Why New Orleans Buries Its Dead Above Ground

Visitors to New Orleans are told, on nearly every tour, that the dead are buried above ground because the city sits below sea level and coffins would float. It is a good story, and the truth is more interesting.

Is the water table really the reason?

Only partly. The Preservation Resource Center of New Orleans calls the idea that residents must bury above ground because a six-foot grave would hit the water table mostly incorrect. The city’s first cemetery, St. Peter Street, opened in 1725 under French rule, and bodies were buried in the ground there for decades, according to Frommer’s. A National Register of Historic Places document on Louisiana’s tombs states the custom is Spanish in origin and came to Louisiana while the colony was under Spanish rule between 1762 and 1800, noting that the same kind of above-ground tombs are found in Spain and in other former Spanish colonies such as Puerto Rico. The Society of Architectural Historians describes the tombs as reflecting the city’s French and Spanish heritage and its high water table, with their continued use probably a result of periodic flooding.

So: the custom came from the Mediterranean, where above-ground vaults were common; the wet ground made it practical; and floods that did occasionally lift coffins kept New Orleanians committed to it.

When did it start?

With St. Louis Cemetery No. 1. When St. Peter Street filled, the Spanish governing council created a new cemetery by royal decree in August 1789, behind the Charity Hospital on what is now Basin Street, according to Save Our Cemeteries. It was in a swamp and constantly threatened by flooding. The first above-ground tombs there were built by 1804 and were common by 1818, according to Wikipedia’s history, and the custom was embraced by the French population and later by Americans. In the 1820s, when the city needed to bury large numbers of people of modest means, cemeteries added rows of wall vaults, stacked like ovens, which the French called fours.

A later rule sealed the pattern: when burials inside the city were restricted for health reasons, an exemption allowed them to continue in existing cemeteries only in above-ground tombs and vaults, according to a local history site.

How does a family tomb work?

By reuse. A typical tomb has one or two vaults above and a caveau, a pit or lower chamber, beneath. A body is sealed into a vault in its casket. After a year and a day, by custom and cemetery rule, matching the traditional year of mourning, the vault may be opened for the next family member: what remains of the first is moved down into the caveau, the casket pieces are removed, and the new casket goes in, according to Frommer’s. The heat of a New Orleans summer in a sealed brick vault does most of the work. If two family members die within a year, one rests in a rented temporary vault until the period has passed. The Preservation Resource Center notes families can rent a wall vault, an “apartment,” when their own tomb is full. One tomb can hold a family for generations, which in a crowded city on wet ground was the point.

Who owns the cemeteries?

Many are Catholic. The Archdiocese of New Orleans owns 13 of the city’s cemeteries, including the three St. Louis cemeteries (1789, 1823, 1854), according to a local television report. The French population in the mid-1800s wanted stylish tombs like those in Père Lachaise in Paris, and the result is the “cities of the dead”: rows of neoclassical tombs along paths laid out like streets, with the elaborate tombs of French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish benevolent societies. St. Louis No. 1 is said to hold the voodoo practitioner Marie Laveau and is still used for a few burials a year.

Can you visit?

St. Louis No. 1 and Lafayette No. 1 restrict access, with entry by registered tour or a family pass, after years of vandalism, according to local sources. Save Our Cemeteries, a nonprofit founded in the 1970s when wall vaults were crumbling and threatened with demolition, runs tours and uses the fees for restoration. Most other cemeteries in the city are open.

Is this unique to New Orleans?

The custom isn’t, but the concentration is. A tourism site puts New Orleans’ share of above-ground burials at about 90 percent, the highest of any American city. Elsewhere in the United States, mausoleums and lawn crypts offer the same above-ground option as a choice rather than a norm; see mausoleums, lawn crypts, and family estates. And for the other New Orleans funeral tradition visitors ask about, see why New Orleans funerals have jazz.

This is a history article. Figures such as the number of people buried at a site are estimates that vary between sources, and visiting rules change; check the site’s official page before planning a visit.