CEMETERY SPOTLIGHT – METAIRIE CEMETERY

Metairie Cemetery, located within the city limits of New Orleans, is the final resting place of many notable residents from the city’s past. The ornate tombs within the cemetery’s gates are an exquisite example of New Orleans’ 19th and 20th-century funerary architecture. Before being incorporated as a cemetery in 1872, the land was home to the Metairie Race Course, established in 1838, and became a prosperous race track during the antebellum decades. By the mid-1800s, New Orleans became well-known as a city for horse racing. However, with the onset of the Civil War, that came to an abrupt end.

The land the race track once stood on would become Camp Moore, a Confederate camp that would be used until the Union captured New Orleans between April 25 – May 1, 1862. After the camp became abandoned and the war had concluded, Charles T. Howard, a native Baltimorian who relocated to New Orleans, vowed to turn the grounds into a cemetery. His reasoning was that he had been refused membership to the Metairie Jockey Club before the war. Howard’s threat came to fruition with the land converted into 65 acres of internment space, where, in 1885, he would become an eternal resident of this now sprawling necropolis after being killed in a carriage accident.

Metairie Cemetery was added to the National Register of Historic Places on December 6, 1991, and has become a well-frequented destination for several reasons. Some visit for the architecture; others to see if they can communicate with ghostly apparitions of the past; others to visit and pay their respects to the resting places of several notable politicians, entrepreneurs, and authors that once made up part of New Orleans’ eclectic population. According to the site Save Our Cemeteries, “Metairie Cemetery holds the graves of over 9,000 people, amongst those many distinctive persons and families.”[1] The people buried within the cemetery’s stone crypts have left different legacies ranging from notable contributions to literature, government, and culinary arts to others whose names will forever be synonymous with dubious events of history. One such name that will resonate with readers of this blog is that of author Anne Rice. The lives of these former residents have left an everlasting mark on the city’s culture, which residents and visitors can still learn from today to better understand the area’s past and the present-day culture in New Orleans.   

One such former resident is Mary Deubler, known to locals as Josie Arlington. Arlington would evolve from a young prostitute in her early years to a businesswoman who owned several properties. This included an upscale brothel and her mansion. Many of her life events, including her death, were shrouded in lore and controversy. In her book Josie Arlington’s Storyville: The Life and Times of a New Orleans Madam, Marita Woywod Crandle wrote, “Her life ended as unusually as it began with a strange and questionable love affair, a contested will, an elaborate tomb, and a ghost story.”[2]  Upon her death in 1914, Arlington was laid to rest in an elegantly designed tomb in Metairie Cemetery. The exquisitely adorned tomb features two large doors and a bronze statue of a young woman posturing as if she were entering the tomb. Soon after her body was entombed, it was exhumed and reburied in an undisclosed part of the cemetery. Her family sold the tomb to Jose A. Morales, a New Orleans attorney. Today the tomb is at the root of a few ghost stories that countless members of the New Orleans community retell as a small piece of their collective culture.

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CITATIONS:

[1] “Cemeteries of New Orleans,” Save Our Cemeteries, accessed July 10, 2023, Metairie Cemetery : Cemeteries : Cemeteries of New Orleans : Save Our Cemeteries.

[2] Marita Woywod Crandle, Josie Arlington’s Storyville: The Life and Times of a New Orleans Madam (The History Press: Charleston, SC, 2020), Introduction.