Metairie Cemetery is one of the famous burial grounds in New Orleans, Louisiana. Its history as a cemetery began after the American Civil War, and it became the final resting place for many Confederate officers and soldiers along with other famous individuals from other decades.
Situated on high ground called Metairie Ridge which bordered Bayou Metairie, the site was originally developed as a track for horse racing. In 1838, the New Orleans Canal and Banking Company allowed Colonel James Garrison and Richard Adams to purchase the land and organized a jockey club. The following year the Spring Meeting at the Metairie Course lasted for six days with high stakes races. Richard Ten Broeck officially founded The Metairie Jockey Club in 1848. Racing continued and local newspapers carried the announcements of upcoming events and the results. Some of the most famous races occurred in 1854 and 1855 with champion horses Lexington and Lecomte on the track.
As the American Civil War began in the spring of 1861, Metairie’s horse racing came to a temporary close, and the track and grounds transformed to Camp Moore, a Confederate camp. By May 1862, Flag Officer David Farragut and General Benjamin Butler captured and occupied New Orleans. However, Confederate soldiers from New Orleans and other parts of Louisiana continued fighting—many in the Army of Tennessee and Army of Northern Virginia—until the close of the war in 1865.
The Metairie Jockey Club revived after the Civil War but set its course for destruction when it refused membership to Charles T. Howard, a local who had made his fortune by starting the Louisiana State Lottery in 1868. Offended, Howard promised that someday the race grounds would become a cemetery. Within a few years, the club went bankrupt, the land was sold, and Metairie Cemetery established by charter in 1872. Architect Benjamin Morgan Harrod created the cemetery’s design, and Central Avenue follows the curving oval of the original racecourse. Spacious, well-kept grounds and accessible avenues through the cemetery were part of the original design, following the changes to cemetery design taking place in the eastern United States in the mid-19th Century.
Many other burial grounds pre-dated Metairie Cemetery, but the cemetery built on the racetrack would be destined to be one of New Orleans’ most famous necropolises. Since European colonial settlement in the New Orleans area, cemeteries had been evolving in the Crescent City. Driven by geography and cultural practices, above ground, brick tombs became the standard for burials by the 1820s. In the mid-1800s, New Orleans tombs reflected the cultural changes toward death and elaborately decorated tomb exteriors honored and memorialized the families resting there. Tombs became a statement of wealth, prestige and memory, and these graves became individualized as personal memorials for families with means. Social societies—like the Odd Fellows, Fireman’s Charitable & Benevolent Organization, the Masons, and the Protective Order of the Elk— created tombs, paying collectively for a final resting place for their members. Fallen Confederate soldiers or Confederate veterans who died in the years after the Civil War were sometimes buried together in collective tombs with a monument above or nearby.
Part of the new cemetery landscape in New Orleans during the Reconstruction Era and beyond, Metairie Cemetery had room for elaborate tombs and monuments along with the new prestige. It became the final resting place for several former Confederate generals and many Confederate veterans. Generals Pierre G.T. Beauregard, John Bell Hood and Richard Taylor are among the Confederate officers buried at Metairie Cemetery. Two necropolis monuments to the Louisiana soldiers in the Army of Tennessee and the Army of Northern Virginia are within the cemetery’s boundaries with statues of Albert S. Johnston and “Stonewall” Jackson rising representatively over the veterans’ burial places. (Neither Johnston nor Jackson are buried in Metairie Cemetery, but are represented in the monuments as their role as commanders of Louisiana troops during the Civil War.)
On February 22, 1880, veterans of the Washington Artillery gathered in Metairie Cemetery to dedicate a monument to their Confederate unit’s memory. The monument sits on a large dirt mound, but—unlike the Army of Tennessee or Army of Northern Virginia monuments—no veterans are buried beneath the artillery monument.
One of Metairie Cemetery’s most memorable days in connection to Civil War memory was in December 1889. Former president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, died of illness while passing through New Orleans. An estimated 200,000 people paid their respects as his body lay in state at the City Hall. On December 11, 1889, Davis’ remains were temporarily interred at Metairie Cemetery during a large funeral. His family made it clear that they would choose a final resting place and his burial in New Orleans was only temporary. Varina Davis, the former president’s widow, eventually selected Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, Virginia, to be his permanent burial site, and in 1893, Jefferson Davis’ remains were transferred with ceremonies from the Crescent City to the Old Dominion.
Through the decades, Metairie Cemetery Association worked to improve the practicality and landscape beauty. In 1895-96 they undertook a large project to improve roadways and drain some of the adjacent lakes, reclaiming land and expanding the cemetery. A local newspaper offered its praise of the project and the progress made at Metairie Cemetery:
“One by one, along the crest of the grass-fringed ridge, grew up the silent little houses of the dead, until from being a few years back, a mere colony of timid graves, Metairie Cemetery is today a great broad city of the dead, with grand mausoleums, stately monuments and solemn sepulchers.” (The Times-Democrat, February 3, 1896)
Today, Metairie Cemetery is the burial place for more than 9,000 deceased, many of local New Orleans prominence and historic legacy. At least nine governors of Louisiana, seven mayors of New Orleans, dozens of Mardi Gras Carnival kings, famous entertainers and sports heroes rest at Metairie Cemetery. In 1991, the cemetery was added to the National Register of Historic Places, adding more prestige to this famous burial ground.
