Mount Olivet Cemetery and Chapel

The ground for the chapel was bought with a schoolteacher's earnings. Mrs. A. D. McCoy, wife of St. James's first rector, raised the money by teaching a day school in her home, and in spring 1858 the parish paid $700 for land inside an existing burying ground. The frame Gothic mission church gained a sacristy in 1873 and an arched chancel opening in 1881. The cemetery holds about 1,548 recorded graves, among them Governor Thomas Overton Moore, banker George Washington Bolton, Senator John H. Overton and the conservationist Henry Hardtner.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Arna Bontemps African American Museum — 0.7 mi
  The restored Alexandria house where the Harlem Renaissance writer Arna Bontemps was born in 1902, on the Louisiana African American Heritage Trail.
• Forts Randolph and Buhlow State Historic Site — 0.8 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.
• Kent Plantation House — 2.8 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 — 4.2 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

• The Jewish Cemetery — steps away
• The Foot of Red Hill — steps away
• Rapides Cemetery — steps away
• Alexandria National Cemetery — 0.4 mi