Shanna Riley March 27th, 2007
Just beyond the South Gates of Louisiana State University on a small, otherwise unnoteworthy little road named Oxford, sits the remnants of an old Baton Rouge burial ground.
Besides being Baton Rouge's oldest cemetery, Highland Cemetery also holds some of the city's earliest important figures; men and women who helped found what is today Louisiana's capital city.
Some of the headstones here are so old as to be written in Cajun French, and some have not been legible at all for many years. Plaques adorn the old, crumbling brick walls found throughout the cemetery; detailing the lives and deeds of some of it's most influential inhabitants. The cemetery is listed as a Louisiana public park and historic site and is managed by the Louisiana Historical Society.
The plaque outside the cemetery gate reads:
In use since 1815. Interred here, among others, are Armand Allard Duplantier, Sr. (1753-1827), French officer who served with Lafayette in the American Revolution; his wife, Constance Rochon Joyce (1766-1841); and Pierre Joseph Favrot (1749-1824), officer under Bernardo Galvez in the 1779 expedition against the British fort at Baton Rouge and commandant here 1779-1781.
For all this, though, perhaps the most intriguing feature of Highland Cemetery is the fact that more than half of its graves have been lost to time and development.
The cemetery itself was lost until new development in the area uncovered the burial grounds - enshrouded by years of dense brush. In 1968, the Louisiana Historical Society began the task of saving the cemetery; a restoration project that was completed in 1978. A monument was erected listing the hundreds of names of people buried in the cemetery whose graves were never found.
The monument consists of a beautiful, black iron gazebo that stands across from the cemetery gate. Underneath it's domed arch are an iron bench and a large plaque, bolted into the circle of concrete that holds the gazebo, that lists the names of those whose graves in Highland Cemetery have been lost over time.
Some graves still stand. Though a few are in their originating spots, others have been put back as close as can be estimated to their original location using old records. One such that still stands where it was originally erected over one hundred years ago is the grave of fourteen year-old Oscar Kleinpeter, who died in 1858. His tall headstone has a beautiful epitaph carved into it which reads:
He lived as lives a peaceful dove
He died as blossoms die
And now his spirit floats above
A seraph in the sky
However, the original cemetery - which was first used in 1815 - was much larger than the small swathe of land it covers now. Of the few headstones that still remain, hundreds have been lost to time and neglect. Houses in the area are, unfortunately, built upon the lost graves of Baton Rouge's earliest settlers.
To compensate for the missing graves and headstones, plaques have been erected around the cemetery that tell it's tale, and the stories of those that are interred there. What develops is a snapshot in time of Baton Rouge's early history.
The land that became Highland Cemetery was donated to the Catholic Church by George Garig, a German settler from Maryland. A plaque affixed to a concrete block reads:
This was in 1794-1825 the 800 arpent plantation of George Garig, a German settler from Maryland, "a resident of well known honesty and one of the most skilled builders of cotton gins and presses in this territory."Because families had been burying on this high spot for years, in 1819 he donated the one arpent graveyard under fence to the Catholic congregation. He was buried here himself in 1825. Cemetery was enlarged by later plantation owners, last burial in 1939. Restored 1976.
There are many such interesting stories and pieces of history to be found at Highland Cemetery.
One occupant of Highland Cemetery that has always fascinated me was Josephine Favrot, who was born in 1785 and died at the age of 51 in 1836; having never married. Her plaque reads:
Poetess, artist, writer. Fiancée of Lieut. Louis de Grand Pre, officer in command of the Spanish fort at Baton Rouge on the fateful night of its capture by West Floridians in 1810, and the only one receiving fatal wounds. She never married.
Josephine lost her fiancée and brother to violence, and a beautiful poem by her adorns a plaque on the brick wall behind her grave.
What pains we take in the acquisition of learning,
Of talents, which shall be buried in a grave,
That a little earth shall rob from a world
Which shall not retain even its memory!
At the last hour, virtues which we have practiced
Shall not survive us; all follows us in the eternal night,
All goes like us into oblivion.
What discouragement in the idea of nothingness
Of all that we have been.
How great our gratitude to the Supreme Being
Who has deigned to create in us an immortal soul
Which escapes the destruction of our whole being!
Oh my God! I thank you having given me a soul
Which shall outlive me,
For a soul capable of lifting itself up to you,
Which feels the benefits of Your favor,
And trusts in Your power for everything;
Virtue is not an empty name
When it is from You that its reward shall come.
WRITTEN BY JOSEPHINE FAVROT (1785-1836), whose fiance was killed in the capture of Baton Rouge fort in 1810 and whose brother was killed in a dual with sabres in 1822.
If not for the dedicated work of the Historical Society, Josephine's grave - already in ruinous condition - would have been lost forever.
A plaque near four overgrown brick tombs tells of Joseph Allard Duplantier and his three daughters, Lillie, Augustine, and Augusta, who were once buried in Highland Cemetery but whose remains were moved due to vandals. The plaque reads:
In 1920's when vandals raided their tombs, the remains of Joseph and daughters were reinterred in Catholic Cemetery on Main Street.
Joseph died in 1884, and two years later - in 1886 - all three of his "little daughters" died. I wondered, naturally, what had caused the three little girls to all die in the same year. Intriguingly, though, an anonymous poster, in 2003, left a photo on a listing for Daughter of Joseph Duplantier and wrote, only, "Died of Yellow fever" [sic].
The cemetery is a treasure trove of history; a nearly forgotten piece of days and people gone by.
