Lafayette Cemetery No 1

A family name can outlast everyone who once answered to it.

At Lafayette Cemetery No. 1, those names remain on the tombs. Behind the walls in New Orleans’s Garden District, paths divide the burial ground into quarters, forming a small city within the larger one. Here, the addresses belong to the dead.

The cemetery was established in 1833, when this district belonged to the separate city of Lafayette. Its early history soon became inseparable from yellow fever. Epidemics returned again and again, sending victims to a burial ground that had barely begun its own existence. German and Irish immigrants were among those buried here; the cemetery preserves part of the history of the people who made their homes in nineteenth-century New Orleans.