Holt Cemetery (New Orleans, Louisiana)

 cemetery, place with historical importance

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Owned by the City of New Orleans, the Holt Cemetery was established in 1897 as a potter’s field for the poor. The agreement with the city is the following: For the $450 cost of each burial, each funeral plot is free for a family to use as long as they want and as long as the holders maintain their own plot. These days that maintenance requirement is not being enforced. Just as multiple burials are commonplace in the more distinctive above ground mausoleums, such as Metairie Cemetery, they are likewise the norm for the below-ground burial sites in the Holt. A multiple burial is allowed after one year plus a day following the preceding burial. Because the water table in New Orleans is high, i.e. close to the surface of the land, most of New Orleans’ deceased are interred in above-ground tombs. The Holt Cemetery is an exception to this standard. To bury the dead in this cemetery, grave diggers only dig 4 ½ feet down, thus avoiding the high water table. In its way, the Holt is just as fascinating as the better known cemeteries of New Orleans.

As you enter this graveyard through a ramshackle iron fence, your sweeping view of the cemetery will likely give you the impression of a grim forgotten burial waste land. There is no formal landscaping here at this time; bare dirt, mud clumps, and choking yellow weeds carpet this environment. Well and poorly tended plots intermingle. A narrow ditch of green water stretches the length of the Holt. Sometimes a bone works its way out of the ground as graves are re-dug for a second, third, or more burial in the same site. A few old oaks provide some shady relief from the heat of a summer day. As you walk through this burial ground, you may at times be saddened by the state of disrepair here, but you also may be pleasurably surprised by the creativity, personality, and love revealed in the unique designs of the grave sites.