Hope Mausoleum

Located in the 4800 block of Canal Street, St. John’s was founded in 1867 by the St. John Evangelical Lutheran Congregation (the church is just down Canal Stree, on the downtown side). The ogirinal name of the cemetery was the First German Evangelical Lutheran St. John Cemetery.

St. John’s Cemetery was administered by St. John’s Luthern Church on Canal Street. The church ran into financial problems administering the cemetery, however. In the 1920s, the city paved Canal Street in front of the cemetery, and charged the cemetery for the costs of the street work.  This was a tax bill the congregation could not afford to pay, so the church agreed to sell the cemetery to the Huber family (Victor Huber being in the memorial business already and a member of the church). Huber paid the tax debt and maintained the name, but he made the cemetery a nonsectarian one.  This was an important distinction, since Catholic bishops had steadfastly refused to allow their priests to perform any rites in the Lutheran cemetery.

In 1931, the Hubers expanded the cemetery by opening Hope Mausoleum on the site, on the property in the back.  The mausoleum was expanded, and now it wraps around the cemetery proper.

Mausoleums tend to be uninteresting by nature; they’re rows of niches with no architectural distinction. This is the case in Hope, although there are a number of stained glass windows at the end of the hallways that depict various New Orleans scenes.

Girod Internments

The Girod Street Cemetery was opened in 1822, the first Protestant cemetery in New Orleans.  By the 1950s, the cemetery had fallen into such disrepair that it was neither a safe nor a dignified place. Girod Street was “deconsecrated” on January 4, 1957. Christ Church Cathedral (the owners of Girod Street) provided a crypt in Hope for those white famlies who chose to reinter their relatives there. There are 55 individual containers in this cypt for these families, as well as containers for the individuals identified by name on the marker.  These remains were removed from Girod Street and reinterred in Hope.  This tablet marks the crypt where they now rest.

(A side note, black families with relatives buried in Girod reinterred their loved ones in Providence Memorial Park.)

Comments are welcome: e-mail to comments@citiesofthedead.net

citiesofthedead.net is a production of Seashell Software.  ©1999-2003, Seashell Software.  All rights reserved.  Inquires should be made to the webmaster.