Chalmette National Cemetery (the Freedmen's Cemetery)

Beside the soldiers' graves lies a second burial ground, for civilians. After Union forces took New Orleans in 1862 this ground sheltered a camp of freed people, and civilians were buried here until 1867. That year the Freedmen's Bureau moved their remains to a four-acre Freedmen's Cemetery next door, holding mostly formerly enslaved people sent from the city's Freedmen's hospitals. Estimates run from 2,000 to 4,000 graves, though about 716 interments are recorded for 1867 to 1869. River silt covered the graves, a wall divided the cemeteries in 1874, and radar surveys have not located individual graves.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Chalmette Battlefield — steps away
  The ground of the January 8, 1815 Battle of New Orleans, beside Chalmette National Cemetery and the site of Fazendeville, a freedpeople's community founded in 1867 and bought out in the 1960s.
• The Cabildo — 4.7 mi
  The Spanish town hall on Jackson Square, finished in 1799, where Louisiana changed flags in 1803 and where the state Supreme Court sat in the same room until 1910, Plessy v. Ferguson among its cases.
• New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park — 4.7 mi
  A National Park Service unit created in 1994 to tell where jazz came from, with free programs and a visitor center in the French Quarter and park land inside Louis Armstrong Park.
• The Historic New Orleans Collection — 4.7 mi
  A French Quarter museum and research center founded in 1966, whose 2015 Purchased Lives exhibition took on New Orleans' place as the largest slave market in antebellum America.

More markers nearby

• British Batteries — steps away
• Pakenham's Fall — steps away
• Chalmette National Cemetery — 0.2 mi
• Fazendeville (the Village) — 0.3 mi