Central Louisiana State Hospital Cemetery

The hospital opened in January 1906 as the Louisiana Hospital for the Insane, and its first superintendent, Dr. George A. B. Hays, set up a morgue and cemetery to meet legislative reporting requirements. Counts differ: the marker gives 2,356 burials and another history about 3,000, with the last burial in 1985. Hospital staff handled funerals, and bodies were moved by wheelbarrow until a hand-drawn hearse was built in 1933. Patients lie under numbered concrete markers set below ground. Rose Cottage, built in 1917, is the only building left from that era, and it is on the National Register.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Forts Randolph and Buhlow State Historic Site — 0.9 mi
  Two Confederate earthen forts on the Red River at Pineville, built with enslaved labor and never attacked, beside the remains of Bailey's Dam.
• Arna Bontemps African American Museum — 1.5 mi
  The restored Alexandria house where the Harlem Renaissance writer Arna Bontemps was born in 1902, on the Louisiana African American Heritage Trail.
• Kent Plantation House — 3.3 mi
  Rapides Parish's oldest known standing building, a Creole house with a February tour and a 2023 memorial that put the enslaved first.
• Louisiana Maneuvers and Military Museum — 3.4 mi
  A National Guard museum in a replica WWII barracks at Camp Beauregard, built around the huge 1940-41 war games in Central Louisiana. Free.

More markers nearby

• Alexandria National Cemetery — 0.7 mi
• Louisiana College — 0.7 mi
• Deserting soldiers and the end of the war — 0.8 mi
• Why was Fort Randolph Built? — 0.8 mi