Monday Cemetery Blogging

Sisters of Mercy community tomb in St. Joseph's Cemetery.

St. Joseph's is located at Washington and Loyola Avenues, in Central City. It's NOT a good neighborhood for sightseeing, keep that in mind and exercise Urban Common Sense.

In New Orleans, the families that own plots in Catholic cemeteries tend to follow ethnic lines. The Creoles in the St. Louis cemeteries, the Irish in the three St. Patrick cemeteries, the Italians in St. Vincent de Paul, and the Germans in St. Joseph. St. Joseph's was opened in 1854, founded by the German Orphan Asylum Association. In 1857, St. Mary's Assumption parish on Constance and Josephine decided to build a huge new church. They dismantled the old, wood-frame church (that's really just a chapel in size), and moved it, board by board, to St. Joseph Cemetery, where it was used as a burial chapel. In the 1990s, author Anne Rice bought the old Redemptorist residence on Prytania and Third Streets in the Garden District. The people of the Garden District had been going to Mass there for decades. Not wanting to simply re-join St. Mary's Parish, the Garden District's Catholics received permission to relocate the burial chapel to an empty lot on Jackson Avenue, between Prytania and St. Charles. So, now there are once again three churches in the same physical parish, just like the 19th Century. St. Mary's is the main parish church now. It was originally for the Germans. St. Alphonsus across the street on Constance was for the Irish community. The French had a small chapel on Jackson that burned in the 1880s that served the very small Garden District Creole community.

The tomb in the photo is typical of "society" tombs throughout the city. This one is for an order of nuns, the Sisters of Mercy.