Have you ever walked through any of the cemeteries of New Orleans and noticed SOC on a few of the tombs? These particular placards are placed on tombs that are being restored by ‘Save Our Cemeteries’. Founded in December 1974, Save Our Cemeteries preserves and restores the historic cemeteries of New Orleans. This is no small feat in that there are 31 cemeteries in the city including the well-known Lafayette Cemetery No. 1 and St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 that many tourists visit every year.
Save Our Cemeteries wants to help preserve, protect and promote these historic cemeteries. In order to do this, they rely on tours, advocacy and education to help raise money for restoration of the tombs in the city. One such restoration project they worked on was the restoration of Marie Laveau’s tomb. This project cost $10,000 to complete and was finished in October, 2014.
Here are some of the ways Save Our Cemeteries has raised money to help preserve these beautiful cemeteries around the city:
- A Run through History 1 Mile & 5K which is held inside Metairie Cemetery.
- All Saints Soiree Gala
- Cemeteryscape (photography exhibit to raise awareness of cemeteries)
- Cemetery Tours through Lafayette Cemetery No. 1, St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 and a special tour through St. Louis Cemetery No. 2 (held on the fourth Sunday of the month)
- Lecture series on topics relating to the cemeteries which are held four times a year. Along with the lecture series, there’s a summer lecture that consists of several topics, speakers and is a day-long seminar
By no means, does this even scratch the surface on the many projects that Save Our Cemeteries has going on with these historic cemeteries. Along with these projects, there is research that’s ongoing regarding these tombs and the best ways to preserve and restore them to their former glory. You can’t expect to go to any tomb and scrub the paint or markers, if vandalized, or pressure wash it and hope to get it back to the way it once was. It takes a lot of hard work in restoring any of these tombs and one effective way is in using lime wash as part of the restoration process. They only restore abandoned tombs where no one is around to care for them and have not seen a burial in 50 years or longer. They do not restore every tomb in New Orleans since some of those still have relatives to care for them or the cemeteries are privately owned such as Greenwood Cemetery.
What will you do when you visit any of these cemeteries of New Orleans? Will you think twice when you see an SOC placard on one of these tombs? Will you think about all the research and restoration that goes into making any one of these tombs look the way they did before they started crumbling, decaying, marked up or painted because of weather or vandalism? Will you think about what you can do to help?
There are ways we can help Save Our Cemeteries preserve, protect and restore these historic cemeteries for future generations. We can become members of Save Our Cemeteries or make donations to help fund these tomb restoration projects. Another way would be volunteering our time to any one of the Save Our Cemeteries projects that is happening in New Orleans such as the vegetation removal that happened at Lafayette Cemetery No. 1 in mid 2014.
Don’t feel that you can’t do anything to help preserve any of these cemeteries because anyone can help restore them back to their former glory.
Click on this link to check out Save Our Cemeteries on ways you can help.
Cemeteries should be saved. We have spent many hours strolling through some beautiful cemeteries around the world.
Mark and Kate @vagrantsoftheworld recently posted…REVIEW Sea Star Spa Resort. Corn Island, Nicaragua
It was definitely an eye opener for me because I never knew there were people who gave of their time to help restore some of these tombs.
I feel the same way in that it has brought about an awareness of these cemeteries that I didn’t know of until I visited New Orleans.
I once did a cemetery tour in Dublin that reminds me a bit of this… they would take papers and a rock over the tomb stone and rub it so the paper has the engraving of the tomb stone! They said it was a way for families to preserve their name and stone!
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I haven’t personally done something like taking a rock and paper and rubbing it over a stone to get the engraving off of it but I know of some people who have done that. I would have loved to have walked through one of the cemeteries when I was in Dublin a couple of years ago. Never got around to it.
Thanks for bringing this to my attention..I do love visiting cemeteries all over the world, think they should be preserved and that’s great that there are organizations like SOC doing such wonderful work!
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I was happy to learn that there are organizations such as SOC that want to help preserve the cemeteries because some of the tombs I had seen were in bad shape and need to be restored back to the way they were.