cemeteries like St. Louis Cemetery No. 3 on Esplanade Avenue (est. 1854).  A grand dedication ceremony like those seen at Cypress Grove and Odd Fellows Rest would not be held for Greenwood Cemetery.  This may have been the result of an almost immediate cholera and yellow fever epidemic following the cemetery’s opening.  The 1853 yellow fever epidemic would kill as many as 12,000 people in New Orleans, quickly making Greenwood a vital burial ground.
 
Unlike Cypress Grove or Odd Fellows Rest, Greenwood Cemetery was not enclosed with a masonry wall, but an iron fence.  This left the southern boundary of the cemetery visually open to the bayou that meandered in front of it.  The grassy space left room for display of more impressive monuments.  Decades would pass, however, before the most iconic monuments of Greenwood would appear.  The Confederate monument (1873), Firemen’s monument (1887), and Elk’s Lodge tumulus (1911) did not yet rise above the bayou.  Instead, one of the first monuments to be erected in Greenwood Cemetery would be that of two martyred firefighters.
 
On March 16, 1854, Daniel Woodruff and William McLeod responded to a fire on Magazine Street as members of Mississippi Fire Company No. 2.  In the blaze, a wall fell upon Daniel Woodruff and he was killed in action.  Later, William McLeod died of injuries sustained in the fire.[2] 

1854 Woodruff-McLeod tomb, Greenwood Cemetery. Photo by Emily Ford.

Exactly one year after the tragic fire, the FCA laid the cornerstone of the fallen men’s memorial tomb.  The Firemen traveled to Greenwood Cemetery in a procession to Metairie Ridge where the cornerstone was laid.  In Masonic tradition, the architect of the tomb, Sheppard Reynolds, presented the Grand Master of the FCA with a plumb, square, and level with which to test the cornerstone.  After it was pronounced level and plumb, the stone was anointed using vessels of corn, wine, and oil.  After an oratory, the procession retreated.[3]
 
The Woodruff-McLeod tomb, similar in style but not size to the Teutonia Lodge tomb, was completed by stonecutter and tomb builder Newton Richards (1805 – 1874), who also constructed the Irad Ferry monument.  Each arched loggia-like vault memorializes the life and service of Woodruff and McLeod.  Yet only one of the two martyrs are actually buried in this tomb.  When the time came to re-inter William McLeod in Greenwood his widow objected.  His body remained at Girod Street Cemetery.  It is unclear where McLeod may have been re-interred after the demolition of Girod Street Cemetery in 1957.[4]

Detail of Woodruff-McLeod epitaph, Greenwood Cemetery. Photo by Emily Ford.

Newton Richards had by 1859 constructed the Irad Ferry monument, the Woodruff-McLeod monument, dozens of other tombs in New Orleans cemeteries, and even the granite pedestal atop which the Andrew Jackson statue is mounted in Jackson Square.[5]  A man from New Hampshire who specialized in granite monuments, Richards was especially active in the Anglo-Northern associated cemeteries.  In 1859, he would once again shape the budding landscape of Greenwood Cemetery by erecting the memorial of former New Orleans mayor Abidel Daily Crossman in Greenwood Cemetery.
 
A.D. Crossman served four consecutive terms as mayor of New Orleans, weathering the city through natural disasters like Sauve’s Crevasse and the 1853 yellow fever epidemic.  He oversaw the re-joining of the city from three separate municipalities into one united city government, and local military response to the Mexican-American War.  Crossman was from Massachusetts and had long been a friend of the city’s firefighters – serving as a firefighter himself under Eagle Company No. 7.[6]  For Crossman, Richards erected a classical Doric column carved of granite and surmounted with an urn.  The granite die and stacked bases atop which the column sits are enclosed with cast iron fencing, the corners of which are each topped with cast iron flaming lamps.

1859 A.D. Crossman monument, erected by Newton Richards. Photo by Emily Ford.

The 1860s Egyptian Revival granite tomb of James A. Bass in Greenwood cemetery exemplifies some of Newton Richards' typical tombwork. Photo by Emily Ford.

The Locke tomb and column monument were erected in Greenwood Cemetery in the mid-1860s, also constructed by Newton Richards. Photo by Emily Ford.

The cemeteries at the end of Canal Street were tied not only by geography but, in some cases, mutual origins and culture, specifically that of Northern-born Americans.  For this reason, it is no surprise that stonecutters and tomb builders with similar backgrounds tended to concentrate their work in Cypress Grove, Greenwood, and Odd Fellows.  In fact, the first sexton of Greenwood Cemetery, Daniel Merritt, also served as sexton in Odd Fellows Rest.  Carved tablets signed by Merritt are found in all three cemeteries.[7]
 
Greenwood Cemetery greeted a peculiar new tomb construction in the 1860s – tombs built of brick and mortar but clad in cast-iron panels.  This style was not exclusive to Greenwood (Lafayette Cemetery No. 1 had the Karstendiek tomb by 1866, and Cypress Grove famously houses the Leeds cast-iron tomb), but Greenwood gathered the highest concentration of these unique structures.  Five of these tombs (Marks, Miltenberger, Summers, Pelton and Hetion) were identical catalog-order tombs from the ironwork firm of Wood, Miltenberger, and Company, which had a branch in New Orleans.  The Edwards tomb, also of cast iron, was a custom construction erected in 1861 across the aisle from the Woodruff and McLeod tomb.

1861 Edwards cast iron tomb in Greenwood Cemetery. Photo by Emily Ford.

Greenwood Cemetery has six cast-iron tombs produced by Wood & Miltenberger & Co., a branch of Wood & Perot Ironworks. The tombs were featured in the company's 1867 catalog (pictured above). At left, the Summers tomb is one of Greenwood's six catalog cast-irons.

1858:  Tememe Derech Cemetery
Jewish immigration to New Orleans continued through the first half of the nineteenth century.  Some Jews emigrated from France, Germany, and the contested territory of Alsace-Lorraine between the two countries.  By the 1850s, however, other Jewish people from Eastern Europe began to arrive, fleeing pogroms in their home countries.  In 1858, Polish Jews formed the Orthodox congregation of Tememe Derech (“The Right Way”).  This congregation was the first Eastern European Jewish congregation to construct a purpose-built synagogue, once on Carondelet Street.  Tememe Derech also established its own cemetery across Canal Street from Dispersed of Judah Cemetery, on what is now Botinelli Place.[8]
 
Tememe Derech was not the only Eastern European Jewish congregation in nineteenth century New Orleans.  Over time, other congregations formed and merged, and Tememe Derech itself merged with others in 1904 to form Beth Israel Congregation.  The new congregation constructed a synagogue on Carondelet Street and designed by Emile Weil.  This building is now the New Home Family Worship Center at 1616 Carondelet.[9]

1904 Beth Israel synagogue building, Carondelet Street near Euterpe Street. The building now houses the New Home Family Worship Center. Photo by Emily Ford, 2012.

As congregations formed and merged among Eastern European Jews in New Orleans, Tememe Derech’s original cemetery would become the burying ground for other congregations, namely Chevra Thilim and later Beth Israel.  In 1916, Beth Israel would construct a Metaher house (a traditional chapel for the cleansing of bodies) at the entrance to the Canal Street cemetery.  This structure was demolished in the 1960s.[10]

One section of the multi-congregation Jewish Cemetery off of Botinelli Place and Canal Street. Photo by Emily Ford.

The 1860s:  A Decade of Change
With the addition of Greenwood and Tememe Derech Cemeteries in the 1850s, the confluence of Canal Street, New Basin Canal, and Bayou Metairie had six cemeteries within its bounds.  In 1854, New Orleans City Park was founded.  Larger than New York’s Central Park and home to the largest concentration of old-growth live oak trees in the world, City Park would add to the character of this area as a place of diversion and rural retreat.  A portion of Bayou Metairie running through City Park would eventually be closed off to become a park lagoon.  Today, this lagoon is the last remaining vestige of Bayou Metairie.

The Peristyle pavilion in New Orleans City Park was constructed in 1907 and overlooks the last vestige of Bayou Metairie. Image via New Orleans City Park.

New Orleans as a city was growing in both population and urbanized area.  In 1861, the New Orleans City Railroad Company constructed a rail line extending up Canal Street from its foot at the Mississippi River all the way to Bayou Metairie, expanding access and development.  The next year, the second fraternal cemetery in the area would arrive when Masonic Cemetery No. 1 and 2 opened at Bienville Street and Bayou Metairie.
 
Despite steady development in the area, it would not escape the humbling effects of natural forces.  Metairie Ridge had escaped the flooding of Sauve’s Crevasse in 1849, but would not be so lucky in 1860, when both New Basin and Carondelet Canals overflowed their levies and flooded the area.[11]  Another crevasse in 1871 would inundate the cemeteries even more, when the New Basin Canal levy breached at the Halfway House, causing water to flow into the cemeteries.[12]
 
By 1862, additional railroad track was present running alongside Bayou Metairie to the Halfway House.  Through the Civil War and into the 1870s, New Orleans’ street grid would encroach toward the cemeteries.  Nearby City Park, home to the famous “dueling oaks,” would not be the only venue for such bouts.  In 1868, a duel between a Mr. “M” and a Mr. “G” was fought near the Halfway House with swords as the chosen weapon.  Although neither man died in the match, neighbors in the vicinity soon afterward requested a police station be placed at the Halfway House – a request that the city council granted.[13]

Map showing cemeteries present by 1870. Masonic Cemetery, Dispersed of Judah, St. John's, and Tememe Derech are added. The location of Cypress Grove on this map may not be correct. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

1867:  St. John Cemetery
Another cemetery would join the landscape of Canal Street in 1867.  Founded by German St. John Evangelical Lutheran Church, St. John Cemetery was the second Protestant cemetery in New Orleans (the first was Episcopal Girod Street Cemetery, founded 1822).  St. John Cemetery was owned and managed by the church through the nineteenth century and was religiously restricted.  Wrote Leonard Victor Huber, who later co-owned the cemetery with his family, under the church’s ownership “secret societies were not allowed to hold ceremonies in it, and Catholic priests were forbidden by their bishops to officiate services in it.”[14]
 
St. John Cemetery was managed by a sexton who lived on the grounds.  The small cemetery at Canal and Bernadotte Streets would develop over time into a typical New Orleans cemetery until the 1920s, when circumstances would transform it into a completely different type of cemetery.[15]

The Civil War
New Orleans was captured by Union forces in late April 1862, early in the Civil War.  The American Civil War was also a time in which the culture and practice of death changed nationwide.  Soldiers, accustomed to the concept of a “good death” instead died on battlefields, often buried where they fell. 
 
In New Orleans, bodies of both Union and Confederate soldiers were received, transported from elsewhere and buried in places like Cypress Grove Cemetery No. 2 and Chalmette Cemetery in St. Bernard Parish.  After the Civil War, questions of claiming and memorializing the dead dominated conversation.

"The Lost Found," Illustration from Harper's Weekly, February 1866, depicting a widow as she discovers the battlefield grave of her husband. Image via Library of Congress.

Cypress Grove Cemetery No. 2, also referred to as Charity Hospital Cemetery No. 2, received the remains of both Federal and Confederate soldiers.  In the 1870s, when the remains of Confederate soldiers were relocated from Chalmette Cemetery to Greenwood Cemetery, remains from other cemeteries including Cypress Grove No. 2 were reinterred in the same place.  This effort was headed by the Ladies Benevolent Association of New Orleans, who erected the Greenwood Confederate monument atop this mass grave of 600 soldiers in 1873.  The “Old Soldier’s Home,” established in 1866 by the State of Louisiana for Confederate veterans, also had a society tomb in Greenwood Cemetery by 1868.
 
Remains of Union soldiers were also removed from Cypress Grove No. 2, as well.  In the 1920s, as the old potter’s field was beginning to be redeveloped as a road and dumping ground, Federal soldiers were disinterred from Cypress Grove No. 2 and relocated to Chalmette National Cemetery. 

The Greenwood Confederate monument marks the point of relocation for 600 soldiers removed from other cemeteries. Erected in 1873 by the Ladies Benevolent Association. Photo by Emily Ford.

On All Saints’ Day, November 1, 1868, New Orleaneans observed the yearly tradition of decorating and visiting graves.  The New Orleans Republican offered a glimpse of the Canal Street cemeteries on this day, noting the “noble monuments” of Cypress Grove, and nodding to the society tombs of the Deutscher Louisiana Draymen Verein (now mostly demolished), and the New Orleans Typographical Union in Greenwood Cemetery.  Odd Fellows was described as well, “with its specious avenues bordered with trees and lined with the tombs of good and charitable men, is one of the most attractive of the homes of the dead.”[16]

The former society tomb of the Deutscher Louisiana Draymen Verein is mostly demolished, although the tomb pediment stone, carved by Anthony Barret, remains.

The rural cemeteries at Canal and City Park Avenue had matured into landscapes of marble, granite, limewash, and green landscaping.  Each cemetery enclosed by masonry walls, picket fences, or painted ironwork, they framed canal and bayou as carriages and barges passed through.  As much as the landscape had changed over three decades since the New Basin Canal opened, it was about to transform even further with the founding of an entirely new cemetery, the likes of which the city of New Orleans had yet to see.

Modern tombs in Greenwood Cemetery. Photo by Emily Ford.

​[1] Thomas O’Conner, editor, History of the Fire Department of New Orleans (New Orleans:  Thomas O’Conner, 1891), 75.
​[2] O’Conner, 84-85.
​[3] “Woodruff and McLeod Monument,” Daily Picayune, March 18, 1855.
[4] Huber et. Al., New Orleans Architecture, Vol. III:  The Cemeteries, 39.
​[5] “Inauguration of the Equestrian Statue of Andrew Jackson,” Daily Picayune, February 9, 1856, 2.
[6] O’Connor, 127.
​[7] “Firemen’s Charitable Association, Cypress Grove and Greenwood Cemeteries,” Daily Picayune, June 17, 1855; “Odd Fellows Rest,” Daily Crescent, January 21, 1862.
​[8] Catherine C. Kahn and Irwin Lachoff, Images of America:  The Jewish Community of New Orleans (Charleston, SC:  Arcadia Publishing, 2005), 24; The Goldring/Woldenberg Institute of Southern Jewish Life, “History of Orthodox Congregations in New Orleans.”  http://www.msje.org/history/archive/la/HistoryofOrthodoxCongregations.htm [Accessed September 10, 2017]
[9] Barry Stiefel and Emily Ford, The Jews of New Orleans and the Mississippi Delta:  A History of Life and Community Along the Bayou (Charleston, SC:  History Press, 2012), 47, 77-80.
​[10] Huber et. Al., New Orleans Architecture, Vol. III:  The Cemeteries, 22-23.
​[11] “Overflow of Canals,” Daily Crescent, October 4, 1860, 1.
[12] “The Last Great Flood:  Rear of the City Submerged,” New Orleans Republican, June 4, 1871, 1.
[13] “Dueling,” New Orleans Republican, May 30, 1868, 3; “To the Common Council of the City of New Orleans,” New Orleans Republican, May 31, 1868.
​[14] Huber, et. Al., New Orleans Architecture, Vol III:  The Cemeteries, 47-48.
[15] Ibid.
​[16] “All Saints Day,” New Orleans Republican, November 2, 1868, 1.