In Katrina’s Wake: An Image of New Orleans’ Cities of the Dead
There’s a great article in the July/August 2006 Archaeology Magazine on the damage Katrina did to New Orleans. You can view a great picture of some of the damage that the Buras cemetery sustained on their website.
New Orleans cemeteries are referred to as Cities of the Dead because of their above-ground tombs. According to ExperienceNewOrleans.com
New Orleans has always respected the dead, but this isn’t the reason the tombs of our departed loved ones are interred above ground. Early settlers in the area struggled with different methods to bury the dead. Burial plots are shallow in New Orleans because the water table is high. Dig a few feet down, and the grave becomes soggy, filling with water. The casket will literally float. You just can’t keep a good person down!
The early settlers tried by placing stones in and on top of coffins to weigh them down and keep them underground. Unfortunately, after a rainstorm, the rising water table would literally pop the airtight coffins out of the ground. To this day, unpredictable flooding still lifts an occasional coffin out of the ground in those areas generally considered safe from flooding and above the water table.
Shannon Lee Dawdy, assistant professor at the University of Chicago, worked with FEMA from October-December 2005 to record the damage done to the city’s 20 National Historic Register Districts. In the article, she reflects on both Katrina’s destruction and the numerous other disasters in New Orleans’ past – 6 major hurricanes and floods, two major fires, and 3 yellow fever and cholera epidemics – and how after each, New Orleans rebuilt.
In 1722, just after the first French buildings were constructed, New Orleans experienced a major hurricane. Le Blond de La Tour, the city’s first engineer, saw it as a rebuilding opportunity, saying
“All these buildings were old and provisionally built, and not a single one was in the alignment of the new city and thus would have had to be demolished.”
Interestingly, most of the buildings that make up the French Quarter were constructed in the Spanish colonial (1769-1803) and American periods (post 1803). About 80% of the French structures burned to the ground with a devastating fire of 1788.
For more info on Katrina’s effect on New Orleans’ cemeteries, visit SaveOurCemeteries.org
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Category: New Orleans
